Comments on: Modista

Modista

ajshankar — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:31:09 -0800

"I can't believe how intuitive and effective this is." Shop for apparel (men's and women's shoes, handbags, eyewear) in a totally novel way. Click on something that catches your eye, then instantly see more items that look similar. There's also some variety thrown in so that you can explore related looks. This open-ended browsing is supposed to be easy and fun! This project, based on computer vision algorithms, won the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition this year. We're just releasing the beta now. I'd love to get some feedback on it... thanks!

By: peacheater

peacheater — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:51:21 -0800

Great site! Really easy to narrow down the options and see general price ranges for a particular kind of item. One thing you might want to add is a way to narrow things down using size for shoes. My shoe size is a Women's size 10 and can be a little hard to find, so it makes sense to narrow things down using that first.

By: ioesf

ioesf — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:53:30 -0800

nice design, very intuitive. one godsend of a filter i don't see is shoe size, which cuts out 90% of the chaff and leaves me the mens 15s.

By: Riverine

Riverine — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:58:38 -0800

I like this very much.

By: ajshankar

ajshankar — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:09:26 -0800

Thanks for the early feedback! Just a note -- we are working hard on getting sizes up there. (It's a bit hard since size information changes very frequently and we don't have a way to get that info from of our retailers yet.) But hopefully we'll get that working in the next week or two.

By: culberjo

culberjo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:39:45 -0800

Sizes in the handbag section would be nice to have too, but that may be very difficult to track down.

By: itstheclamsname

itstheclamsname — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:47:15 -0800

This is a terrific way to present products. The only design suggestion I'd make is create a cooler placeholder graphic for times when the page loads.

Unfortunately, I experienced a problem: after I left the site and navigated back to it, it appeared to try to pick up where I left off, then got stuck with the "computing" button flashing. It appeared to hang up my entire browser until I closed the tab in which it was trying to load. Even clicking "start over" doesn't get it to reset. Not sure what the problem is, but FYI. I'm running Safari 3.1.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.11.

By: bettafish

bettafish — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:22:04 -0800

Man, that is fun to play with ... one pony-request I would have if I were using it to shop, though? A "back" button. Like, I would select an item from a pool, then select another one I liked to get a new pool, then realize I liked the first pool better and be unable to get back to it and have to start all over again.

By: ajshankar

ajshankar — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:59:31 -0800

Bettafish: You can use your browser's back button. We've spent a good amount of time making that work. However, I agree it's not obvious that you're browser's back button would work, so we're also working on a little history widget that displays your browsing history for you so you can go back to anything you've visited previously.

By: like_neon

like_neon — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:27:03 -0800

Very fun, but I've noticed that some results come back duplicate. Could be an issue with how Zappo's stocks inventory in their database, but that sort of thing may unfairly work against the site as it makes it looks like it returns more unique results than there are.

By: xo

xo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:57:20 -0800

Very nice! I'd like to first narrow it by type, like within shoes to first select "boots" or "sneakers", or within handbags to first select "clutches" or "messengers". That prevents having to click through multiple pages from the get-go before finding something to select as a favorite.

By: tushfestival

tushfestival — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:10:31 -0800

This open-ended browsing is supposed to be easy and fun!

It is! Any plans on expanding to clothing in the future?

By: oddman

oddman — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:53:53 -0800

This is great!

Two comments:
I would like the ability to narrow things by option (e.g. I'd like to be able to select shoes without traditional shoe strings).

Could you add bags with more utility? I mean things like laptop bags or courier bags.

By: schyler523

schyler523 — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:15:24 -0800

Very useful. I just bought a pair of shoes and plugged your site when the site asked where I'd heard of them. Thanks!

By: bwanabetty

bwanabetty — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:28:41 -0800

I would love to know (at least at a high level) how this works. Even beyond the high level, is there a whitepaper link somewhere?

My overall feedback is that it is wonderful, full of potential, except ...

Bettafish: You can use your browser's back button. We've spent a good amount of time making that work.

... except that you broke the back button for everything but your site.

By: peacheater

peacheater — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:56:24 -0800

Can the site not handle prices above 3 digits? I noticed that a bag was listed as $0 on Modiste only to find when I clicked through that it was actually $2250. Rather disappointing! :)

By: ajshankar

ajshankar — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:52:11 -0800

Hi all,
Thanks for the great feedback! To answer some questions:

We've fixed the back button issue. (I hope.) Please let me know if you have any problems.

xo: We're working in an explicit type search, but you can always enter in the type (e.g. "boot", "clutch") into the quick find box (top right).

tushfestival: Long term plans include clothing, furniture, and jewelry. But first we're trying to break even on this ;).

peacheater: I can't for the life of me find this mysterious bag. Any info would be appreciated. We definitely do support 4 digit prices, and there are a bunch of bags listed at above $1k on the site.

By: davejay

davejay — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:25:26 -0800

Terrific!

By: davejay

davejay — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 01:26:09 -0800

Wait, more than terrific -- all apparel shopping sites should work this way, this should literally be the standard. Holy crap, what a great job you've done.

By: Chinese Jet Pilot

Chinese Jet Pilot — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:23:04 -0800

What a great filter mechanism. This is the most transparent, intuitive shopping interface I have encountered.

By: mamessner

mamessner — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:55:47 -0800

Yes! Great job. PLEASE do not add too much more functionality. Danger here of feature creep. It's simple, it's intuitive, it's fun, it's practical. This is how people actually think about clothing and shoe shopping.

By: zazerr

zazerr — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:56:13 -0800

This really is excellent. Awesome work.

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:33:43 -0800

Aw, man. I have to have a size filter with my size 11 feet. Shopping without one just depresses me, it's like having doors slammed in my face.

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:46:23 -0800

Wow.

By: ajshankar

ajshankar — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:12:59 -0800

Hey all,
I'm happy to announce that we've put out a new release with some better UI stuff, a larger inventory, two new categories -- and, most importantly, sizes! We've got tens of thousands of shoes at each of the sizes mentioned here, so I hope this helps.

By: RikiTikiTavi

RikiTikiTavi — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:12:21 -0800

Width, width, *width*! I've watched someone with wide feet shop, and it's typically 80% of the shoes that are too narrow. It would be nice to be able to narrow it down.

By: nerdcore

nerdcore — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:26:01 -0800

Woah are you guys working with Zappos now? I just saw this post from @zappos and thought I recognized the interface.

By: ajshankar

ajshankar — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:19:08 -0800

nerdcore: Yep, we're trying to work something out with them. Would be great to get this technology out to a larger audience!

By: carsonb

carsonb — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:18:31 -0800

I want to shop for everything like this, please.

By: specialagentwebb

specialagentwebb — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:36:42 -0800

Although I'm not sure that anyone will see this, I just wanted to say that I'm sad that Modista is gone now. It was really an awesome shopping experience, and it sucks that it had to go.