Kollecta: Great Idea, Kludgy Implementation

I'm a big collector of THINGS: books, music, foreign currency, vintage fashion dolls, etc. A long while back I actually ran a collector site, and thought about building an app that people could use to track their collections and estimate a secondary market value for their items. Of course, I had kids instead, but was pleasantly surprised to see someone had gone ahead and done it when I saw a blurb about Kollecta, a site organized around collectables and the people who collect them.

Kollecta allows guests to browse the site, but registration is required to participate in any of the site's features, which include logging your own collection, participating in groups relating to collections, and using the sale and wanted lists. The site sounds like a dream for collectors.

However, Kollecta's implementation falls far short of what must have been the initial vision. This site could be used as an example of why you need at least the input of a quality UI designer, because using the site is so tedious I finally gave up.

Registration brings the first issue; your username is limited to 8 characters. If you happen to use the same username on multiple sites and it's longer than 8 characters (like mine is), you are out of luck. Especially for collectors, who may already be on eBay or other discussion groups, losing your identity heading to a new site isn't going to endear the site to new members.

I accepted the limitation, came up with a new username, and headed in, planning to start adding a few items and see how the groups were. After 20 minutes trying to add a single item to my "haves" I finally gave up. The interface is so counter-intuitive it makes it painful to navigate the site.

The premise of Kollecta is that you can add items to your "have" list from the existing database. However, if your item isn't in the database, you are invited to add it. Now, from a normal person's perspective, you'd assume that if you were adding an item, going to the trouble of putting it in the database, including adding pictures, it would be added to your own profile, right? Not in the Kollecta world, where you have to go BACK out to the database to add it. This extra step might not have been so completely annoying if it wasn't for the fact that it took me at least 10 tries to figure out how to add the item in the first place. Each item requires a category, and Kollecta would like you to GUESS what their categories are. There is no drop-down list, and they have actually added instructions next to the box to encourage you to keep guessing. Either the site was built by a bunch of eight-year-olds, or the developers should try out a class in UI design. It will only do type-ahead if you manage to hit on the right first few letters, and even that doesn't make sense. For example, dolls are under a category named "Dolls, figurines, toys" so typing "doll" should work, right? Unfortunately, Kollecta has it listed DIFFERENTLY in the add screen as "Figurine (toy/doll)." I'd sure hate to be their DBA, if they even have a DBA.

Now, if you lack a crystal ball like I do and guess wrong on the category, when you click submit, you get kicked back to the same screen with the added bonus of having all the information you've entered deleted.

At this point, it seems that the majority of the items logged into the site are CDs, videos, and books. I'd guess that may be because those categories would be fairly intuitive for entry. If the site ends up with just media collections, however, it doesn't seem any different from any of the other sites out there that already do the same thing, leaving Kollecta as just one of a crowd.