Sortable -- a great tool for deciding what (camera/phone/laptop/tv) to buy

Sortable is a cool little company that I’ve been following for awhile.

They produce an efficient, beautifully laid out ‘decision-engine’ that helps users rank and compare consumer gadgets.

I’ve found their site extremely useful for doing research on phones and cameras.

You can easily look up everything you want to know about a product, compare it to the competition, as well as view a high-level summary of why you might be interested. It’s all about ferreting out what will suit your needs and make you happy, from a sea of competing gadgets.

I highly recommend checking out Sortable.

Continuing growth and product evolution

Comprised of a small team based in my home town of Waterloo, the company was originally incarnated as Snapsort. Snapsort and its sister sites were relaunched at the beginning of this year under the umbrella Sortable brand. Then in July, they were acquired by Rebellion Media. Positive word of mouth -- like this post, for example -- has fuelled usage to over 17 million visitors and 41 million recommendations.

Their site has been evolving features and getting better all the time -- and I love that it happens to be in directions that I agree with.

For example, I had previously written (about Snapsort), that they should incorporate:

a curated set of links to external in-depth reviews from major third parties, e.g. CNET, dcresource.com, Engadget, and so forth. [...] Perhaps a separate 'Reviews' tab? 

What happened? Sortable has a Reviews tab for products, that excerpts quotes from major reviews as well as comments from the discussion community -- and links to the source material.

I also wrote,

The [one product] price comparison feature is presently weak...

They addressed that criticism by essentially eliminating the feature and quoting a single representative product price from Amazon. It’s a lot simpler and less confusing this way.

Lastly, I wrote,

I’m curious to see whether in the future they'll expand their offering to cover other product types, like cars or televisions or mobile phones and tablets. 

Guess what, Sortable features sections for phones, tablets, laptops and televisions (in addition to the seminal camera engine. They tested a car comparison site too, but it looks like it didn’t pan out). I presume that they are going to continue to carefully select and expand to additional domains for their decision engine.

So I commend the Sortable team for continually refining their tool. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, but it’s super fun when a company seems to read your mind about where to take a product.

Online discussions: building a community

Gadget geeks love to discuss products.

Sortable invites people to post questions and answers

A relatively new feature of Sortable is their discussion area, which provides a vaguely StackExchange (or Quora)-like forum for posting questions and answering other people’s questions.


Answers can be voted on by other users, so the best answers tend to bubble up to the top.

At the moment the discussion areas are fairly sparse, but if it takes off (and it ought to, given the volume of users each month) I can see this becoming a very complementary aspect to the site.

Recency Weakness

Sortable’s ranking and sorting algorithm sometimes generates erratic results, particularly for newly released products -- for example, the new iPhone 5 is currently way down on their list of top phones -- but that tends to be something that self-rectifies itself over time, as their database gets populated with information and reviews.

This is a design tradeoff I reluctantly accept -- higher quality detailed results over less optimized holistic output. In a similar fashion, I choose to use an alternate default search engine, Duckduckgo, which is superior to Google in many ways, but is also weak on recency.

In any case while the score rankings are occasionally debatable, the detailed product views and the comparison tool are quality resources.

Contest -- win an iPad 3!

Sortable is holding a contest in which you can win an iPad3! I love contests, don’t you? Enter here. Full disclosure: I’ve entered this contest too, and the above is (presumably) my referral link. If you don’t want me to get extra entries, use this link.

tldr: Summary

Of the product research and comparison tools that are out there, for the particular domains it services, I think Sortable is the best in class at what it does. Their site aesthetic is lovely and makes me want to click on stuff.

If you’re shopping for a gadget, check out Sortable!

Easily compare cameras with Snapsort

A short while ago, I needed to buy a compact digital camera to take with me on my trip to Spain. My previous camera was kludgy, old, and I wasn't generally happy with the output quality, so deciding to upgrade was easy.

However, choosing a new camera to purchase was not so simple. Digital photography and feature sets have advanced considerably in the past few years (perhaps spurred by competitive innovation in the mobile-phone camera space?), and manufacturers now offer a wide plethora of different models with varying capabilities.

