Review of KoolKart

This post is basically the review of a new website - KoolKart.

KoolKart will sound interesting to folks who make online purchases. There are couple of sites which do the same, so the idea is not unique. Uniqueness should be in the implementation. When you visit the Koolkart website:

The first impression you get is- it’s just another online retail site, which it is not. Koolkart is not a online retailer, so you don’t need a big panel on your left which shows you to “Log in”. Why would I want to log in just to see which retailer is giving me the cheapest rate. Also from a user point of view, he/she need not make 3-4 clicks to reach that page.

Basically I am coming from – whether you want to make Google like stuff where you don’t stay on home page for more than 3 seconds or you want to make Yahoo like stuff which wants you to stay on it’s website.

The first half of the page is almost of no-use to me. Being a first time user, I don’t know if i will be coming back. So I don’t think I will create a user id for myself. Also I felt there is too much of emphasis on Sign Up (or use Facebook). To me that’s a little No-No.

Generally people visiting this website would have made some online purchases in past. I am discounting the first time visitor as they would hear Flipkart/Junglee/Myntra/Jabong first. So you actually don’t need to show them how it works. It should be quite intuitive. Those videos make sense for demonstration of software tools and not how to use a website.

Let’s get into the next page.

As a typical User I would click on “view more” on what’s in frame. This piss me off big time. I don’t want to log in. I will hit back button and try to find if there is any textbox for me to enter what i am looking for. I didn’t find any.

Hold on there is something for my help. Scroll the page down, in the right most bottom corner you will see Categories. God I am lucky, these are not just texts but hyper links which I was actually looking for. I am clicking Book there.

Ahhh, this page is making me feel a little happy. Since I come from using at least Flipkart/Junglee/Myntra/Jabong, I feel this is more of a known UX. But again the same “Log in “ stuff.

I guess they need to remove it and re-order the sections, View by Friends first, then Filter By and then Login (if they can’t remove it).

I entered some characters of the book (I am looking for Fooled by Randomness)and saw a list coming up. This is good, I need not type the whole stuff. The auto-complete starts showing up after 3 characters itself. Also if the auto-complete highlight the characters entered, it would be great.

Sort by doesn’t work. It shows values Popularity, Price and Recently Karted. But changing to any of them doesn’t work. May be it requires login, but doesn’t show me anywhere.

On the Search Result page, when I scroll to see the results at bottom, whole page moves down. I think they should introduce frames and keep the top portion and left portion fixed, so that when I scroll only the results sections scroll.

Instead of “About us”, “Tutorial”, “button” on top , there could be a bottom bar which hosts these things.

I think this has grown a little long. Will continue this in another blog post. My interest in this website is because I had the same idea an year before, so I took some time out to go through their website and give them some feedback.