Check out the blog entry - From The Information Age To The Connected Age by Zelenka over at GigaOM.
Pretty good analysis…
Here are my thoughts:
I am in the market to buy a car. Obviously we did some preliminary research on MSN Autos and Edmunds.com and we also looked at manufacturer’s sites for specs etc.
Once we decided on the class of the car, the time came to do some comparative analysis. This is where the Web 1.0/1.5/2.0 technology based user interface features started falling short. The user experience was horrible. I had to click through so many times to get to what I wanted (which BTW I had visited 15-20 minutes back! The comparison also didn’t allow me to see more than 3 cars (MSN Autos) per page and in addition it failed to show all the information in one go. For example, I wanted to select a specific model on Edmunds.com and I had to click about 4-5 times (Click new car, select make, select year, select model and then click on that model). I didn’t even see a Search button either. It would be very useful to simply type in the vehicle information - “2008 Lexus IS350″ - and land on the home page for that vehicle!
Eventually I got so frustrated that I downloaded all the data into Excel (actually I copy/pasted data in Excel – not really download). I also copy/pasted page snippets into a Word document to see all the relevant information in one page (e.g., expert’s ratings, user’s ratings and reviews in one group, NHTSA safety data/information in another UI block, fuel economy data into another UI block etc.).
Then I used Excel 2007 feature of conditional formatting to find the model with best numbers for each feature. This helped quite a bit in getting our ducks in row.
Next up – test driving the short listed vehicles (at least 3 of them) and then making a final decision.
Obviously Edmunds.com data around TMV etc. came in quite handy.
Lessons learned – I guess I am the power user when it comes to available data on the web. I wish they had given me an option to download the vehicle specifications in Excel – or given be a database on the web with all the manipulation capabilities. I also wish that they had given me a bunch of UI widgets that I could plug into my portal page and then trigger them with the vehicle data from some other widgets. This – in my mind – is true Web 2.0 or even Web 3.0 capability that will work in enterprises. In summary – enterprises need highly structured data with highly structured/usable UI to manipulate them to make final decisions.
I guess there is an opportunity here – create a data service on the web to fulfill the wish that I have. The data can be any data – product data mostly – vehicles, computer parts etc. The user should be able to pick the access mechanism – web only, smart client, Excel (incl. Excel service), Access database, XML, widgets/gadgets (for Google, Yahoo, Vista etc.), PDF and mobile – anything! The site should provide complete sort, search, filter, grouping capabilities etc. which will obviously depend on the access mechanism.
I guess there are few products out there but I am not impressed with these – DabbleDB is one of them. I have to use it and see what type of facilities it provides.
BTW - We are yet to finalize the car purchase! Will test drive few cars this week and then by early next week we should have completed this task!