UI Patterns: Wet Lazy Susan

I ran across a couple of variations on the “wet floor” effect today which both introduce a rotating set of images that can be moused over for more information. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this the “Wet Lazy Susan” effect.

First up, Amazon.com has the following under the “Recommended Based on Your Browsing History” heading on their homepage:

I like the controls for scrolling through the circle of products. The tooltip-like popups on mouse over are nice too.

Then there’s the following, found on Nissan USA, shown here at half size:

Here the shadows that fade in when an item is highlighted are a nice touch, as is the text being in the same position for each item.

Has anyone else noticed any variations on this pattern floating around out there?

Update: Yeah, I probably should’ve remembered that Front Row has the same effect for its main menu. Doh.

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