About two years ago I came across the site ‘Woodpie’, a site for the exchange of books. The idea was very interesting and so I explored the site and wrote my views and review on it.

After the initial week or two of use the site fell away and over time I forgot all about it. Then a couple of weeks back I received an email telling me Woodpie was all updated and new and shiny now.

I figured another review was due. I was also curious to see what the improved site looked like and how many of the issues I’d raised, had been sorted. 😀

Welcome Page

The new welcome screen is clean and engaging. It’s well laid out with enough information to show that the heart of Woodpie has stayed the same through all changes. The site is all about book exchange.

And guess who’s testimonial was up there 😀

Home Page

The first thing I notice after the home page is it simple clean lines. It feels nice on the eye and makes we want to explore more. A pinterest type layout that is easy to navigate.

This page tells you all about what other users of Woodpie are doing in a nice cards layout. It feels good to scroll through all those book covers and see which ones catch my eye.

The page also has little widgets/column’s with lists of popular books and popular people, to help you find books to read and make friends in the community.

‘Me’ Tab

The ‘Me’ section has all the books I’ve added placed on shelves. There is also options to check out the ‘Reviews’ I’ve done, my ‘Wishlist’ and my ‘Friends’.

The page looks clean and I like how it is laid out. The bio section with numbers of reviews, books and wishlist is a handy thing for a quick appraisal.

Editing the profile is also easy and intuitive. On your Woodpie profile you can currently list links to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and your Blog. What you see in the Me is what everyone else sees too when they come to your profile.

The Friends section has three divisions – the people you are connected to,people who are connected to you and Facebook contacts. The first two work quite like the following options on Goodreads or Facebook.

Clicking on Facebook contacts lists out my Facebook friends with an invite button next to each profile. As of now the listing seems limited to 32 friends and the site can’t load beyond that. I would have also liked to see a search option so I could get past the letter A quickly. 😀

Library

Clicking on the Library option takes you to a page filled with books. Here there are some excellent options to choose from. You can take a looks at all the books shared on Woodpie or look at just books in your city. You can also choose to view books from a list of 20 countries and active cities in it.

Trade

The Trade section has a listing of exchange offered made by you and to you. Since my trade section was empty I decided to try requesting a book and see how it worked out.

You can choose the book you want from your Wishlist section or click on any book in the Library. In your wishlist if a book is available (someone has it) you’ll see a ‘Get It’ note below the book details. The library of course has book that someone already has.

Searching for a book isn’t a great option as the results show all editions of the book and if you do not choose the same edition as other users, you will not be able to request the book.

Clicking on the ‘Get It’ option causes a drop down with the flow of getting the book. You first see a list of users who have the book. After you have chosen the user, you next have to choose the book you want to give in exchange on your list or books the user has requested. Finally before you confirm, you can suggest a place and time to meet up.

The exchange process is well laid out and simple. Once a exchange request is placed it shows up in the trade section. I would have liked to see options to mail or courier books too. That way I’m not limited to any city.

Adding Books

There are also two little buttons at the top to Add/Review Book and Invite Friends. Clicking on the Add button leads to a search box, and the results of a search give you a listing of various editions of the book.

The listing also has a lot of books related to your search topic. That’s means aside from the usual title, author and ISBN, you can also search by topic, though you may have to scroll through a lot of stuff.

Each book listing has options to add it to your library, request it or review it. If the book is already in your library, on your wishlist or reviewed the buttons will be depressed. The difference in the buttons being active and inactive is very slight. I’d have like it to be more prominent.

Invite Friends

The invite friends option leads to a page with three ways to find friends – Facebook, Email and Woodpie. The Facebook option here works well and lists all friends in a never ending list. Here too a search option would have been helpful.

The email section asks for a list of email ID’s. I would have liked a way to import email ID’s rather than type or copy paste them individually. In the preview email invite sent out goes from Anuradha Bajpai. I’d have liked to send the email out with my name.

The last option is to connect with users on Woodpie. This is a great way to find new book friends and create a new network of friends.

Apart from all of this in the top right hand corner you have settings and notifications. Settings allows you to choose what notifications you get and control Woodpie’s posting on your behalf on Facebook. Notifications is the usual listing of alerts. I would have liked to see date and time here tomato each alert more relevant.

Summary

Over all Woodpie looks and behaves way better than when I saw it two years ago. The usability and smoothness is good and I enjoyed going through the page. There are still some glitches to be smoothed out but nothing that majorly takes away from the experience.

The biggest drawback I see is not in the site but the concept. I don’t know how many people today want to metope and exchange books. That needs to the core missing piece I saw. There aren’t enough users right now and until the critical number is reached the site isn’t going to be very helpful.

That said, I would like to see a future for Woodpie as it would bring book lovers closer and revive paper books to some extent.

