The IxD Bookshop Website
The Interaction Design (IxD) Bookshop is a simple, uncluttered and easy-to-use website for buying the best books on interaction design, usability testing, human-computer interaction and human factors from Amazon. The following screenshot shows the IxD Bookshop website:
The IxD Bookshop has many compelling features, including:
- domain-specific book categories
- incremental multi-search suggestions
- visible shopping cart
- automatic Amazon country selection
Domain-Specific Book Categories
The IxD Bookshop uses knowledge of the interaction design field to select and organise books by author and topic. The category section on the left of the page lists popular authors and topics in the field, as shown in this screenshot:
Clicking on an author displays the books written by that author. Similarly, clicking on a topic displays the books about that topic. The books by an author and the books about a topic are displayed in two lists. The first list presents a hand-picked selection of books recommended by the IxD Bookshop. The second list presents the books found by searching Amazon for books by the author or related to the topic. The next screenshot highlights the hand-picked selection of books for the author Jakob Nielsen:
Clicking on the name of the author performs a search for books written by that author. Clicking on the title of a book presents more information about the book, including reviews written by Amazon customers, as shown in the following screenshot for The Humane Interface:
Incremental Multi-Search Suggestions
The IxD Bookshop also uses knowledge of the interaction design field to give customers highly relevant results. The IxD Bookshop displays and updates suggestions as customers type in the search box. The incremental search suggestions include books that match the search, books written by authors that match the search, and frequently issued queries that match the search. This screenshot shows the authors that match the search jef and the books written by those authors:
In the previous screenshot, the search jef matches the authors Jef Raskin and Jeff Johnson, which are the first two authors listed in the authors section of the search results. Underneath the authors section of the search results, the titles section lists The Humane Interface written by Jef Raskin, and Web Bloopers written by Jeff Johnson. This searching system works double duty: it enables customers to search for authors and books using the same search interface.
Visible Shopping Cart
The IxD Bookshop helps customers manage their shopping cart by displaying the contents of the cart on every page. The shopping cart provides a visual reminder of its contents with a thumbnail of each book as well as a brief summary including the title, author and price. Customers can remove books or empty their cart interactively without requiring a separate page load.
Automatic Amazon Country Selection
The IxD Bookshop selects the appropriate Amazon website by geolocating the IP address of the customer’s computer. Customers in the UK and Europe see reviews and buy books from Amazon.co.uk; customers in Canada deal with Amazon.ca; and all other customers deal with Amazon.com.
When ready to buy the books in their IxD Bookshop shopping cart, customers in the US, for example, click the Buy at Amazon.com button. The IxD Bookshop then transfers the books in the shopping cart to Amazon.com. The Amazon.com website then prompts the customer to log in to his or her Amazon.com account to pay Amazon.com for the books. Amazon.com then delivers the books to the customer.
Implementation
The IxD Bookshop website was implemented in PHP on an Apache web server. The details of each book including the title, author, customer reviews and price were retrieved from Amazon using the Amazon Web Services PHP API and stored in a MySQL database. The incremental search interface and interactive shopping cart was implemented in JavaScript that communicated with the IxD Bookshop web server with AJAX.