Posted by Markus on 25th November 2009

Netcycler: First impressions

I got my invitation to Netcycler yesterday and had time to browse around last night.

They describe themselves as:

Netcycler is a swap and give away service for acquiring secondhand goods. We will soon add buy and sell options as well. When you no longer need something, the service will find someone who does. It’s an alternative for consumption centered lifestyle, an easy way to minimize shopping while still getting all you need. We are still developing the service and there are plenty of new features to come.

They also warned the invitees that there aren’t many items shared yet, which is understandable as the site just opened to alpha and bugs are expected. So, the first 4 things that came up while using Netcycler:

1. It. is. slow.

I have a 100 meg connection at home and loading the front page takes 15.74 seconds. Fifteen seconds! And it’s not about great strain to the servers, as there are only 300 users currently in the alpha and I’m sure there are only tens of simultaneous users. For me, the sites sluggishness is an issue that stops me from using the site and it seriously needs fixing.

UPDATE: Did I say slow? 38.34 SECONDS to load the browsing area. That’s the average attention span of a 20-year old. Multiplied by 40.

UPDATE 2: I just got an error 500 after 37.4 seconds of waiting. It’s down.

2. The concept

Freecycling and 2nd hand stores are really trendy at the moment. Similar chains are buzzing in Facebook as well, the problem there is the people. People want too much and want to give too little. Even in Netcycler it’s “I’ll give away this old, used USB cable and I want a full 7mm wetsuit in change.” I believe this can be evaded by adding some sort of category of “value” to the items, an average retail price or something similar – you know, “how much would you expect to get for this item on a flea market.”

In order for the service to work, it has to have movement, a sense of urgency. Otherwise is stagnates and it becomes cluttered.

3. Adding items

Adding items has been done very well considering the amount of stuff out there. Sure, it would be even nicer to have a product number search tool that would decipher the information of my DVR, but the questions we logical and simple in their hierarchical method. Doing this right is one of the most important tasks in designing a service like this – especially when their goal is obviously to go multilingual in the future.

4. Usability

Sure, the basic site and its navigation is very standard 2.0 usability, can’t go wrong there. But there are still a lot of places where more information would be appreciated, while setting up an item to be given I get a prompt asking for me to “select meetingpoints” with two options of public and private meetingpoints.

First of all, meetings and points are two different words – and what do they have to do with recycling? Did this become a dating service? Can I get that camera by meeting someone in a forest doing “services”? There’s no explanation on what I should do and I can’t even skip this as I could skip the previous steps (such as a photo and description).

So, fixy fixy, more descriptions and explanations to forms, please.

UPDATE: After clicking OK to the meeting point question, there popped up another popup below the latest popup saying that it’s a place where I meet my contacts. Would have appreciated that info earlier. Maybe people could insert these meeting points already while setting up their profile?

All in all, the concept has promise and as soon as they can fix the lagging, I’ll start using it more efficiently. All the other things are minor user experience improvements – and I would appreciate seeing Netcycler to use the expertise available in Finland, I mean, just using Twitter in Finland gives one great resources to get feedback.