What will TestFreaks be and how are you different from “the others”?

[Edward]

I enjoyed seeing you at the conference today and I was exited about this new project but I’m not sure that I get how you will be different from the other sites out there.

If you just let us know a little bit more about the project I’m sure a lot of us out there can help with ideas, I for one would be glad to do so.

[Kristofer]

Hi Edward,

After the web 2.0 conference “Hej 2007” in Stockholm others asked similar questions regarding how TestFreaks will be different from current buying guides, price comparison web sites, review aggregators, etc. Of course this is a really valid point and we will try to give you some input to that below. But we also want you to be a part of the process that will help us identify what should and can be different.

We could start to tell you all about how we are going to pull together different content and present it in a smart way. However, I would say one of the best ways to describe it is through an analogy from the late nineties. One of the first search engines I used was AltaVista and I thought it was the best thing that ever had happened. You could really find the stuff you were looking for, albeit it took some time in many cases. There were some other search engines out there but many people felt that AV did the job. What else could you ask for? Then Google came a long… and you know what happened. Before that neither I or many others realized that web search could be that good and deliver such relevant results.

We feel that there is a great opportunity to take the shopping research process to a new level today. We think that a real problem today is “finding the best product for me based on my personal preferences”. We are all shopping enthusiasts and spend a lot of time on research using different sources and tools. Our goal with TestFreaks is to dramatically simplify this process. Today many services help you find the bestsellers and top rated products in a segment. We feel there is a lot more that can be done.

We are aiming for relevant results for your individual need. This will be done be collecting and analyzing a lot of data about products, and interaction and discussions about products, but most importantly use this information together with our users preferences in order to truly deliver relevant recommendations for each request. The competition out there doesn’t really use the available information and many miss out of the social functions, and if they include social functions it takes to long time to search through it.

Our ambition is to give you, the users, a supreme experience but we want you to be a part of defining what that supreme experience is about. We want to try to build a think-thank in this forum rather than letting you try the first beta versions in a few months we want your input now. Just like we all at TestFreaks enjoy being a part of creating something new and useful we hope that you want to be a part of this as well.

Along the way we will disclose more information about the functions we are planning to implement.

Best

[Flame]

That _sounds_ real good! I’m hopping to try out the site soon.. If you can deliver what you promise I will be a fan of your site..

[Lars]

When I buy products of this type (consumer electronics) the purchase process is often characterized by a pretty intense search process. Initially I establish what type of product I want by listing different requirements (for instance if I want a cellphone, I might want a camera and a mp3-player function). Listing the requirements for the product creates boundaries for my search process. After that there's a matter of finding reliable sources of information, meaning websites with reviews that I like and trust. Later when I've found my sources, the real search process can start. This is the most time consuming part of my purchase process since I have to find products that match my requirements and appeal to me in other ways.

Having that said, I have some questions concerning your website in relation to my own purchase process. As I understand it you will accumulate reviews and build an info-depot for consumers like me. But how do you know what I want and what's best for me? And I also wonder how you will make my purchase process less time consuming?

[Stefan]

Lars: First off you will have all the data in one place, namely TestFreaks, secondly we will be able to give you suggestions based both on your preferences but also based on other users experiences. Our goal is not to give you 1 product suggestion saying this is the best one rather helping you deduct which is the best product. I can't go into to much details on how the process will look like at the moment. When we launch our first beta site and start giving grades and rating products based on aggregated data we will explain more how this grading and recommendation will work.

But as with everything else when it comes to TestFreaks if you have suggestions on what are important factors when choosing a digital camera for example, please let us know so we can consider it in our grading and recommendation engines.

[Flame]

I think I start to see what you are trying to do.. but if we take other good shopping sites like Amazon. They give recommendations etc which in many cases I think are pretty good. There are many other examples out there but I personaly like Amazon over many of the others. Will your thing be the same or what?..

[ByronH]

Originally Posted by Stefan

Lars: First off you will have all the data in one place, namely TestFreaks, secondly we will be able to give you suggestions based both on your preferences but also based on other users experiences. Our goal is not to give you 1 product suggestion saying this is the best one rather helping you deduct which is the best product. I can't go into to much details on how the process will look like at the moment. When we launch our first beta site and start giving grades and rating products based on aggregated data we will explain more how this grading and recommendation will work.

But as with everything else when it comes to TestFreaks if you have suggestions on what are important factors when choosing a digital camera for example, please let us know so we can consider it in our grading and recommendation engines.

I'm not sure whether you've talked about the rating on some other thread or not. The thing I often feel with rating on other sites, not necessarily consumer electronics, is that the rating and grading by visitors often get smudged. Some people tend to be less serious than others or exaggerate there opinions, thus making the quality of the rating poor. But on the other hand I could be wrong. Maybe I'm the problem since I (in these cases) rarely follow mainstream opinions according to the ratings. But I mean on these sites they have like a general rating for the product, so it does not really say anything about the product. I mean a product could look really great and get ratings from that, even though the functionality is really bad. Have you decided how to tackle this problem or is it still a working process?

[Stefan]

We will allow you to include or exclude user ratings from the aggregated score. When it comes to users ratings I'm afraid that those will in many cases be a bit exaggerated due to basic psychological behaviour. However when users describe in details their experiences about a product many times I find them to be extremely valuable. Especially users who have owned the products for some time and have a deeper knowledge about the product. Professional reviewers are often very knowledgeable but they will only use the products for a short and intensive period before they move on to the next test.