Comment by johnnygood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnygood | Hacker News Reader

Something I'd like to point out: http://i.imgur.com/gNdLh.png

Make sure you test your fonts on Windows both with and without Cleartype. A few of the trendy new sites are using this font now and it's near unreadable on Windows without Cleartype. The site looks awesome and I'm looking forward to using it (excellent timing in my life). However, the font issue is going to be a big pain for Windows users.

Even with Cleartype (http://i.imgur.com/EQNr5.png), the fonts look bad. Anything that is rounded on the top (2, 0, 9, S, etc.) has an odd bump in the center. While it's more readable (due to the darker rendering that Cleartype is giving it), it's quite jagged.

I'm mostly posting this since I'm guessing someone from CarWoo will be reading this thread. I've always wanted a service like CarWoo and I think you've got something really great.

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I've found another thing: when you're selecting a style, you're only allowed one. Rather than making it radio buttons, you've used checkboxes and popped up a JS alert when I select two. It means I have to de-select the original before changing my mind. You could keep the checkbox look while making it behave as radio buttons would.

EDIT: During the process (I haven't paid yet), it didn't ask me what options I wanted with the car. That means that if I get a quote for the car, it isn't the quote I want.

The other problem I see is that I can't compare the deal I'd get on a Camry and an Accord. Often times, people make decisions between two models based on price rather than deciding between the two models and then looking for the best price on that model. I was told by the chat help on your site that I'd have to purchase two plans if I wanted to get a quote on two different cars. During my car buying experience, I'm likely to narrow it down to 2 or 3 cars in the same class and then want to see the price difference. If a dealership is giving me $1,000 less on a Camry (which might have started out with the same MSRP), that might sway me away from the Accord.

I've found another thing: when you're selecting a style, you're only allowed one. Rather than making it radio buttons, you've used checkboxes and popped up a JS alert when I select two. It means I have to de-select the original before changing my mind. You could keep the checkbox look while making it behave as radio buttons would.

This is really bad advice, IMO. A radio button implies "choose 1 of" while a checkbox implies "select 1 or more". That's a basic web design (and W3C) principle. I would suggest changing the list of trims to radio buttons, or at a minimum changing the span.checkbox background image to look like a radio button if you have other reasons for hiding the actual input fields.

Just FYI, this has been fixed, we're now using radio buttons. You can see my response below as to why we were using checkboxes in the first place.

It's true, you would have to buy 2 plans to shop for 2 cars. The reason we do that is because there's a fixed cost per car on the back-end for us in terms of contacting dealers and getting offers, so letting users shop as many cars as they want isn't feasible unless we charged a lot more. However, most people don't want to shop 2 cars at the same time so we decided to cater to what the majority of our users want.

We'll be rolling out multiple deals/user in the near future, but for now, if you actually are shopping an Accord and a Camry, I can give you a coupon for a discount on the second deal if you're interested.

Thanks for pointing out these issues. We're working on fixing them.

So, some insight into the checkbox vs. radio button thing:

We started with checkboxes because it used to be the case that a buyer could select up to 3 trims. This gave them more flexibility, but ultimately created a burden for dealers. From the dealers' perspective, they had trouble figuring out which trim to make an offer on (and, sadly, they are generally too lazy to make offers on multiple trims).

So we ran an A/B test to see if limiting the buyer's choices to 1 trim had any effect on conversions. Turns out it actually increased conversions a little bit (more on that later, but in essence: eliminating choice is good).

Then, we just forgot to switch it over to radio buttons now that the test is over, but the new changes will be deployed to production shortly.

Anyways, thanks for your feedback!

When I was buying a car recently, I wasn't at all sure about the differences between the different trims when just looking on Edmunds, and the dealers catalogs aren't much better. Do you have it in the pipeline to present detailed descriptions of each trims offering?

Yup. Right now, we're focusing on buyers who know exactly what they want.

Moving forward, we're going to move further up the funnel and get into the research step too.

There are already sites that do research fairly well, but no one handles the actual transaction (except for CarWoo!) so that's where we can add the most value and that's where we're focused.

It's important that CarWoo be mindful of how their fonts render on different systems, but I also think you should send that comment to Microsoft. It's 2010 — there's no excuse for font rendering like that anymore. Time to fix it.

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