Some of you might remember the individual charts. This has been brewing as a side project since March last year when I first did the chart of the 200 most popular flash drives. Called it "The tourist map of flashdrives" at that time. Added more products and the interactive filters later in the year. Every time it got good responses here on Hacker News and even some press outlets picked it up.
So I decided to turn this into a full fledged project on its own this year. Got a proper domain name and made a homepage for it. So here it is. ProductChart.com!
Mission statement: For every product type, provide a nice overview of what is available in the market, plus the filters to choose the perfect product.
I love this, it's a great way to look at all products at the same time and just hover over them to get details. I would be nice if you included a link to a product review, + a link to a place where I can but it. Good luck!
Great! One thing, and I don't know how you'd necessarily resolve this, but specifications aren't the be-all and end-all of buying a gadget: a lot of it is taking the time to read reviews on build quality, issues like drivers and overheating, etc. It'd be great to see a way of incorporating that - even initially something as simple as adding Amazon ratings to each item.
This. I suspect that far fewer people buy phones/laptops/gadgets based purely on specs and price, which is all that's on display here. For pure commodities this makes total sense (the SSD and flash drives charts are awesome), but consumer gadgets are much harder to differentiate in such a rigidly quantifiable way.
It's true, that besides specs one usually will wants to take into account opinions. At the moment, the site is more about giving you an overview of what is available then to help you with the final decision. Because that is what I feel is missing on the market. There already are a lot of review and rating sites out there.
If I come up with an interesting idea for ratings or opinions, I will add it to the site.
This is a great idea, buyers really love side by side comparisons... my main concern is how are products being populated? I'd like to know that I'm not potentially missing something by doing my product research on your site.
Im including the most popular products available on Amazon.com. Depending on product type between 100 and 300 products. Maybe I should show the same number of products in each section. I just have not settled on what is the best number yet.
nice visualization! I remember it but I can't recall where I saw it, did you posted it already? Anyway it's good to see different way of presenting information for ecommerce.
Very nice! But things like PPI are meaningless to me so you will lose a lot of people with that. Also it doesn't work very well on an iPhone 6, the sliders were incredibly sensitive. For example I moved the slider for laptop hard drives and it went to 183 gb but I could t move it back.
On PPI ... I don't think you'll lose users, but they might get a little lost. For PPI you could have some mouseover-activated points of reference.
I had trouble with memory and RAM for smartphones. Lots of marketing mixes them together so for an average customer, it might be more confusing than helpful.
I guess I would say: see if you can research what the most common distinguishing factors for a purchase are, stick to those.
It's a great tool. I can see using it for laptops. Harder for phones etc.
Perhaps it's different for Intel, because they have the advantages of brand recognition and being the market leader, but most of the information about their processors seem to be purposefully obfuscated. It's hard to get a straight answer about the differences between i5 and i7. Once you've dialed down to an i7, its even more muddled. An i7-4702EC sounds like it would be better than an i7-4700EC, right? Wrong.
I'm an electrical engineer, and I don't know what a third of those specifications mean. How is the average consumer supposed to make heads of tails of it?
Very pretty! I've discovered it's very important to have "buying criteria" over time, which is what reviews are great for. You learn about things you didn't realize you needed to care about which are often times quite important and explain why one product is pricier than the next.
The design is a bit underwhelming, and I'm not 100% sure the highlight/dismiss thing works all that well. It feels to me like you ought to be able to click a product to highlight it, but instead you get spirited away to Amazon with, of course, an affiliate link (a natural and excellent way to monetise this!). It wasn't immediately obvious to me what "dismiss" would do when I clicked it, and then I didn't know how to "undismiss" something until I saw "reset settings", which presumably has that effect.
Also, the tiny icons on the chart showing the products themselves aren't actually very useful - you can't really determine much of value from them without hovering over them to get the popup; to me, at least, it might actually be more useful to see a brand logo.
Overall, though, I think it's a terrific idea, and a genuinely useful way of visualising multiple purchase criteria.
I like it. But the specs displayed on your website do not always match the specs from Amazon. Example: Dell Inspiron i5547-15001sLV 15.6-Inch listed with 16GB on your website, 8GB at Amazon
Interesting idea ... might be useful to be able to invert the cost measures. For example on the SSD page seeing $/GB instead of GB/$. Seeing the price per GB go down is more intuitive to me than seeing the GB per $ go up ... not sure why!
Nice site. A big problem I see is that it only uses Amazon for pricing. This results in the Nexus 6 being listed as 70% more expensive than the Google Play Store. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of price comparison.
Being able to compare laptops' processor speed (or at least displaying it) is pretty important, especially since Intel's model numbers are meaningless and are completely divorced from their specifications.
39 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadSo I decided to turn this into a full fledged project on its own this year. Got a proper domain name and made a homepage for it. So here it is. ProductChart.com!
Mission statement: For every product type, provide a nice overview of what is available in the market, plus the filters to choose the perfect product.
I have a few questions:
1. Where are you getting the specs for the products?
2. How current are the prices?
3. Could you add an 'LTE' filter for smartphones?
Also a few suggestions:
1. Have an option to view the list as a table, sortable by any parameter
2. Add the filters to the url, so you can bookmark it
3. Email users when a new product which meets the filters hits the market
4. Show the Amazon price history for a product (like camelcamelcamel), and email them when it hits a new low price.
Great work otherwise, I can see myself using it in future.
The specs are partly from Amazon and partly from the manufacturers websites.
The date of the price is always written next to it. Never older then 24h.
Yup, will add an LTE filter.
Thanks for the suggestions! I will prioritize all feature requests based on the feedback I get.
I would prefer a side-by-side when comparing say 2 or 3 different devices.
If I come up with an interesting idea for ratings or opinions, I will add it to the site.
I had trouble with memory and RAM for smartphones. Lots of marketing mixes them together so for an average customer, it might be more confusing than helpful.
I guess I would say: see if you can research what the most common distinguishing factors for a purchase are, stick to those.
It's a great tool. I can see using it for laptops. Harder for phones etc.
Perhaps it's different for Intel, because they have the advantages of brand recognition and being the market leader, but most of the information about their processors seem to be purposefully obfuscated. It's hard to get a straight answer about the differences between i5 and i7. Once you've dialed down to an i7, its even more muddled. An i7-4702EC sounds like it would be better than an i7-4700EC, right? Wrong.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/75555,75556
I'm an electrical engineer, and I don't know what a third of those specifications mean. How is the average consumer supposed to make heads of tails of it?
Also, the tiny icons on the chart showing the products themselves aren't actually very useful - you can't really determine much of value from them without hovering over them to get the popup; to me, at least, it might actually be more useful to see a brand logo.
Overall, though, I think it's a terrific idea, and a genuinely useful way of visualising multiple purchase criteria.
I like geizhals.at for such things. The design is old school, but it lets me filter for things I care.
Smartphones example: Battery capacity, standby time, OS version.
I would think most people will want 3-6 choices like economy, business, first etc
Being able to compare laptops' processor speed (or at least displaying it) is pretty important, especially since Intel's model numbers are meaningless and are completely divorced from their specifications.
Even without that feature, this is one AMAZING tool! I wish you the best!