| Overall: | 20 | 3 |
| Design: | 7 | 4 |
| Navigation: | ||
| Usefulness: | 4 | 5 |
20
3
Ranker is an operating system for Lists. Okay, that was pretty nerdy.
But basically, Ranker is an easy, fun and social way to rank anything. By hooking up our 5 million+ item database to a drag and drop interface, we make it easy for you to create complex lists with lots of data without wasting your time or causing carpal tunnel.
Everything in our system is connected, and your lists are always with you on Ranker. So, it's easy to drag items from one list to another, and add items from other people's lists to your rankings. It also allows us to aggregate everybody's lists into The Consensus, which uses the community's aggregated opinions to create lists that reflect the wisdom of the crowd.
The end goal is to produce a 'wikipedia of opinions', and it can't be done without yours.
Please keep in mind that we are adding more navigation and browsing functionalities soon.
1) What does the site do?
2) When you first hit the homepage, what was your reaction? Did you find it easy to get into the site? Please elaborate.
3) Would you use Ranker? If so, what for? If not, why not?
4) What were your feelings about the process for starting a list? Did you find it easy or hard? What confused you about it, and what did you find intuitive?
5) How was the experience of building a list? Was it easy or hard? What tools did you find that were helpful and what do you wish we had provided?
6) Was the data in our lists useful to you? Did you find it overly complex or did you find that it enhanced your list viewing experience?
7) What issues did you have with the site's functionalities? What do you think we need to explain better?
Even after reading the What/Why/How I was confused. I played around a bit with it and found it easy to use, but not very appealing to the eye. I mean, the place where you drag and drop the lists seems odd because it's followed by ads and just doesn't seem part of the site. I like the colors you've chosen, but I think there's just too much going on. Place the ads on one central location always, not in two places.
Overall, I'm really confused on this site and I think you would benefit from de-cluttering in an effort to make your point more clear and concise.
Wow, what a turd of a site. "os for lists" ? ? um.... in what way? ranker is pretty rank.
I mean, I guess it's an ok amateur site, if it was done by a lone dev over a long weekend. He needs to hire someone to help him out with clutter though.
It really is nothing like wikipedia, as the social aspect of it is just limited to comments.. there is no group collaboration, and the only thing you can do is just copy someone's list to make your own. I mean... that's not at all in the spirit of online collaboration.
I'm interested to see how this guy fixes his issues.
Oh and MONTH,DAY,YEAR all in caps looks like a nasty placeholder for a i18n file or something... clean it up a bit :)
1) On first loading the site, I'm not sure what it does. The homepage really doesn't give me any useful information immediately. I have to dig into the What/How/Why links to find out anything. After reading through those I'm still not 100% sure unfortunately. You have what looks like a lot of features but IMO are not doing a good job of explaining them there. Too much joking and not enough meat. It also looks like you may be a bit too unfocused on what the site should be used for since you mention using it for pretty much anything from blog pages to movie rankings to holding a media collection list.
2) My first reaction on the homepage was that there is far too much "stuff" and not enough direction. I found myself drawn to click the What/How/Why links but as mentioned the information was not overly helpful. Aside from that, everything beneath that on the page was overload for me. There were like 15 sub-sections or something. I wasn't sure what the differences between some of them even were (e.g. Most Popular, The Ranks, Most Discussed, and Featured List).
3) I think I would use it if it was cleaned up and a) easier to use and b) easier to find a list I care about.
4) I found the two different list types very confusing even w/the comparison you have. The names you used (InfoType vs. FreeStyle) are also somewhat meaningless to an outsider.
5) Didn't like having to sign up to add a description to my list. The signup process was relatively painless but you could streamline it by removing the login and using email for login. I like the ability to find videos on YouTube for my list but when I found one it overlapped the textarea strangely. I tried saving the item but the save button did not appear to do anything so I had to X it out and was unable to add anything to my list.
6) I created a simple music InfoStyle list to test this out. It seemed to work much better than the freestyle list I tried first. I really like the search and drag/drop. Only problem as I'm sure you know is you just need so much data for that to be fully usable though... It could also use some design cleanup to look nicer. If you can pull that off though it would be cool.
7) Your site has the strange ability to be scrolled horizontally on my computer even though no horizontal scrollbar exists. I have no idea what that's all about but it doesn't happen on any other sites. I think you need to explain what exactly it is you do and how it can help me better than you do now.
Overall it's a very interesting but possibly too ambitious idea. The amount of data you have on the front page is overwhelming as will be the amount of data used to create useful InfoStyle lists once you have enough of it. Your biggest challenge will be making all of that data simple to search and simple to use. Good luck!