Wize Blog

Are fewer choices better?

A recent post on Bokardo by Josh Porter brought up some interesting points about choice and decision-making. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, spoke at the User Interface Conference in Cambridge MA this month. Josh attended the conference and quoted Barry in his blog as having said:

People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.

Schwartz’ statement is especially relevant when placed into the context of e-services that require sorting and sifting information to find specific content: online shopping, news portals, or media sharing sites are good examples. In the course of finding what they’re searching for users and consumers end up settling on experiences, content, or products not because it’s exactly what they’re looking for, but because it was fast and “good enough.” Josh legitimately claims that settling isn’t an indicator of sloth, but a natural way to prioritize the amount of time spent on 1 of the 400 decisions an average person will make in the course of the day.

According to Josh:

It doesn’t take much to discover the ramifications of Schwartz’ observation. We choose politicians based on if we’ve heard of them before, not if they have the best record. We choose computers if we use the same kind at work, not if they are the best at helping us get stuff done. We choose movies that get high ratings, not if they’re the most important movie for us to see. Many times it’s OK if it’s not the best choice, but it’s the one we’re most comfortable with.

Settling for mediocrity might have been the case in the past, but new ways of evaluating and organizing information make it possible for the quickest and the easiest choice to be the best one too. As users create, evaluate and rank content they add to its existing value. Banking on the collective wisdom of users to evaluate and rank content decreases the time involved in the decision making process and provides fewer better results to the user.

High-quality content inevitably filters to the top of the heap. Whether one is searching for a particular episode of the Daily Show on YouTube, learning about news before its breaks on Digg, or finding the best DVD player to buy on Wize a person can rely on their online peers to provide better results. The future is not in more choices, but fewer and better ones that make the decision process easier, quicker, and ultimately more accurate.

A middle-aged man walks into a retail outlet...

Last night I got a call from my father. He was calling from the electronics section of a major retailer asking for shopping advice. With the exception his vintage late-nineties cell phone, most technology conceived after 1970 plays a small part in my Dad’s day-to-day life. He went into the store planning to purchase an MP3 player for my 17 year-old brother’s birthday; not knowing that an “MP3 player” is not a product in its own right, but is instead a category of products comprised of a slew of shapes, sizes, brands and prices. After a brief over-the-phone run down with him on MP3 players he ended up going with an Ipod Nano.

The phone call got me thinking about product selection as it applies to gift buying. Buying a gift often means shopping outside ones realm of product knowledge and experience. If you’re buying a gift for someone who has interests and a lifestyle different from your own, how do you decide which product to buy? Having no knowledge of rice cookers, baby strollers or calculators makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make the right purchase without conducting a ton of product research.

It occurred to me that the Wize Rank is a great tool for gift buying when a person is shopping outside of their normal purchasing patterns. Wize takes into consideration everything from product warranty to usability when calculating a product’s Wize Rank, so you don’t have to be Julia Child to find the right mixer for someone who loves to cook. The Wize Rank can also compile a list of the best products based upon criterion that the user sets, providing easy access to the best products within a price range, feature set, or a brand. The strength of the Wize experience is you don’t have to be a product expert to make a good purchase; you only have to know what you’re looking for.

Shopping for the perfect thing, or looking for the best deal?

From Kate Newlin’s Shopportunity!, page 66:

Wal-Mart’s impact is not simply to grind brands that try to please them into dust. It also seeks to claim the higher ground of “consumer friend” through its “everyday low pricing,” all the while searching the globe for the cheapest, okay merchandise, regardless of how or where or by whom it was made.

We respond to their logic. Why? Because we allow ourselves one bargain at a time to lose our ability to evaluate the relative merits of a gallon of pickles at whatever price. We have become addicts, based on genuine changes of biochemistry. We no longer search for the perfect “thing.” We’re trolling for “the best deal.”

Using Wal-Mart to define all that is currently wrong with retail shopping is nothing new—it could almost be considered trendy. But Shopportunity! does more than take shots at the retail giant. Shopportunity! is about our endless quest for savings and about what it’s cost us individually and culturally. It’s a book I’m sure I’ll return to.

It’s scary to read the excerpt above in the context of online shopping, where Wal-Mart is just one of the many businesses competing for your shopping basket. What happens to customer loyalty when your competitors are a single click—instead of a parking lot—away? The service industry looks more and more like something from “the good old days”; our kids will use our stories about the local hardware store to prove that we’re old and out of touch.

