Changes Along the Amazon

This morning I needed to look up a book I will buy from amazon.com before too long. When I was looking at the site, it appears they're changing the template/layout for books (maybe other stuff too eventually--looking at the baby items, they still have the same layout they had yesterday). It looks very different today than before. It's a little disconcerting, actually. I think it looks nice; I like that there are much bigger cover pictures. But I guess after close to 10 years of using amazon, the template hasn't changed that radically, and you get used to something looking a certain way.

Now this seems like a foolish post, on the surface. Who the hell cares about whether a bookstore website changes its template? I am not all spooled up about this; it's not that big of a deal, but it does reflect on something about human nature, and myself a little bit.

Change.

Do you adapt to change quickly, easily? I usually do. I taught myself HTML, webpage design, graphic design. I pretty much taught myself technical writing, so that I can teach it pretty darn well. I mostly taught myself things like Powerpoint-- which, although some people want to claim is obsolete and not good for presentations in a real business setting, is pretty darn cool to most people, not easily done by most people, and very widely used in academia for presentations & stuff. There are more things I taught myself-- and this is just an example of how I adapt to change pretty easily. I certainly learn things a lot quicker than a whole lot of people I have tried to teach. This isn't to toot my own horn-- but to realize that apparently, there is a limit to my adaptability.

Somehow, looking at the new amazon template, I get this sense of wrongness. See how the part that used to be in the center of the screen, with columns down along the left and right side, is now butted up against your left side of the screen instead? If you go to another page you can see how it used to look. See the "Search" box? The long columns of "recently viewed" and "rate this item" stuff? Those are missing from the new look, at least for now.

Part of me is yelling: It shouldn't be different; it should be the old template I'm used to. There are things missing, for Christ's sake. It doesn't look right! Is this getting old? Is it a designer's viewpoint? I think it's the second-- something about this new template seems unfinished and incomplete, like perhaps it's a beta model and they're still working on it. But you know they have the ability to hold something until it's reached a certain level of perfection before launching it. So somewhere, someone thinks it's ready to go. And I'm just not sure.

It's something most people will undoubtedly not notice. But I think it will confuse a lot of the folks who don't adapt to change very well. Where are my "browse" sections columns? Why is this picture so big? Where do I click to buy it?

Change bad? Change good? Don't care about change; let's get with the cool literature and quirky stories? Maybe later, after I finish obsessing about something that I have no compelling reason to need to care about. That, my friends, is procrastination.