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John
50 posts
Dec 28, 2006
1 year, 6 months ago
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1Re: What new feature would u like to see?
My personal choice would be to have someone besides me implement all of these choices because some are hard!! (most notably spell checking) but i have to put this god-forsaken comp sci degree to the test so let's do this ppl!
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John
50 posts
Dec 28, 2006
1 year, 6 months ago
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2Re: What new feature would u like to see?
I would like to see a buddy list feature... something like "What's Rick NOT drinking" -- because my friend is like the George Costanza of the wine world, if he likes it, i want to steer clear -- waaaay clear of it.
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$Bill
5 posts
Jan 28, 2007
1 year, 5 months ago
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3Re: What new feature would u like to see?
Some thoughts:
1. If you don't know correct spelling of a wine, vintner, etc you won't get a match in the search. I think web folks expect this help feature. You can mitigate this by offering a search interface that included select lists of wine terms (wines, vintners, vintages, etc).
2. When searching, what does "# Retailers" do?
3. Could see potential benefit in setting up various forums based on what "wine people" (wine-o's?) ordinarly dicuss. Ex, Vintage Years Rated, Matching Wine To Food, What the Experts Say, Storage Systems, Vintners, Wine Tasting How To's, etc. Some of these ideas may belong in a Wine Knowledge area instead of Forums. Most customers initially need/want to be led thru a web site because ever site is so different. Real time up-to-date data (wine vendors, prices, rating, etc) may be the ultimate place user want to get to, but users want a to feel a sense of broadened knowledge on their way there. The main idea here is that your web customer needs to leave the Vinquire site with a sense that their "wine search" and/or "wine knowledge quest" was at least semi-enjoyable and thus rememberable (aka ... bookmarked in tech terms).
4. Elaborating on #3, think about a providing users a choice on how they start using your web site when they first arrive. Example choices might be: (a) Help, I nothing about wine but how to spell it, (b) Help me match the wine to the occasion/food, (c) Help, Just need to find a good wine asap. Not sure if these are the exact categories, but you get the picture.
Ta Ta for now. $Bill
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$Bill
5 posts
Jan 28, 2007
1 year, 5 months ago
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4Re: What new feature would u like to see?
Just notices that your Forums area has several Topics/Subforums. Didn't see this because of your web page design has "real estate" issues .. eg., the entire top 1/2 of your page is void of content, which make you scroll down to where the content is. Upon doing so, you can't get to the non-descript nav bar (Home Forums). What looks like a side nav bar under About Vinquire ends up being a source of confusion. It just a mix of Content, Faux links (About Vinquire, Wine Search, etc), and actual links (Recent Seraches, Top Searches). In a nutshell ... your navigation need to be fixed ... most customer need you to KISS. Provide consistent locations on your site for navigation and content. Standard nav bar locations top and/or left (optionally bottom, hardly every right). Make link styles obvious and easy to pick out. Users kind-of get the concept of nav bar areas and that any thing in them is clickable, but links outside the nav area need to be obvious and consistently styled. Your nav areas could be enhanced with small styled buttons, but understand the real estate is an issue.
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$Bill
5 posts
Jan 28, 2007
1 year, 5 months ago
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5Re: What new feature would u like to see?
I'm on a roll here looking over your web site.
I have questions about your Search Results list items. My first instinct is to click the product name, but it not clickable. Seems like you could roll the Buy From & vendor name into one line to save real estate and make the product clickable ... they'll get the idea that each product line is a different vendor. Also, every list item has a review box next to it ... but it seems like most of your products will never have a review. Possibly find smaller footprint for this next to vendor or get rid of it for now to save real estate. Also, one inconsistent thing I noticed is that some wine items in the list have Review and Discuss links (all with 0 Reviews and 0 Posts) while others don't. Propose that this creates user confusion about how the site works and subtracts points from their "user experience scorecard". Users need to feel that they understand how to navigate your site, what the features are, and how to use the features. Believe its best to not provide features/widgets that are not obvious to the user.
FYI ... Vinquire is actually a great name .. it kind of grows on you and is easy to remember.
$Bill.
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John
50 posts
Jan 29, 2007
1 year, 5 months ago
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6Re: What new feature would u like to see?
Thanks for the great feedback!! Here's a list of some of the issues you brought up and some info about each one.
1) Spelling. Ya this definately is an annoyance. We currently already have rudimentary spell checking for common misspellings of words, like sauvignon, cabernet, champagne, etc. However we do not have full-blown "guess what the user really meant to type" for a large set of words. This is on our feature list but is pushed out a bit as it is not simple.
2) What does num retailers do? Sorting by # Retailers sorts the wine list by how many stores sell that given wine. I.e., how "popular" that wine is vs other wines in terms of how many retailers sell it. Kinda hard to explain. We are thinking of removing this feature or relabeling it because it is difficult to understand in its current format.
3) Guiding users through the site more effectively. I agree, we're working on something to kinda group people into categories and get them into the site based on how much knowledge they have of wine.
4) Nav bar/real estate. We will look into this.
5) Inconsistencies in layouts, not being able to click wine name, etc. Take a look at this again, we updated on monday (1/29/07) some of that should be better.
Thanks for the input $Bill
John
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