[Sigia-l] Jared Spool's article on galleries

[Dwayne King]

On 12/22/05, Drop, Daniel              SIK <ddrop at sikorsky.com> wrote:
> Olly Wright states:
>
> - So what is the primary driver for phone purchase? It is how the
> phone looks. Essentially, the great majority of users will make an
> initial selection based on appearance and then delve further into the
> phone, trying to get a feel for its overall complexity / cost rather
> than zeroing in on individual features. This applies as much to
> offline (typically in a store) as online.
>
> And
>
> - we're very open to suggestions for improvements
>
>
> If a user may have a number of phones that meet his appearance criteria, to
> prevent pogosticking, have a comparison feature from the gallery where the
> user selects a few models and brings up a side-by-side comparison.  The
> comparison list would start with the most important features that allow the
> user to understand the phones' complexities and costs.
>

Personal preference here, not based on any research. I tend to shop in
the exact opposite fashion than Dan or Ollie are using. I use filter
functions to pick the features I need, then pick the phones that have
a visual appearance that I like from the smaller pool. I'd much rather
say I want bluetooth, sms and email capability and pick from a smaller
list.

A good example of this in the non-phone world is VW:

http://www.vw.com/models_overview/chooser.html

Using this site versus Audi to find an all-wheel-drive car is much
easier. Check the Audi site for a comparison - they use the
mobile-phone paradigm. They show thumbnails and model numbers of each
car - which frankly all pretty much look the same in a thumbnail.

As far as research with a smaple size of one - I quit looking for an
Audi because I couldn't figure out how to find the right car and got
tired of wasting my time.

my 2 cents