This Site Reviews Products After They’ve Broken.
We are used to relying on reviews when choosing products to purchase. Everything gets more expensive ( or gets smaller ) after all, and you want to make sure you’re making smart purchases. Reviews offer you a real-life experience of who bought the item you’re looking at and help you understand if it’s worth the money. However, they often suck.
Traditional reviews are not thorough enough
Reviews, as we know them, are inherently flawed. When reliable, they are a great indicator of how much the customer likes the product as new or over the last period of time, but most of them do not give us advice on how this product will perform in the future. If you’re writing reviews, you’ll usually want to share your thoughts soon after first seeing a product. You open the box and the product either meets your expectations, exceeds them, or doesn’t meet your expectations. In any case, you immediately have thoughts, and you are ready to share them.
These initial opinions are important—and can influence someone’s decision to buy a product for themselves—but first impressions aren’t everything. Perhaps more important is how long products last over time. You want to know if the $400 headphones you’re about to buy will last for years or if they fall apart in six months. Reviews from people who just bought headphones won’t tell you that (unless they’re completely bad).
While this is important information, how often do you go back and write a review years later, whether for the better or for the worse? If a product disappoints you, you can , but I find that the desire to share your thoughts decreases the longer you have the product.
ExitReviews highlights products by years of use
This issue with traditional reviews ledAdrian Krebs to create ExitReviews , a website where people can share how their devices perform over the long term and whether they think they’re worth buying at all. The site heavily promotes consumer technology, but other types of products are listed, including shoes , oven mitts , and dishwashers .
When you first load the site, the site prompts you to search for your product or general type of product, as well as view the latest reviews or popular companies. Reviews can be as complete or concise as the reviewer wants, but ExitReviews provides guidance on the information you should share. It asks for the product, the company that makes the product, and the status of that product, including “Broken”, “Worn Out” and “Early Failure” among other options. The site encourages you to share the original image of the device, which is especially helpful in identifying areas of failure.
You need to report how many years you have owned the device, stress points (or which parts broke), anything good about the product (which I guess can be difficult in certain situations), would you buy the product again, and how much did you actually use. product. You can choose whether to report how much you originally paid for the device or whether it was ever repaired, but these bits are not required for your review. However, it’s cool if you share the price tag, as the site breaks down that cost over the life of the product (a $100 item owned for two years comes out at 13.7 cents a day).
Let’s take a look at a SteelSeries Rival 600 review that I own and use myself. This user felt uncomfortable with the mouse and used it daily for three years. They have three main complaints, including the problem with the rubber mouse pad falling off (which I also experienced), and although they praise the reliability of the device, they will not buy it again.
Whether or not this review will discourage you from buying the Rival 650 if you were looking for a gaming mouse, it’s a little more insightful than the thoughts of someone who bought a new one last week.
The best reviews remain reviews
Of course, while these reviews may be more helpful when considering the long-term potential of a product, they are still reviews. As they say, it’s like your opinion , dude. Reviews are opinions, and not all opinions are yours, and not all reviewers put in the same effort. You may find a few lazy warnings about the products you’re exploring, or detailed praise for things you know you’ve hated in the past.
Not to mention, just because a product breaks doesn’t automatically make it bad. If a user complains that their phone no longer turns on, but it’s already eight years old, that’s not the judgment they’re thinking of.
One last thing to keep in mind, this website is relatively new, so there may not be as many reviews as you would like. If you don’t see your product listed here, please be patient: the reviews are entirely crowdsourced, so it’s only a matter of time before someone who has used this device shares their thoughts on it.
If you’re interested in digging deeper into these discussions, check out the ExitReviews subreddit, r/productfails .