Saturday, April 18th, 2009, 1127 days ago

Taobao image browsing search engine

Before starting the review of Taobao.com’s new service the image browsing search engine, it looks Taobao is attempting to mostly utilize datas it has accumulated, definitly, that is something like data digging which will be quite nice for customers. Ok, let’s review it.

The main page is quite a little dark with simple search engine like style to lead user easily finding the entance. Some hot search words and pictures, on the left top corner, a even more simpler interface style switch button is there, but not so clear what it is used for until click it. 

Typing some words and click search, there comes results page. Looks the images are quite huge and slow to load, during the tests,  i tried several times to reload to stop page getting down, but at last i gave up to go back. Probably, the web speed would be the first problem.

Finally i saw the pictures, fantastic indeed, except bit of slow speed.

Browsing the page by click or wheel scrolling, either is good to use, nice work.

Oops, got down again. I wonder, why does Taobao sacrify so much waiting time to show such couple of pictures, patient challengable ? It would be nightmare under china’s web speed environments. 

So, i designed an illustration below to compare with the original one: getting smaller pictures which can be enlarged when mouse is over.

Here is just the first sight review, whether it is good to use or not, how easy to use and what exactly the interaction effectiveness it is, all those will come up soon.