We’ve come to rely on reviews when researching what products to buy. After all, everything’s getting more expensive (or getting smaller), and you want to be sure the purchases you make are smart. Reviews offer you real-life experience from someone who bought the item you’re looking at, and help inform you whether or not it’s worth the money. That said, they often suck.
Traditional reviews aren’t thorough enough
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Reviews, as we’ve come to know them, are inherently flawed. When reliable, they’re a great measure of a customer’s enjoyment of the product as new, or within a recent timeframe, but most fail to advise us on how that product handles down the road. If you’re someone who writes reviews, you’re usually inspired to share your thoughts shortly after experiencing the product for the first time. You open the box, and the item either meets your expectations, surpasses them, or falls short. In any case, you have thoughts right away, and you’re ready to share them.
Those initial opinions are important—and may make or break someone’s decision to buy the product for themselves—but first impressions are far from everything. How long a products holds up over time is arguably more important. You want to know if the $400 pair of headphones you’re thinking of buying will last you for years to come, or if they’ll fall apart in six months. Reviews from people who just bought the headphones aren’t going to tell you that (unless they’re really bad).
While it’s important info, how often have you gone back and written a review years down the line, whether for better or for worse? If a product fails you spectacularly, you might, but I find the desire to share your thoughts diminishes the longer you have a product.
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ExitReviews highlights products over years of use
This problem with traditional reviews is what led Adrian Krebs to create ExitReviews, a website for people to share how their devices have held up over the long run, and whether they believe it was worth buying in the first place. The site heavily favors consumer tech, but there are other types of products listed here as well, including shoes, oven mitts, and dishwashers.
When you first boot it up, the site invites you to search for your product, or a general product type, as well as browse by latest reviews or popular companies. Reviews can be as thorough or as brief as a reviewer wants it to be, but ExitReviews does provide a guide for the information you should share. It asks for the product, the company that makes the product, and the condition of that product, including “Broken,” “Wear and Tear,” and “Early Failure,” among other options. The site encourages you to share an original image of the device, which is especially useful when identifying areas of failure.
You need to share how many years you owned the device, stress points (or which parts broke), something nice about the product (which I imagine could prove difficult for certain situations), whether you would purchase the product again, and how much you actually used the product. You can choose whether or not to share how much you originally paid for the device, or whether it ever went through a repair, but those bits aren’t required for your review. It is cool if you share the price tag, though, since the site breaks that cost over the lifetime of the product (a $100 item owned for two years comes out to 13.7 cents a day).
Let’s take a look at a review for the SteelSeries Rival 600, a product I own and use myself. This user felt inconvenienced by the mouse, and used it daily for three years. They have three major complaints, including an issue with the rubber siding falling off the mouse (something I’ve also experienced), and while they speak highly of the device’s reliability, they would not buy it again.
Whether or not that review would discourage you from purchasing the Rival 650, if you were in the market for a gaming mouse, it is a bit more insightful than the thoughts of someone who bought a new one last week.
Better reviews are still reviews
Of course, while these reviews might be more useful when considering the long term potential of a product, they’re still reviews. As they say, that’s just like your opinion, man. Reviews are opinions, and not all opinions will align with yours, nor will all reviewers put in the same amount of effort. You might find some lazy admonishments of products you’re looking into, or some detailed praise of things you know you hated in the past.
Not to mention, just because a product breaks, that doesn’t automatically make it bad. If a user is complaining their phone doesn’t power on anymore, but it’s eight years old, that isn’t the condemnation they think it is.
One last thing to keep in mind: This website is relatively new, so there might not be as many reviews as you’d ideally like to see. If you don’t see your product represented here, be patient: Reviews are entirely crowd sourced, so it’s only a matter of time before someone who has used that device shared their thoughts about it.
If you’re interested in a deeper dive on these types of discussions, take a peek at ExitReviews’ companion subreddit, r/productfails.