Wize Blog

Helping people feel smart

I did a quick search on 43 Things this morning, a site that asks people “what do you want to do with your life?” According to the site, only 6 people want to “feel smart” . To put this in context, 2,059 people want to grow their hair long , 2,252 people want to learn to knit , and 4,524 people want to have better posture.

The 6 people who want to feel smart must be the same ones we talked to last week, when we asked what they wanted from a product research website. They told us there’s already too much information out there, but not the right information. They told us that it’s hard to figure out what gifts to buy for people, and that they’re tired of feeling dumb when they walk into a retail store. They told us that the fear of making purchase mistakes can be paralyzing.

But here’s what else these people told us: they don’t want to be told what to do, or what to buy. They want the process to be empowering, and to provide the information that allows them to make confident decisions along the way, to feel smart. They want the right information and the right tools at the right time.

It makes sense to us, and it matches our own experience: I want my restaurant servers to tell me what the specials are in words I can understand, not to decide what I should eat. I want my movie critics to tell me about the movies they saw, not to tell me which one to see. And I want my research sites and stores to help me feel smart, not to tell me what to buy.

We think there are a lot more than 6 people out there who want to feel smart. How about you?

Time magazine's Person of the Year

... [W]ho actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Time Magazine, December 2006

It's always an event when Time announces its person of the year, and this year's announcement was met by more than a few slaps on the head. Of course! It's us! Brilliant! And so true. According to Jon Fine at BusinessWeek.com, "2006 was the year of YouTube". The year of Wikipedia and lonelygirl15. And 2007 promises to be more of the same, as internet businesses find new ways to wrangle true value from the enormous -- and rapidly growing -- amount of  user generated content on the web. In this context, it's worth reviewing what New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki wrote in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds":

... in most [experiments] the members of the group were not talking to each other or working on a problem together. They were making individual guesses, which were aggregated and then averaged ... the group's guess will not be better than that of every single person in the group each time. In many (perhaps most) cases, there will be a few people who do better than the group.

In other words, in order for the wisdom of crowds to work, each member of the crowd has to think (or vote, write, review, rate, etc.) independently. It's independent and unique content that makes the web useful and compelling, not the law of averages. In her blog "The 'Dumbness of Crowds'", Kathy Sierra points out that:

By "crowd", [Surowiecki] was referring to a collection of individuals. Individuals whose independent knowledge (and "independent" is a key word in what makes the crowd "smart") is aggregated in some way, not smushed into one amorphous Consensus Result.

Which brings us to the year 2007 and Wize.com. By collecting more independent product reviews from more sources, Wize is committed to leveraging the wisdom -- not the dumbness -- of crowds. We are convinced that using these independent reviews to generate ratings is a better way to do product research. And while we're actively looking for ways to improve our Wize Rank algorithm -- and our customer experience -- We've already used the wisdom of crowds to make better purchase decisions fast. We'd love to hear what you think.

Are you a savvy shopper?

Do you hear what I hear? It's the sound of retail managers everywhere quietly closing their office doors and curling into the fetal position as "A Patsy Cline Christmas" plays on continuous loop. What's the cause of this ulcer-inducing holiday stress? Mandatory "family time" with the in-laws? Existential angst? Too much Patsy? Maybe, but the more likely cause is the growing number of savvy shoppers out there this holiday season.

American consumers expect, on average, to spend 17% more on gifts this year than last. So why are smarter, savvier, wealthier shoppers a cause for such angst among retailers? Consider the reasons that consumers dislike holiday shopping:

Waiting in lines (32%)
Finding the right selection of gifts for everyone on my list (26%)
Lack of time to get it all done (19%)
Trying to stay in budget (12%)
Finding parking at shopping centers (10%)

To avoid these hassles savvy holiday shoppers are turning to the Internet to research and purchase their gifts. Consumers find online shopping to be an attractive alternative to forging through the holiday scrum at retail outlets and malls. Shrewd shoppers see the advantages to shopping online as: lower prices (20%); better product selection (9%); more flexible (33%); and more convenient (34%) than shopping offline. Even the game of deal-chicken retailers habitually employ the week before Christmas can now be considered almost quaint as shoppers learn that they can find those deals (or even better ones) on the Internet. It's no wonder that the majority of Americans plan to purchase at least half of their holiday gifts online this year.

Does this spell the end of traditional retail? Hardly, but it does force offline retailers to rethink their approach to the holiday shopping season. Shopping online gives consumers the ability and the information they need to choose the store that's cheapest, easiest, provides the widest selection, and is the most convenient. With the help of comparison-shopping, or product review sites like Wize, consumers save themselves energy, time and money. It's time for offline retailers to realize that a "successful" holiday shopping experience is more than ensuring a customer goes home with a purchase. It's about creating an environment and an experience that gives customers the personal satisfaction of knowing they didn't have to elbow a senior citizen in the ribs to find the best gift at the best possible price.

* Data used to write this blog came from the "Holiday 2006 Shopping Trends Consumer Behavior Report"

New Wize features

Since our launch in September we've gotten some great feedback from customers suggesting ways to improve our site and user experience. Today, based on user recommendations, we're launching a new set of site functions. Now customers can:

* Sign up for the Wize newsletter.

The Wize newsletter is a great way to keep up-to-date on new products, new product lists (like the Wize 100s), and the Wize blogs.

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* View recently released products.

Wize will now be listing new products as soon as they come out. This will allow our visitors to view, purchase, and follow new products as they settle into our Wize Rank standings. New products won't have a Wize Rank until we collect and aggregate a statistically relevant number of user and expert reviews.

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* Email product pages to a friend.

Many visitors have commented on how useful it would be to share product pages. To answer this call we've added an "email a friend" function to each product page. Visitors can now email products to friends and family -- a great way to exchange gift ideas during the holiday season.

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* Read buying guides.

Just in time for Christmas, Wize has selected some of the best buying guides on the web and made them available to customers on our product category pages. We hope that these guides will help visitors make good purchasing decisions this season. We've found them to be especially useful when shopping outside of one's normal purchasing patterns: choosing a video game console for the teenage nephew, finding the perfect new gas grill for Dad, or learning all you need to know about buying your first digital receiver.

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* Participate in our survey

Our new customer survey is a great way to let us know what we can do to make the Wize experience better.

Everyone at Wize.com is excited about the new site features, and we're interested to hear what our customers think. Please let us know.

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.

Customer experience progress

A week into beta launch, we're continuing to work the bugs out, including building a database from the emails we've received and gearing up for a "formal" usability lab the second week of September (not our first, but our first since launch...). Also working on a process that allows us to quickly update the site with ideas that make sense to us and our customers. You've already seen a few design tweaks...

A few years ago there was a movement (do 4 people constitute a movement?) around this thing called immersibility that tried to combine both usability and marketing data. The idea was that acting on either usability or marketing without keeping an eye on the other leads to bad (boring, unusable, ineffective, etc.) design. I tend to agree.

The folks at Creative Good (www.creativegood.com) seem to have a lot of this down, and their weekly mailing is terrific. Check out www.thisisbroken.com too.