Amazon’s way of disabling controls

Today I saw an interesting way to disable the button shown in the web UI. Today I was browsing Amazon and trying to pre-order a book named “Confessions of the public speaker” written by Scott Berkun. I haven’t ordered books from Amazon since I have moved to this new address.

But Amazon has a validation before completing your shopping cart check out. That is: If you are shipping to a new address for the first time, you must key in your payment information again. This is for verification of authentication.

But I saw a “continue” button in the upper right corner of the screen.

I tried to click the “Continue “ button, but once I move my mouse over this button the button got faded out and ah ha, there popped a clear message explaining why I cannot click this button, at this point of time.

Rather than hiding the controls and startling the users by making them visible suddenly, this approach is cool. This is better than the approach of  enable/disable controls too, for this shows a friendly message to the users; rather than showing dumb disabled control.

Nice transparent way to control the UI flow. I am thinking of writing an user control for this. 🙂