After the much talked about change of Borders using Amazon.com to host their site, Borders releases their new beta site. At first glance the site has a nice design.
The first thing I noticed was the “Magic Book Shelf” and immediately got my hopes up for something really cool and useful. Unfortunately, it’s a Flash object consisting of a static set of books, movies, and music that scrolls through 2-3 pages of 5 books per page. There was no way of going deeper beyond the initial set of chosen books and navigation is unintuitive to say the least. I kept trying to drag the focus on the bookshelf to other areas with no effect and found that only selecting the listed menu items on the right had any affect. It does have a “picked for you” feature once you sign in. I found the feature to be unhelpful in discovering new books, but hopefully that’s because I don’t have a large purchase history for them to mine from and it will improve with time.
The site sports a faceted search navigation menu on the left. Although I was surprised to not find facets for a couple common categories in the fiction section like mystery or true crime. Also listing the number of books besides the facet is a bit scary with 6293 Action & Adventure books yet only a 122 “Classics”. I found that when clicking on the Action section, I could only drill down further by format, special features(Abridged, Annotated, Large Print, etc.), price and Best Sellers.
