Phenomenal response to Catalog Choice November 6th, 2007 by Matt
HARDLY A MONTH HAS PASSED since we announced the launch of Catalog Choice, a website that MakaluMedia was chosen to design and develop by an amazing team of funding and supporting organizations, and the response to the site has been extraordinary.
In less than 25 days, more than 100,000 users have registered, opting out of more than 800,000 catalogs. And for us, as user experience designers and product developers, one of the most exciting statistics is the near 50% conversion ratio, meaning that nearly one out of every two visitors to the site has registered.
Update November 21, 2007: We are about at the one month point now, and have over 180,000 users, opting out of nearly two million catalogs!.
Catalog Choice has also been featured on the national television networks CNN, NBC and ABC (see videos below), and has been well received in the press and blogosphere:
- The New York Times
- The Boston Herald
- The Chicago Tribune
- Guy Kawasaki
- Joel on Software
- Adam Engst at TidBITS
The success of the site has served to validate much of our beliefs regarding user experience design. Some of principles that stand out include:
- Simple is better. Less is more.
- A successful user experience derives from near obsessive attention to detail.
- Don’t outsource your user support. On the contrary, put your best people on it. People love getting a personal response from somebody that knows what they’re talking about. You’ll reap the benefits in trust, patience and tremendous value in terms of feedback to the process of continually improving the user experience.
We’ve also learned a wealth about effectively operating a high-volume Ruby on Rails application. (On one particular day, the ABC “Good Morning America” spot was the very top news article on Yahoo News, and we saw 20,000 new user registrations in a period of four hours.) Having a great hosting partner helps a lot!
Finally, this project is proof positive that talented and motivated people, supported by an effective agile process and paying a lot of attention to clear communications, can build a successful project, even if separated great distances geographically. Our Catalog Choice team includes MakaluMedia staff located in the United States, Germany, Spain and Ireland!
And with that, we bring this article to a close. Our next project milestones include one million catalog opt-outs, and hopefully down the road one millions users! And remember, if you’re located in the US, and ready to simplify your life while helping the environment, head on over to Catalog Choice and sign up for a free account:
Be sure to check out the following video clips.
- Catalog Choice on NBC
- Catalog Choice on CNN
- Catalog Choice on ABC Good Morning America
November 6th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
[...] IN LESS THAN ONE MONTH’S TIME, our recently launched Catalog Choice website has registered 100,000 users, opting out of over 800,000 catalogs! We’ve published an extensive article about the success of the site over at the MakaluMedia Summit Blog. [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 5:31 am
It’s nice, but the visual simplicity and elegance hides – no, forces – a blinders-on, wizard-like workflow that slows the user down. The ubiquity of Web-2.0 “lightbox” dialogs looks great, to a graphic artist, but it kills the usability.
My browser, like most, will happily sign me in automatically using its password cache; that doesn’t work on this roll-your-own lightbox window. Everything I click on has to wait to render, because there’s a fancy fade-in/fade-out that I simply must watch; it’s time-based, not CPU-based, so it slows me down just as much on my dual-3.0GHz AthlonX2.
when I search for a new catalog, I have to type the first few letters, but once that’s the last catalog shown by auto-search, I can’t just hit enter – I still have to select it from the “list” of a single catalog down below (which the auto-select field actually covers up). Or, if I see the catalog isn’t listed, I still have to type enough of my catalog name to prove to the script that it’s not there before it will allow me to enter a new name.
Overall, the functionality’s amazingly solid for a first release, and the polish is beautiful – but you may have sacrified some function for that form, like a Bauhaus chair that is so striking and dramatic that it’s no longer comfortable to sit in.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:37 am
All right, I understand that this is a very old post, I was looking for something completely different, however now I am so glad I did it. This Catalog Choice still exists! Let’s see if this thing still works, because I have few catalogs which must stop. Thanks buddy and sorry to post on your archived article.
Cheers,
Kosta
December 29th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Thank you regarding your awsome post. I am going to keep an observation on your site, i allready added it to personal list :)