Very nice! I looked at them from several perspectives, and saw some neat things. I like that you have curated commentary on each item, and included (I think) referrer links to Amazon. I was pleasantly surprised to be asked if I wanted to be reminded about something -- not sure what triggered that, but it was cool. I'm going to try using this for my amazon wishlist-creation. ;)
It looks very nice. Would you be willing to write about the tech stack you used for this?
Thanks for the kind words :). I am very happy to see that the care I put into the site is being noticed.
I used MEAN Stack to build this:
Express / Node / Mongo / Angular.
I knew Express, Node and Mongo from before, I started this project in order to see what Angular was all about.
While learning a new technology, I always think about what to build while learning.
My wife had said that it's always hard for her to pick gift for guys. So I decided to build this for poeple like her, to make the process a little simpler.
The subscription modal comes up only once (for now) after you succesfuly paginate 3 times, (View about 60 items).
It'd also be cool if the ages actually meant something. I noticed that 90% of the items are the same, whether I picked "son", "father", or "grandfather." Do you really think my grandfather would want a nerf gun? :)
I am glad that this list isn't just your standard alcohol, knives, and golf equipment list that heavily dominates men's gift lists.
You are right, there are a lot of repitition. But you will see that what comes up as "Grandson" may come up as "Maybe not a good idea" in the "Best Guess" description.
I basically ranked each item from 0 (don't show) to 10 (Best match) for each relationship. So the more you scroll down, you may start seeing some meh results for that particular relationship.
Because every person is unique I have a hard time completely dismissing something (rank as 0) for a particular relationship.
I have plans to add a lot more products. When the total product count reaches more than 300, I think this problem of seeing duplicate results will reduce by a good margin.
In that case, a clearer way of doing that might be to separate the rank 0s into its own section on the same page. "For Grandpa:" and something more bland like "Other Exciting Items" or something like that. That way, as I'm scrolling down, I see a clear break between what's for Grandpa, and what's probably not going to interest him, but is there "just in case."
If this is worth the time investment, I would be happy to make a sister site :)
Thanks for the suggestion. Until now, I just went with my hunch the whole way. Now that it's launched, I can make some iterations based on actually learning from users.
It be cool if the gifts weren't so centered on nerd culture, I personally didn't see anything I'd be excited to get. Maybe you could add interest filters?
Thanks for the feedback. I planned to do an interest filter in the beginning but decided I would get the first batch of feedback without it while keeping UX as simple as possible.
It might be cool if you had the same UI but instead of who the person is in terms of their relation to you, different archetypes, ie. The Gamer, The Cook, The Farmer, The Fashionister (is that a word?), etc.
First off, awesome site. I read the background on why you created this so take this with a grain of salt :)
Using new routes for each relationship selection would be cool so that I can press the back button to return to the awesome landing page (I did see you had a return button but it took me a bit too long to see it).
Cool idea regardless! I spend way too much time browsing thinkgeek around the holidays for each member of the family.
You are right, now that I think about it, hitting back while you are browsing product should totally bring you back to the homepage, I just never thought of the scenario.
The fact that you mentioned awesome landing page makes me extra happy. I hand drew the pixel arts myself and had a lot of fun doing it :D
It looks very nice. Would you be willing to write about the tech stack you used for this?