Visualizing Qualities of Consumer Goods

When you're buying or looking to buy a new item, clothing, equipment, gadget or what not, you seldom know if you're just paying for brand or quality, and as we talked about in our last post; how much impact the item you're buying has on the environment and how fair the trade is. Most of us are uninformed shoppers basing our choices on advertising and other peoples poor choices. It's time to get informed. It's time to know more about what we are buying.

Actually we found some invigorating ideas in the classic game, Diablo II; a lot of the game is based on finding items, weapons, armour, clothing, acessories etc. All these items vary in quality and the users can easily distinguish the different items and their qualites based on the color of the items name; grey for basic items, violet for magic items, yellow for rare items, orange for crafted items, green for set items, and gold for unique items. This gives the user easy overview of the quality of all the items scattered around the battlefield and he can easily pick up the items he finds worthy of his small pouch. When you have picked up an item in Diablo II you can also see all the items' attributes and how magical it is.

Wouldn't it be nice to have this in real life? To be able to see all the necessary meta data of one product, the durability, how repairable it is, the material used etc?

As we mentioned in our last post, this could be crowdsourced to begin with, and be founded on the same principle as Wikipedia. If you want to submit your experience to the wiki of a certain product you would also have to answer a bunch of questions that would contribute to that products' overall score. Or color if you will. Questions like "How long have you had this product", "has it ever needed repair" etc. This could be a resource site for people contemplating a certain purchase, but also be a guide while shopping. We're thinking an app that would be triggered by the barcode and show you what class the product in question belongs to. Is it a quality product? Is it a fair product? Is it animal friendly?

If you can get a crowdsourced service like this to be widely used, it can also influence producers and sellers to include and share more information, because it is in their best interest that the information that is out there is correct. The more information that is easily and pedagogically available to consumers, the more pressure there will be on producers of products that can't stand the scrutiny. If they want to keep selling, they would have to change.

By giving consumers information when and where they need it, and the opportunity to share information, they would be influenced to think more about the choices they make. We believe helping people make more conscious choices is an effective way to affect the rate of mass consumption.

Got any ideas? Feel free to share!