Dooyoo Members' Feedback Initiative: Kukana (Public Notice)

Member Name: Kukana

Product:	Public Notice
Date:	10/08/04 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It might lead to something positive

Disadvantages: I hate to be negative

The Duke says ~ This isn't really a challenge, although more of helping hand for Dooyoo to understand the members and hopefully, in return, a chance of a better understanding of Dooyoo for us. This is how it works:

You write an open letter to Dooyoo giving them your feedback on the site as well as any suggestions you may have for taking the site forward addressing any concerns you might have etc. The important thing is the feedback, so include as much or as little as you feel is appropriate to yourself. Don't worry if someone has mentioned a point that you want to raise - it's also important that Dooyoo see how many people have praise, concerns or suggestions about aspects of the site.

Then you do three things: first, you post your "opinion" on Dooyoo (the category is listed below) and include some blurb in it which I'll post below. Second (and this is the important bit) you email your opinion off to Dooyoo directly via the dooyooteam@dooyoo.co.uk address so that they can read it. Third, if (and the 'if' must be stressed here) or when you get a reply, then you post their reply onto the end of your letter thus giving a complete picture of your suggestions and concerns and how Dooyoo views them. Obviously, the blurb bit is important as people don't like you quoting their emails, so if a certain piece of text is included in the opinion, then they'll know what people's intentions are.

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10th August 2004

Dear Dooyoo,

I've only been a member here for nine months now. I wasn't around in the pre-Aurora days of Dooyoo's glory when it was (so I'm told) by far the best consumer review site in the UK. But I've been encouraged to write you a letter giving my impressions of your site an
yway. Perhaps I can be more impartial because I didn't know about it when it worked well and was considerably busier than it is now.

My reasons for joining weren't very inspiring, I'm afraid. I had joined Ciao three months previously, and despite hearing about Dooyoo on the late Chatterweb forum, I didn't think I could possibly find time for another similar site. However one weekend Ciao was unavailable due to a crash, so I thought I would investigate the competition.

My first impressions were pretty good. At the time the Ciao site featured a rather garish orange colour, and I preferred Dooyoo's green scheme; much easier on the eye. I read through the various tour pages, and was pleasantly surprised at the payment rate. 3p per read on everything was a great deal better than Ciao's 1p per read on certain selected products. Then shortly after I joined, Dooyoo started offering 6p per read until Christmas 2003; that was an excellent offer, and certainly encouraged me - and others - to get posting.

I have no complaints about the speed of payment either, or the various options. Well, a minor quibble that you have to deduct a £2.50 fee for every voucher; since Amazon don't charge for gift vouchers I don't really understand why you do. But as your payments are generous I'm not too worried. The first voucher I claimed arrived within a week; the second took longer, but when I emailed your info address I had a friendly reply, and Clare sorted it out for me. I was impressed. Thank you.

I like the crown system too. It's considerably fairer than Ciao's premium fund, and more open. I received some early on, much to my surprise; clearly new members are just as likely to be given crowns as more established folk. I particularly li
ke the way that we can nominate other members' reviews for crowns without anybody knowing, so there's no worry about people wanting 'reciprocal' nominations or asking why we have or haven't nominated a certain review.

I like the general low-key friendliness of Dooyoo too - it's less lively than Ciao, with fewer active members and no guestbook system, but I've found everybody to be welcoming and accepting. Without the dreaded 'community points' there's less competition, and although inevitably there are some newcomers who post quantities of short reviews within the space of an hour or two, this doesn't happen nearly so much as it does on Ciao. Of course this may be a disadvantage: there aren't so many new members, and a site needs new members to keep going. But there's still a steady trickle, and many of them stick around.

So...

Why is it, I wonder, that I log onto Ciao nearly every day, and read lots of other opinions there, whereas I keep forgetting about Dooyoo? When I'm here, I quite like it, but somehow it feels like so much more effort.

Firstly I think this is due to the slow page-loading, and the awful popups. It was after joining Dooyoo that I downloaded the Google tool-bar, which allows popups to be blocked; without it, I wouldn't have lasted more than a few days here. I do understand that you need advertisements in order to generate income, and I have no problem with banner ads, or relevant links to stores where products can be bought. But popups - well, they're so irritating. I find it hard to believe that anybody ever clicks on them. Even if I wanted to buy the product advertised, the fact that it came in a popup would immediately bias me against it.

Thanks to the Google bar I don't see popups - most of th
em, anyway. But every time one is being blocked, my mouse pointer changes and the site pauses for a second or two. It happens when I log in, and periodically when I'm reading or rating (or even commenting on) reviews. If for other reasons my broadband connection is a bit slower than usual, it's almost painfully slow navigating around Dooyoo. And to make it worse, I STILL get a few popups, and every so often a pop-under as well. I don't mind that so much, at least it's not intrusive. But I'm sure the vast number of popups must be very off-putting to most consumers.

Then there's the search engine.

Oh dear.

