Yummy or Crummy?

I just learned about Websort, a web-based application that allows you to conduct a card-sorting exercise remotely. It lets you set up an introduction page that explains the goal of your research, and allows participants to create any number of categories to put in the “cards” you give them. You get an email as someone completes the study, and you can export the results, or use the built-in analysis tool.

I haven’t actually used Websort, but I would be curious to try it out. It seems straight-forward, with not a lot of bells-n-whistles. The interface seemed easy enough to use, although I haven’t looked into customization options, like if you can set up a study where user can put in an item into more than one category. (Apple can be both “red” and “fruit,” for example.)

Upon looking further, there seems to be plenty of tools available in this arena.

Tamayura online tea store, found via Design Meltdown.

It’s a cute site, feels a lot like Teaosophy, which POP created. Rich information, evocative of that calming feeling when you sit down to have a cup of tea. This design is a bit more web 2.0, though. I liked the little trick of switching the stylesheet when you’re on a product detail page so that the background color of the module matches the color of the selected tea. Gimmicky as it might be, but I still like the attention to detail. Also the instructional drawing on the side is cute, too.

I can’t understand anything the site is saying, but it’s still a good user experience! (I was able to add an item to the cart, and begin the checkout process.)

Amazon has had tags on their product page for a while. And I’m not sure how long this feature has been in it, but it’s new to me.

It’s a keyboard shortcut for entering tags — whenever you are on a product detail page like this one, you can hit “t” on your keyboard twice to pop open a layer that allows you to enter tags.

It’s like a double-click, except it’s with the keyboard. A very short learning curve, although I had no idea such a shorcut existed to begin with. Once I learned about it, it was easy to remember and use. It was much easier than scrolling down to the tag field on the page. I almost never use their tags, but today I happened to be making a list of books for a presentation that I wanted to share with someone, and giving them a tag to search with was the first thing I thought of, so this feature was useful for going around and tagging a bunch of books pretty quickly.

istockphoto.com

I came across this site while I was searching for royalty-free stock photos on the Web. It’s an interesting marriage of micropayments and eMarketplace/eCommunity. I haven’t looked into it seriously — my camera’s resolution is not good enough to take pictures to make them useful for anybody. But when I get a new camera, I’ll be looking up this site to look to cash in!

Speaking of marriage of micropayments and eCommunity… I used to be really into Epinions. I really thought that I could make some money if I wrote a fair amount of good, honest reviews that people would find helpful. Well that never happened, and I lost interest after a while. I stopped paying attention to the site, and my general impression is that most people did, too. I speculate that the following factors had something to do with it: 1) overemphasis on merchandising (users have to get past all the crap about ‘comparison shopping’ before they get to the actual reviews), 2) too many product categories (there are a lot of product categories that don’t have any reviews at all, contributing to the impression that the site is not all that useful — plus it’s impossible to stay competitive with other ‘review’ sites if you’re not focused), 3) and poor IA that potentially buried well-written reviews underneath badly-written ones (they corrected this now, but back then the reviews were sorted by date — even if you wrote a masterpiece, one month later it was buried to the bottom of the page, giving your review practically no exposure). The way they corrected #3 is good (the default sort is based on how the reviewer him/herself is rated, then you have option to sort by date or product rating), but you still have to scroll all the way down, past all the merchandising info, to see the list of reviews.