Experience Planner

On my previous post, I provided an overview of online reputation systems with some examples. Here, I’ll explain why they are important.

As we know, online shopping can be very convenient. Sites such as Amazon offer an incredibly big variety of items. A search for “laptop” on Amazon retrieves more than 450,000 results. For any item, a customer can choose the best price, compare it with similar products and create bundles to get more for less. From one hand, this is a good thing and that’s what makes Amazon so attractive to customers. But it also poses a new problem: with so many options out there, how do I choose the best one?

Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, in which customers have the ability to see and sometimes even test the products before buying them, the Internet lacks some of the crucial elements a real shopping experience has. Whenever customers go to a store inside a shopping mall for example, they are able to make immediate judgments from their interaction with other people and the environment. Customers can hold the products, ask questions, evaluate if the staff is friendly, look around and see if the store is well-organized and observe the other people that buy things there.

All those physical cues are not present on the digital space. For that reason, e-commerce sites try to minimize the problem with good design, online assistance, discounts on shipping and so on. Reputation systems are also part of that strategy and they are built to facilitate the online shopping process. Amazon provides ratings and reviews for products. This is one way of helping customers overcome 2 problems: (a) the overwhelming number of available options for products and (b) the lack of personal interactions.

In a nutshell, reputation systems can improve decision making by aggregating user feedback and presenting it in a way that allows people to narrow their options. On my next post, I’ll talk about a little bit more about user feedback.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).