User Centered

The problem with Amazon.com and Epinions.com and the like is that the opinions are unreliable, lacking, and in some cases spamtastic and annoying. There are TONs of good, detailed, in-depth reviews out there- but they almost always are buried in a forum specific to that product or type of products. It makes sense because that’s the community of users interested in depth reviews but it doesn’t help out the new adopters that are doing research on where to spend their hard earned money. It would be nice to have a portal to these types of real good review- you go to one place and search for the product and have links to one or two really in depth reviews with pictures and comments, good and bad. Google just doesn’t cut it for me. Most search results are (understandably) selling related.

Eventually- the website could (with permission of the orginal reviewers) incorporate the reviews into it’s own site to preserve it and not worry about link-rot and other problems.

I think most people feel that one really good review is worth 50 really bad ones that say “Great product! Snap to setup, got it working in 15 minutes!” or “Thumbs down- I called the customer service department and they dropped my call when they tried to transfer me- if you can’t manage a phone, you can’t have my business”

In fact, who really reads all the reviews? You mainly just look at the overall rate and read a few of the negative comments to see what people are complaining about since most positive reviews are generic “it’s great!” but the negative comments tend to actually have a reason why.