P.S. – I also hope they move their Social Links elsewhere. On a page with unlimited scrolling trying to click on links at the bottom of the page is a b*tch. 😛

 
P.S. – Day Eleven of the 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

I’ve received so many email reminders from IndiBlogger about the CarConnect.in contest that I finally decided to check it out. Well, the content would do my blog some good and if I won one of those vouchers they keep shouting about I’d be happy. Who wouldn’t when the first prize is a Rs.50,000 voucher, second is 2 Rs.25,000 vouchers and then there also are 80 Rs.1,000 vouchers; I’d have preferred cash though 😀

Disclaimer: This is a long post. If you want the quick and dirty, scroll right to the end now. 😛

Ok, onto checking out the site… Here’s what the home page looks like…

Positives:
The layout looks clean and fairly simple with enough social proof on the right to get me interested.

Negatives:
The only way to login is Facebook. Personally I don’t like that, I prefer to keep facebook out of other sites I use. Logging in with facebook requires me to be very careful about permissions, one mistake and the site will be plastering their info all over my facebook stream. There is also the fact that Facebook is not forever, so what happens to my CarConnect login if facebook disappears tomorrow? I would have liked to see another login option apart from Facebook.

Apart from the forced Facebook login, without giving CarConnect.in access to my Facebook details by logging in, I cannot see or do anything on the site. Every click only brings up one prompt.

“Please Login with Facebook to proceed…”

Oops, Wait a moment… All links at the bottom of the site work without login. 😀 So, you can check out the site’s About Us (which has some errors in language), How to Earn Badges, etc. without a Facebook login. But the one that caught my eye was the Contact Us.

The page is just like any other contact us page except for the 200 character limitation. Hey CarConnect.in, this isn’t a twitter status message. If you expect a more than 200 word review of your site, wouldn’t I be entitled to more than 200 characters in a complaint?

Positives:
This pops up when you hit the ‘Login with Facebook’ button, which isn’t so bad since the fine print at the bottom says, CarConnect.in cannot post on my behalf.

Positives:
After login completes the Profile page loads with all *fields populated from Facebook (these are editable though). There is not much information being asked for and I like the fact that I didn’t have to fill a lengthy form about myself.

My profile created and saved, I clicked on view profile to see what it looked like. The my profile page is simple and short with a note in bold asking you to share your experiences. So that’s where I headed next.

The Share Experience page gives you two options at the start. Car Experience and Long Drive Experience. This choice doesn’t change much on the page except for giving you car selection options or destination options.
Once past this selection I filled in the other details – caption, description, keywords/tags. I didn’t have any images or video so I skipped those fields.

Positives:
Simple and user friendly to fill up with the right fields and choices being given.
Options for Photos and Videos make for a nice touch.

Negatives:
The start point and destination drop-downs have very few options. I’d have liked to see more here. As of now there are just the metros, major cities and common holiday destinations.

Clicking the submit option brings up the above message. Moderation of posts isn’t bad and will help make sure random nonsense does not get added to the site, but I would have liked to know what parameters would be used for moderation, ‘appropriate’ isn’t enough to describe it.

Now that all login essentials are done, here’s what the Home Page looks like –

The home page now shows Top Car and Long Drive Experiences and all tags in the clouds lead to pages with more entries from users.

That concluded the login process I guess but before I wind up lets look at the various options in the main menu of CarConnect.in.

‘Home’ is as above, ‘My Profile’ we talked about earlier, ‘My Friends’ as expected is blank right now for me, and ‘Share Experience’ takes me back to the form for travel details.

Then, there is a ‘Leaderboard’ which gives badges and ratings of users. ‘Car News’ which gives news from the automobile industry and ‘New Launches’ which I assume gives info on new car launches.

Aside from all these, there is a ‘Long Drive’ option. The page asks you to select start point to see all route options. At first glance I thought this was a cool system for mapping. What it actually is, is a another tag cloud. A click on the city will take you to entries made by users starting from that city, not a map or route options.

Lastly there is the ‘Compare Cars’ option. This also sounds cool but when you get to the page you realise it isn’t real-time. Results will be emailed, now that just makes for more waiting and processing. There are other sites that do this real-time and would be so much better to use for this feature than what CarConnect.in has to offer.

Overall Thoughts –

Positives:
Most of the site is user friendly and straight forward.

Negatives:
My over all experience was marred by a few things like the Facebook login being the only option, the site layout being too rudimentary (more bells and whistles would have been nice), the reading experience of write-ups and news being more easy on the eye (at the moment it reminds me of Orkut), and other things where they have said one thing and delivered another like in the Long Drive section.

CarConnect.in as a concept is pretty cool since India is right now bursting at the seams with cars. (No point in arguing about there being no road space for these cars in this post) With the right incentives and a lot of clean up, the site would definitely gather more users.