In 2004 Barry Schwartz wrote a popular book called The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. In his book Schwartz argues that too much choice can be inimical, leading to decision paralysis and second-guessing. In modern Western economies, we celebrate the number of choices available to us in the marketplace as being a testament to our freedom and autonomy. Unfortunately, reveals Schwartz, this overwhelming swathe of choices contributes to psychological tension and unhappiness.

The disturbing prospect of possible buyer's remorse weighs heavily on consumers: We worry that we might choose non-optimally; there might have been a better product available, a more satisfying option. Our expectations are set too high and we stress out about possible opportunity costs.

This phenomenon vigorously manifests itself in the world of digital cameras. There are hundreds of models to select from. The accompanying marketing verbiage makes each one sound like the most incredible technological artifact you could possibly imagine -- until you read the next description. How could I pick out the camera that was right for me?

I didn't have a lot of time to make my decision: the trip was coming up fast and I needed to act. Comparing camera technical specifications and reading dozens of reviews on the internet was melting my brain into a hazy fog of insensibility. The paradox of choice was exhausting.

I happened to stumble across a handy product-comparison site, Snapsort.

Summary: Snapsort is a great site for comparing cameras. * 

It has a simple, succinct, clean layout (almost too clean -- some pages look a little sparse). It works quickly. It highlights the relative strengths and weaknesses of selected cameras, in an apparently neutral fashion. It lets you compare any camera to any other camera. It has discussion areas for each camera, and useful articles about digital photography topics (e.g. understanding resolution).

Easily compare and contrast camera models with Snapsort

A recently added feature is a 'Videos' section, where links to video samples as well as external video reviews and tutorials for the selected model are posted. Users can also suggest or contribute related video content from YouTube. It's a clever idea which works well for most cameras.

There are a couple of areas which could be improved.

The price comparison feature is presently weak: it doesn't seem to aggregate data from a significant number of sources -- at least not in Canada (I can garner broader results from shopbot or photoprice, which often come up in google searches for camera names). Their biz dev guy should get working on building some more relationships with local vendors that also ship.

The other area relates to the aforementioned Videos section. As I said it's a clever idea, but honestly it wasn't what I was expecting. It needs to leverage more content. I should give them the benefit of the doubt I suppose; maybe they just haven't had a lot of time to populate the database with videos.

If I were to speculate as to the design intent for the tab, confining the content to videos allows Snapsort to keep users on the site, and to summarize and present the content in an attractive manner. However, what I kept thinking I was looking for, was a curated set of links to external in-depth reviews from major third parties, e.g. CNET, dcresource.com, Engadget, and so forth. Not just videos. Stickiness in user navigation shouldn't override the value of linked content. In any case, they should consider partnering with other sites for access to additional external data sources and reviews. Perhaps a separate 'Reviews' tab?

In short I found Snapsort to be excellent for comparing and contrasting the technical specifications and quantifiable metrics of different cameras -- but less obviously useful for discovering expert qualitative opinions and assessments.

I'm curious to see whether in the future they'll expand their offering to cover other product types, like cars or televisions or mobile phones and tablets. Roughly speaking the underlying engine would be the same, just the field labels (and obviously the content!) would be different. I'm not sure what their ultimate business model is going to be like; right now it seems to be affiliate partner driven, as well as sporting the occasional advertisement. But I hope that they succeed. Maybe they'll stick to the photography niche -- it depends how big their vision is.

To end the story, I used Snapsort to help winnow down the field to a manageable set of candidate cameras. It was a huge time-saver. And the shots I took in Spain, from the camera I eventually bought, weren't too shabby either.

Trundling down to the local store and physically handling camera models should still be part of a disciplined evaluation process, but if you're doing research online, Snapsort is a solid, handy tool for comparing cameras -- and for battling the paradox of choice.

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* Snapsort also happens to be a Waterloo startup housed in the Accelerator Centre. I grew up in that town, and my present company maintains an ongoing relationship with the University of Waterloo, so I feel a strong affinity for companies based in that region. Go Waterloo!