Poll: Blank book covers – which looks better

I am not a designer, so other than telling me neither option looks great, please choose the lesser evil. Which looks better for blank book covers

A. Light text on dark covers

B. Dark text on light covers

Just write A or B in the comments. I am leaning towards B.

IndiaBookStore.net – More UI updates

Presenting a cleaner UI. Both visually and in terms of the information shown. Check out and compare with the previous screenshots.

I’m not showing names of book stores anymore in the main search results now. This not only makes the UI less cluttered, but has a nice side effect (something intended), that no book store names are appearing on the search results, and it won’t appear that Bookstore A is better just because they have a certain book at only Rs. 10 less than Bookstore B, and are appearing a whole lot more in the search results. For eg. see the previous screenshot. You can see a lot more Infibeam’s despite Flipkart not being all that more expensive (for this particular search).

Clicking on a cover shows details in a modal window now. A modal window is a good pattern to use here as I can now add more stuff like book reviews and recommendations here.

UI updates for IndiaBookStore.net

Cover images are here. And I find it to be a significant improvement. Makes searching more fun.

Now I’m grouping books by ISBN. So the UI is much more scalable and can accomodate a large number of stores now. The best pricing is shown by default along with the name of the store. To see prices for any particular ISBN for all stores, just click on the [n other matches] link.

I’ve added a status bar on the right which will update in case there are any errors from retrieving books from any store. It also works well as a progress bar and gives a sense that something is happening while the results stream in. I think it does a good job of keeping the user engaged and informed.

I’ve also updated the main page now to be more descriptive of what this search engine does. I quickly realized after seeing the high bounce rates from the previous main page, that I ain’t no google, so just a logo and a search box won’t quite cut it. I better not waste my visitors time in asking them to figure me out. So I hope to see some improvement with this new page

Tasks to do :

• I missed out on the in stock / out of stock info. Will be adding that in a couple of days.
• Have to make the UI behave better in case cover images are not found for a certain book. It looks ok in Firefox as of now, but chrome and IE are a little ugly.

You can follow my updates on twitter or facebook.

UI experiment with cover images

Click on the images to see a higher resolution version.

The default view will show you the four most relevant results. There will be a link to fetch more results. Clicking/Hovering over a title will bring up more details..

How do you like this one. I am in favor of incorporating cover images. It seems to improve the experience significantly.

A more scalable UI. First look.

Here’s how the new UI is coming along. This will group results by ISBN. It is along the lines of google product search and other meta search engines. The pricing shown will be the lowest found and the link will point to the respective store which has the lowest pricing.

The other matches will be hidden behind a click and are also readily accessible

This may not look polished yet as I am no designer, but other than that, what do you think. I feel it is cleaner, reduces clutter and ofcourse allows me to add an arbitrary number of stores.

Next step is to find a clever way to sort out the result order and relevance problem. Because of the fact that I am doing matching and rendering via Javascript on the client, live, as the results stream in, the order in which results appear as of now is unpredictable. Whichever arrives first, comes up on top. That won’t quite cut it. Have a few ideas to try to solve this.

PS. Also I think I should just do away with ‘out of stock’ results. Or atleast keep them hidden by default.

Search books across all Indian services . Fast.

Here’s the problem :

With a number of good book e-commerce sites now, I found myself searching on 3-4 different ones in order to check availability and prices. I have personally bought from Flipkart, Infibeam and Indiaplaza and the experience has been good so far with all three. Taking the user experience and service out of the equation (if satisfactory), makes pricing a significant factor which decides where I buy from.

Solution:

So what we need, is a meta-search engine for books that’ll search across all the Indian bookstores and aggregate the results and show them in an easy to consume fashion, so that the user can make a choice based on price, bookstore etc.

The idea is nothing new, other people have solved this problem.. there are other meta-search engines on which one can compare for book prices. But, they were a turn off when it came to user experience and speed. I simply couldn’t get myself to use them to good effect. So I think there is place for a better solution.

Let me introduce you to IndiaBookStore.net. As explained above, it is a search engine which does the grunt work of searching across all your favorite bookstores (I’ll call them vendors) and shows you where you can find the best deals. I have currently started with Flipkart.com, Infibeam.com, Indiaplaza.in and Pustak.co.in to test waters, and plan to add all popular bookstores in the very near future.

This is a work in progress and I will be rapidly iterating on the current barebones product to make it into something truly useful for book buyers in India which will help save time and money. My design goals for the search engine are the following -

• Speed – the results should come up atleast as fast as searching on the book vendors site directly. No slower. They’ll mostly come up faster. How.. you might wonder. More on that later. 
• Concurrency - results from all vendors should arrive concurrently, not serially. If a vendor’s site is running slow, then it should not affect any other results. The search engine will handle failures gracefully.
• Relevance - the best results should be at the top. This is a little tricky because of the way I am implementing things and also depends on how good the relevance is at the vendors’ end. More on that later.
• UI and user experience – A minimalist UI to focus on the search results and no unnecessary elements/clutter.
• Scalability - scalability is needed in a couple of ways. One, on handling the traffic, and two, on the UI end, so that I can add about 10 or so book vendors.

I will try and post my thoughts and progress regularly as I go about working on this so that you can offer me feedback/advice while the product is being shaped. I will be happy to listen, respond and debate.