Christina takes a look at a new Amazon innovation – a dropdown that contains your browsing history. Looks like something that might support “The Cycle” – a hypertext pattern of sense-making that Peter Merholz looked at recently.

In analysing the Amazon additions, Christina raises this:

“The question is my usual one– when a designer wildly flaunts conventions, then what? I can’t condemn it out of hand because I haven’t seen it in the usability lab. Conventions are fine, but one never knows when breaking the rules will allow one to leap past the competition. Could this be such a leap?”

I’ve been reading Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” – and thinking about the parallels between Kuhn’s exploration of the role of dogma and convention in scientific discovery; and the practice of design, especially in relation to technology and interface. Christina’s comments very much remind me of the patterns of discussion described in Kuhn’s text. More in a little while.