| I'm in your target market, though I'm not as serious as many. My thoughts: 1. Figuring out how to register without Facebook was way too tough. I had to find two links that were indistinguishable from the rest of the text. 2. What is "Brand". Is that car brand (BMW) or part brand (Bilstein)? 3. Okay, now I've gone to the "What do you want to sell" page, and I see "Brand" is the part brand (this is just because I'm poking around -- as a regular user, I'd never do this). Which makes me wonder, how do I find parts for my particular year/make/model (E46 330i, in my case)? 4. I can't do anything useful from the home page. Show me a list of brands, a search box, anything to start me on my way. 5. What does "forensics" mean in this context? The "Show forensics updates" is neat looking, but useless for someone who is buying or selling (but interesting for wasting time / kicking tires). The pictures should at least tell me what the product is. Hopefully this hapazard feedback is useful. It looks like promising concept and you've clearly worked hard on it, but I think you need to populate it with products and then observe first-hand how people interact with it. |
1) We would prefer it if people register with Facebook but I agree that I've made it a little too discrete to register without it in the new design.
2/3) I'll add the background text examples to the search fields like we've done on the sell pages so that it's more clear what should be in the Brand field. I hope that'll clear up any confusion.
4) The home page definitely needs some work. The key thing that's there doesn't show until there are listings present, unfortunately. Like on the Forensics tab it will show the most recent listings with prices, etc.
5) I suppose we should make that more clear upfront. Part Forensics is our parts wiki. It made more sense on the original release but clearly doesn't anymore.
All feedback is useful. Right now we are talking about ways to build a user base quickly and adding a few products on our own might be a way to make the site a little more useful.
To go back to one of my questions, by looking around could you identify why our service might be better than the others? We have some very real competitive advantages but I don't think we're communicating them very well so I'm interested in hearing what first time users are taking away from it at first glance - so we can make it better.