Author:  dsimpsonugcs  Posted:  Jan 27, 2024 04:07  Subject:  Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants  Viewed:  57 times  Topic:  Catalog Cancel Reply

BrickLink ID Card dsimpsonugcs (37) Location:  USA, California Member Since Contact Type Status May 3, 2019 Buyer

In Catalog, Admin_Russell writes:    If you already sort a particular variant, simply add the descriptor to your listing notes for each item. You can still sell them even though they are not distinguished in the catalog. No need to lose money. Why is this a good UX, or even an acceptable UX? I can attest to how much of a PITA it is to rely upon the variant description in the seller comments already is as I just last week purchased a number of classic space torsos and minifigures for my minifigures I wanted ones without the interior ribs. BL doesn't differinitate between the torsos with small ribs and no ribs in the catalog entry for 973p90c02 and consquently sp005 as well. Only the seller descriptions do. Right now, there are 350 items for sale of 973p90c02 and 787 of sp005 that ship to where I live (in the USA). I then I have to use my browser's text search to find the items I'm interested in. Except that's complicated by the fact that different sellers describe the same thing different ways. Some say, "no ribs." Some say, "without ribs." Some use "prongs" or "supports" instead of "ribs." Others even use "hollow core." Some may not even be in English. I had to search separately for each of these terms. I may have missed some. And since there are more than 500, they can't all be seen on one page, so all these multiple searches had to be done on multiple pages. Point being, there's no well defined way to even describe a variant. Having a separate catalog entry (or variant within an umbrella entry, if such functionality were introduced) would have considerably improved this experience. Catalog entries provide a shared (and enforced) vocabulary to describe elements. This proposal makes this situation worse by adding a third variant. More items to search. More differing descriptions. A seller will undoubtably use "with ribs." Are they small ribs or the modern larger ones? Additionally, this proposal effectively makes other BL shopping features unusable when trying to shop for a variant that is not separately listed. For example, the "Buy Wanted List" feature cannot be used as it is practically impossible to filter out stores only selling variants of the element one doesn't want. A single element on a wanted list where a particular variant is desired is enough to poison the entire list and make shopping for many different element types considerably more painful. Hitting the "Select" button for a particular store doesn't even show the seller descriptions for the items! Yet, this proposal wants me to rely upon those descriptions that can't be filtered, or in some cases even bothered to be displayed. It makes far more sense to introduce a modicum of hierarchy to the catalog database. Variations could be listed under a higher level umbrella entry. By default, when a user added an element to a wanted list it would be the umbrella element encompassing all the variants. They could then optionally pick the variant (or variants) they actually want (and for some nifty UX even show the average price of each of those variants in the selection box). Sellers could choose whether to sort by variant or not, likely being able to charge higher prices when they choose to do so. When purchasing, stores either not sorting the variants or not selling the particular variant a buyer is interested in would trivially be filtered out. Set and minifigure inventories would be changed to show the known variant(s) it came with. That would partially clean-up the "alternate items" sections. Would all that be easy? No. Will there be exceptions in the catalog that cause arguments? Tons of them. I'm confident though the catalog maintainers could accomplish such an undertaking. But the UX would need to be designed and implemented to match. If done properly, users that don't care about variants could ignore them. Even more so than they do now. Users that do care, would have a much better toolset to shop for them. And the catalog could be made even more accurate. And finally, removing information for all is not the proper response to information overload for some (or even a majority). Properly displaying and building a great UX that makes handling all of that data a breeze is.

Message is in Reply To:

Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants - Admin_Russell

[...] If you already sort a particular variant, simply add the descriptor to your listing notes for each item. You can still sell them even though they are not distinguished [...] (5 months ago, Jan 9, 2024, to Catalog)

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