Wize Blog

I harbor a secret fetish:

I harbor a secret fetish: I love well designed things. So when given the opportunity to work with an e-commerce outfit whose philosophy revolves around connecting people with the best consumer products available, I jumped at the opportunity (this is my 4th day).

The Wize 100 page really gets at the power of our Wize Rank -- it's a list of the best products out there, specifically designed for people who love well-built, thoughtful and enduring things. The list is dynamic, so it can change, but it doesn't change too much or too quickly.

Last week I used the Wize 100 list to the find the perfect juicer (the Breville 800JEXL), and after using it to make juice out of just about everything I could find in my fridge (grape leaf juice, anyone?), I was sold on its quality and on the information I was able to get using Wize.com.

More than 17 thousand products are reviewed on Wize.com by nearly 700,000 people. As of today there are 31 products on the Wize 100 list. Check it out.

Collective wisdom

To get a Wize Rank, we pull together all the reviews we can find on a particular product, crunch them in our own formula, and generate a number from 0 to 100. The number that we come up with isn't "massaged" or tinkered with -- the collective wisdom of thousands of people from thousands of sources is not to be messed with. This means that Wize Rank includes not just features, design, and product reliability, but also warranty information, customer service, repair, and anything else that customers factor into purchase decisions. Implicit in this is the fact that value (real or perceived) also includes cost.

Last week a friend told me that he was disappointed that his headphones did not have a higher Wize Rank. "The only thing bad about them," he said, "is that the manufacturer has bad customer service."

But customer service matters to us, and it matters to the customers who care enough to let their views be known on Amazon.com, Epinions.com, and anywhere else. So Wize Rank includes all of this information, unedited. Because we trust collective wisdom. And because before we buy a product that can't be repaired, we want to know.

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.