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Simple is as Simple Does
With apologies to Forrest Gump, how do we make Podiobooks simple?
Not simple as in stupid, but simple as in Apple. Simple like Google.
"Click here to get a good book" simple.
What button do we put on the front page? A form field is acceptable.
The problem, of course, is that the idea of Podiobooks isn't simple. Genre, author, quality, completeness all factor into how a visitor -- new or otherwise -- selects a book to download. Often it boils down to "this looks interesting" but how do we get the visitor to that point?
iTunes is NOT simple. It's an interesting model but comparing the iTunes interface to the iPod interface and you see my point.
So ... how do we make Podiobooks simple?
Not simple as in stupid, but simple as in Apple. Simple like Google.
"Click here to get a good book" simple.
What button do we put on the front page? A form field is acceptable.
The problem, of course, is that the idea of Podiobooks isn't simple. Genre, author, quality, completeness all factor into how a visitor -- new or otherwise -- selects a book to download. Often it boils down to "this looks interesting" but how do we get the visitor to that point?
iTunes is NOT simple. It's an interesting model but comparing the iTunes interface to the iPod interface and you see my point.
So ... how do we make Podiobooks simple?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by MartynDarkly on -
How about something similar to Amazon's lists?
The ability to link favourite books together by members might make it easier to stumble upon one you're after.
Maybe (like iTunes) a dedicated page for each genre, with author profiles, Top 20 charts, featured titles, and even 'Author of the week/month'.
It's not Google-simple, but then Amazon is hardly confusing.
The other model I suppose is something like 'Stumble-Upon' where you ask the browser what genre they want then randomly generate, say, 5 titles that have 4 star or higher ratings. That would be pretty simple.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on -
Ok. I like all of these ideas but ... front page? for the flashing 12's set?
As "drill down" functions, I love 'em
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Permalink Reply by MartynDarkly on
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Not sure I understand the 'flashing 12's set' reference - but you could put a 'Find me a book' button that linked to / or acted as the StumbleUpon style selection generator.
Who is this aimed at? New users I take it?
You could write it so that the 'Find me a book' button activates a search that then generates a list of books - 1 from each genre. If they then want to narrow down the genres they could click tick boxes next to each one (they'd be section headers above the book selection) and then search again. Each time honing their choice.
As the genres are narrowed down, then the amount of books displayed could increase - ie Initially there are (for argument's sake) 10 genres - 1 title for each, the browser then selects 5 genres and searches again - this time 2 books are displayed for each. And so on until 1 genre displays 10 books (or of course they've found a book they like and chosen it).
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on
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Well the idea is for *anybody* ... new visitors, old hands, authors, subscribers, manual downloaders ... it has to be simple enough for people who've never been here and useful enough for the people who are into their 100th title.
I like the "find me a book" idea ...
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Permalink Reply by Paulette Jaxton on -
One thing that bothers me about Podiobooks is that there are so many options (such as delivery schedule, which catcher to subscribe with, etc.) that I always answer the same way. It would be nice if these choices could be stored in a cookie the first time you subscribe to a book and from then on a single button could invoke all the same choices.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on
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That's another good idea!
Thanks, Paulette .. Be nice if you could subscribe on Sailor Mars, eh?
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Permalink Reply by MartynDarkly on
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Member pages like here on the ning site might be the way to do it.
We could select our preferences for subscriptions, have recommendations highlighted to us, and then maybe have an Amazon type 'list' feature to recommend to other members.
Can the two sites be merged in any way? Or is that a no-no?
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on
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well there IS a member profile in Podiobooks where the settings might conceiveably be saved... making that member page visible .. ning style with subscriptions etc is possible.
merging podiobooks WITH the community site? I'm not sure that's where we want to go to make things *simple* ... I wonder about grabbing that 'subscriptions' javascript link from my account page might not be an interesting thing to add to my community profile tho ...
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on
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Ok .. here's a "what if?" ... what's missing? what do we need? What's wrong with this picture?
Sorry about the image quality .. right click and view image to see it full size .. the Ning software collapses it
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Permalink Reply by MartynDarkly on
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Initial reaction is that I feel I have to know what I'm looking for.
I spotted the Charts option at the bottom, but for a newbie this might be a bit intimidating.
That's just a first impression though.
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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on
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That's my problem, too.
I added the "browse by" options ... how about if i change 'browse by' to "show books by"
I need to make those more "button-like" so they're obviously links, probably.
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Permalink Reply by MartynDarkly on
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It's hard to know. I think the main problem is that pretty much all the authors and titles will be unknown to most of the visitors - making searching of any kind difficult.
Charts or Genres seem the most obvious choice.
'Browse by {genre}' would probably be the best starting point, as you suggest.
A more prominent option to access charts would be useful (or a 'What's hot' button that takes you to some kind of selection).
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