A few weeks ago I wanted to post a review about Traidcraft 'Geobar' cereal bars. I was pretty sure I'd seen them somewhere on Dooyoo, but since there are over 500 items listed under 'cereal bars', without any order or sub-categories, I really didn't want to page through all those to hunt for something that might not be listed anyway.

So I searched for 'Geobar'. No product match, I was told. Then I searched for 'Geobars', knowing that Dooyoo isn't very good at close matches, but it didn't help. Still no product match. I searched for 'Traidcraft'. There were two matches: Traidcraft in general and Traidcraft cookies. No good. I even searched for Traidcraft_Geobars. No matches.

OK, I thought, I have to request the product. So I used Google to search for 'Traidcraft Geobars' in order to find a website and a picture. Do you know what the FIRST item on Google's search page was? Yes, it was Dooyoo's category for Geobars! It was here all the time, and had been here long enou
gh to get that high in the Google rankings. It just couldn't be found by Dooyoo's own search engine.

So I wrote my review, and I suppose the surfing public may find reviews like mine via Google. But if any of them try browsing Dooyoo itself, they're going to be very disappointed. Or worse. In their shoes, I'd go and look on Ciao instead since their search engine works extremely well and is updated every day.

What's more, Ciao breaks down categories into smaller groupings if there are too many. I tried browsing Dooyoo's books once. What a nightmare! Every author is listed alphabetically: fiction and non-fiction; children's and adults'... all muddled up. It took about two minutes for the page to load, it was so enormous. I suppose it might be acceptable if I ever want to research a particular author (although it would be easier if I could find them directly in the search engine), but suppose I want to look for children's books? Or biographies? Without knowing the authors, I'd be completely stymied.

A lesser (but still significant) problem is the length of time it takes for product proposals to be dealt with, and the general lack of communication about them. I did have one accepted a few months ago, but I only discovered it when I was browsing through the 'new products' list. Of course it couldn't be found by the search engine so I had to click the 'new product' link in order to find the item. I wrote the review. About a month later I did get an email from Dooyoo telling me that my product had been accepted - a bit late really! The whole process seemed so long-winded and complicated (it's hardly easy in the first place) that I gave up.

On the topic of communication, I don't find Dooyoo's email a
lerts terribly helpful. Once a day, I receive an email telling me if someone has added me to their friends list, or if one of my friends has written a new review. But there are no clickable links! So I have to make a note of who it is, and try to remember to read them next time I log on. Perhaps I'm lazy, but it would be so much easier if I could just click a link and go straight to the review. It would be even more helpful if you could allow auto-login too, but that's only a minor detail.

More of a problem is the lack of comment alerts. I tend to look at the comments on my latest review or two, but if someone has read and commented on one of my older reviews, how would I know? There's a link on my profile page where I can read through comments I've written (although I can't imagine why I'd want to see those again!) but nothing that tells me what comments I've received. I would have thought it would be easy enough to set up, and would make it so much easier to find new comments.

Of course comment threads on Dooyoo are rather strange anyway; with no official guestbooks, members have taken to replying to other people in their own comment threads - which is useful if a future reader has a similar query, but not much use for the person who asked the question in the first place, unless they think of going back later to look. Which is not something I've ever done. On the whole I think guestbooks would be a good idea. But the unofficial Tooyoo ones exist, so this is much less important than sorting out the category structure and the searching.

I'm not going to complain about the capital letter problem, nor the strange layouts that sometimes creep into our reviews. Charlie Chuckle created an excellent 'fix' for the capital letters, and it's easy enough to edit our reviews to e
nsure they're laid out correctly. As someone who's only been around for nine months, these - to me - are Dooyoo quirks, not major issues. I understand you have very few staff, so it's probably not a priority to deal with these - despite the fact that badly laid-out reviews look unprofessional, and can hardly help Dooyoo in the consumer eye.

I would really like to feel more inspired to visit Dooyoo. I think it's healthy to have more than one site of this sort, and there are many people who used to consider it greatly superior to Ciao. If the problems were sorted out, I'm sure that frustrated ex-members would return, and there would be a bigger influx of newcomers.

I realise I'm saying nothing new. These problems have been raised already, and I don't want to nag. But those who set this task for the members wanted to ensure that you get as much appropriate feedback as possible, because it isn't just a few vocal people who find some of these things frustrating. I expect that many give up rather than saying anything, but I'm not one of those.

I hate to be so negative, because I know you're doing what you can to keep the site going. I do appreciate your efforts. But without some resolution to the site problems, I really don't see how it can continue much longer.

Kukana aka Sue

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The above was sent as part of the Dooyoo Members' Feedback Initiative. The content is intended to provide constructive criticism for taking the site forward from the member's point of view, and has been posted to the site as an opinion. Your reply, if any is received, will be posted into the end of the opinion giving members a better idea of the Dooyoo and the site.

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"Dooyoo Members' Feedback Initiative: "

The category to be used is:
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/archive/internet/publi c_notice/

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