Recently Kickstarter posted a blog entry about some cosmetic changes they made to their project page layout. The change looks nice, but just reading the comments reveals some issues with the new design. Moreover, they’ve made revisions that don’t improve the current usability problems on the whole site.
One of the big complaints about the change is that the “backer badge”, a large icon that used to be located prominently at the top of the page, is no longer present. This icon is has been replaced with a small “You Selected” (in small white text on a green background) in one of the pledge boxes. When I first saw this, I had difficulty determining which pledge level I had selected - the one above the notice, or the one below.
Interface usability issues aside, there are many features that Kickstarter has lacked for too long, and it’s simply a matter of time until one of their competitors - like IndieGogo or RocketHub - adds these features, thereby building a better reputation/relationship with the crowdsourcing community.
Sorting Projects
Let's start with my own Kickstarter profile. Considering the goal of putting more projects in front of more people, I would think that Kickstarter would sort public projects differently. When I look at the listing, I see projects in the order that I've backed them, not in their order of funding completion. The result is that the topmost projects may have already completed funding, whereas some in the middle or bottom may not be complete yet.If you look at my profile page, wouldn’t it be interesting to see those projects that I’ve backed so that you, too, have the opportunity to back those projects? This would actually benefit Kickstarter and their projects.
Another perplexing side-effect of this is that I can’t even see what projects I have active. If you switch to the “Backed” page, you can see only the projects (not comments, which are included on the Activity page), and you can page through them. But once again, there is no filter, and the order is by date backed, not date complete.
Some useful things to have on this page would be a filter for type of project (so that you could see only the Board Game projects I’ve backed), or the completion status of a project (to see which have been funded, failed to fund in time, or are still waiting for funding). It would be useful to have a quick way to show which projects I’ve backed that are still in need of funding to reach their goals. There could also be a sort order based on amount backed for, or days left to fund. The same could be done with the Starred Projects listing on the profile page, using details about the projects themselves for the sorting and filtering.
Highlighting Categories
If you've looked at my profile, you know I'm very active in backing good board and card games. Conversely, things I don't typically back are movie and music projects. When I come to Kickstarter, the home and recommendation pages are plagued with movie and music projects. Since I have no interest in those projects at all, those pages are fairly useless to me. Instead, it would be very useful to me to primarily see a list of projects that are from a pre-selected set of categories. If I could choose board games, product design, and technology categories, and have the home or recommendation pages display primarily (not exclusively -- I like a little serendipity, too) project from those categories, I would be able to get to funding projects that much more quickly.Another issue with categories is that although the project pages themselves now more prominently display their category listing, the small project tiles that are used in listings do not. When I’m looking at a project in a listing (or wherever I see the small project tiles), the category would give me a clearer idea of what the project is about and whether I should bother looking at it.
Surveys
Kickstarter surveys are the bane of the system. Consider this scenario:- I fund a project that needs money for development of a product. The reward is one of that product.
- The project is successfully funded by the deadline.
- I receive and submit my backer survey, allowing me to supply my address for shipment of my reward.
- The project owner takes 6 months to finish the design and produce the product, during which I move.
- The project owner has to deal me sending crazy "emails" via the Kickstarter message system so that my product isn't incorrectly shipped to the old address.
This hasn’t happened to me. But it seems to happen very, very often in the case of board and card games, which typically take many weeks just to ship to the US in cargo containers from the big printers in China; Not to mention the time required for design, play-testing, proofing, and packaging.
On top of that, if a backer has offer to ship to a non-US destination that would require more shipping fees, there’s no easy way for the backer to clearly collect that money via the Kickstarter system. And if there are extra bits that might need to be collected in the end, like if you forgot that you wanted that extra bit for the extra $10, it would be useful to be able to include that. It’s interesting that the system is really not designed as a product-selling shop, but most of the projects I’ve seen and/or backed on Kickstarter end up that way. You’d think there was a feature to handle this, but there isn’t.
Kickstarter should add a way to associate a reward address with a pledge, and maintain that address separately from the rest of the response. In addition, the survey could include parts that allow additional payment, either for shipping (which could change if the address changes, up until the project owner locks down the addresses for shipping), or for additional, forgotten components. Allowing payment for these additional components would be at the project owner’s discretion. This would take a bit of the pain out of the process for the project owners, which makes everyone happy.
Progress Gauges
Sometimes when a project is complete, the whole project seems to come to a standstill. My best example of this is the Ironbuds project. During many of the updates, even though the project owner was talking about the project, it was unclear what the status of the project was and whether the ear buds they were manufacturing would ever ship out. There have been 100 updates since the project opened last June, and the product is still not delivered. Today, a new update shows a screen capture from the Pixar movie Up, and the title "IRONbuds are being delivered to us TODAY!" But that's it. No comments, no product photos. Makes me crazy, but I digress.One thing that I saw that is really, really nice is something that Rich Burlew has done with his Order of the Stick project. There are useful graphs in almost every update showing the progress he’s making with his promises.
My suggestion is for Kickstarter to provide a tool (any tool would be great, not just my idea) that would allow project owners to visually track their progress for their backers. They could set specific milestones for different components of the project, and check them off when they are complete. This would be a great visual indicator of the progress of things beyond the usual, appreciated, post for backers.
Personal Progress Pages
This is just something I would like to have. A progress page that showed me the projects that I'm backing that are still open would be nice. This would help me see how well each project is doing, and let me know specifically when I need to start talking to my friends about a project to get it over the hump to success.You’d think that the updates page would be useful for this, or maybe the My Backed Projects page, but for reasons I mentioned above, it’s not. The updates page is terrible, because it only shows updates by their most recent post. If a project posts a sequence of 6 updates, that pushes every other project onto a second page. This is inconvenient.
What I would like to see is something that works at a glance; a page with just projects I’ve backed, their latest post, and some kind of progress graph. Maybe the graph I mentioned above for projects that are complete, maybe a graph like the ones that Kicktraq publishes.
This is just a short list of the changes I’d love to see on Kickstarter to try to improve the use of the site and exposure to great new projects.