The Shopportunity! excerpt above also speaks to something that feels a lot less anachronistic, but is often conspicuously missing in action—the desire for great, lasting things that we love and enjoy, things that say more about us than “we got the best deal”. And that’s our goal at Wize, to help people find the best products fast. Not the cheapest products, and not the best deals, although customers who submit reviews certainly have overall product value in mind. We use Wize Rank and the Wize100s to find products that inspire us, and products that will last. Because we’re buying MP3 players and baby strollers, not pickles.

Good reviews or bad reviews: which are more compelling?

At Wize, we spend a lot of time thinking about customer reviews and expert reviews, how they can be most beneficial to customers, and how businesses use them to drive traffic to their websites, stores, offices, etc. Generally, we agree that manufacturers and restaurant owners prefer it when they get good reviews. But what drives traffic to online retailers who sell products they don't manufacture? Are customers more compelled to read positive reviews or negative ones?

Our working theory, based on our own experience, is that bad reviews are a lot more compelling than good ones. For example, I know that most people love their iPods. But finding the person who hates theirs can be very revealing. Is the negative review good for Apple? Maybe not. But is it good for  Amazon.com?

We'd love to hear what you think. Do you tend to read more positive reviews or more negative ones? Why?

Fewer search results simplify product research

Search engines providers and online retail portals have been working to shorten the amount of time and effort spent on Internet searches since the Internet began, innovating clever methods of retrieving the most relevant information as quickly as possible. Google’s link-based search results model, for example, replaced conventional search queries. Emerging as yet another paradigm, we’ve seen the rise of social bookmaking sites like digg and del.icio.us that ask users to sort and rank content.

Regardless of the means, the goal of the medium is to present consumers/users with exactly the information queried as quickly as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that it is of tremendous depth and quality. The immediate access to a large amount of relative information is what makes Wize unique in the online shopping and consumer research field. For a comparison, take a look at the results of some popular product searches run though Google.com, Become.com and Wize.com.

DVD Players	12,000,000	6,378,048	201
iPod	391,000,000	27,422,454	41
Camcorders	165,000,000	7,693,230	242
Coffee Grinders	4,010,000	248,580	48
Air Conditioners	11,900,000	571,056	38
Disclaimer: All data pulled from their respective web sites as of 10/07/06.

By providing fewer search results Wize makes it easier to get started on product research by presenting immediate access to relevant information. In traditional product research methods the information is there, but a user has to work harder (and expend more time) to find it.

What sets Wize apart is that we tap the human element, not bots, to provide fewer “smart” results to minimize the search process. Fewer results to comb through means consumers receive exactly the requested information as a starting point; from there, Wize allows access to scores of reviews (more than 500 on some products).

Wize makes it easy to conduct product research by presenting customers with exactly the content they want, immediately.

Wize well received on Techcrunch and Yahoo Tech

The consumer research and comparison-shopping industry is growing quickly, with new sites and ideas emerging daily. As the week drew to a close we were thrilled to see that Wize.com had been mentioned on both Yahoo Tech and Techcrunch.

Christopher Null from Yahoo Tech said, “Wize has a great selection of product categories that ranges from laptops to car seats ...”

Techcrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick also had encouraging words: "The site is very aesthetically pleasing and probably has the best chance of commercial success."

Both articles are good reads for those interested in what’s going on with online shopping and its Web 2.0 applications.

The significance of numbers

Last week we blogged that Wize was about to exceed 750,000 consumer and expert reviews. Now we've got more than 760,000. Still, we know that size isn’t everything. What makes our body of product information extraordinary and valuable is the fact that it’s diverse, decentralized, and independent.

Quality matters just as much -- if not more -- than the sheer number of reviews we assemble. More reviews means more input from people who use the product with different frequency and in different ways. And reviews at Wize.com are taken from a large number of sources, guaranteeing that no single group or consumer demographic can extensively alter a product’s rating. Digital anonymity also plays a big part. The Internet allows people to express their opinions without the feelings of awkwardness that come from breaking popular opinion or perceived group consensus.

Our number of consumer reviews will soon hit the seven-figure mark, and as we gather more reviews from different sources (with the same commitment to the quality of information we gather, of course), our Wize Rank keeps getting more refined. To hear it from the man himself, check out this recent pod cast featuring our CEO Doug Baker on Craig Crossman’s Computer America.