SPOTLIGHTm

GoodGuide for iPhone

What is it?

GoodGuide capitalizes on the “green” movement that has been sweeping the world these days by giving users access to a database of products that have been ranked and rated by their impact on your health, the environment, and social causes. The iPhone application is an extension of the GoodGuide website that has been met with great fanfare within the tech industry, despite the fact that websites like this already exist in places like Greener One.

How much does it cost?

Free.

Who is it good for?

Environmentally conscious shoppers who want to purchase products that either “do good” or “do the least bad” for the planet. This is not a bargain shopping application or one with the traditional type of “reviews” that we’ve come to expect from product applications, but rather, it’s for users who want to review their own effect on the environment and make changes based on their purchases.

Summary

GoodGuide is still early, so you won’t find every product that you use in your house inside the database, but the database will likely continue to grow. While we like what GoodGuide is doing, we do have some annoyances with the iPhone product - the load time of the first screen, immediately seeing a “featured products”-type page after loading the app instead of going straight to search, and the inability to use some of the features without registering on the site (and not being able to register through the app and being forced to do so via Safari). If you take the steps to register on GoodGuide, the application becomes much more useful for those of us who are trying to do less “bad” on the environment. Regardless, we like what the application is doing and the parts that are accessible work well for the basics of what it is trying to accomplish.

Keep it or Delete it?

Keep it.

This is one of those applications where we say “Keep it” with some reservations. While the spirit of GoodGuide is there, along with a lot of valuable content, it’s going to be a while until every product in your house is held within the GoodGuide database, simply because this is not one where users are contributing content, but everything appears to be published by the GG team.

After skipping past the “Featured” tab, you’re able to either find products by category, which brings up a list of the top “performers” for each type of product, or search via name to pull up different brands and lines of products that you might be interested in purchasing or have purchased in the past.

There are definitely a lot of categories, but they’re arranged in a logical, drug store aisle way that doesn’t make it too hard to navigate, but it might have made sense to have made the Browse page a sub-result of the higher level categories to avoid unnecessary scrolling - just a thought.

After finding the product you’re looking for (assuming you do, a little over 60,000 products were listed at the time of this posting), you’re able to see different ratings for the products listed on GoodGuide.

The products are given Overall Ratings, which is just the average score of the ratings given to the Health, Environmental, and Social categories for the product you’re looking at.

Beyond the number ratings, GoodGuide gives some canned reasons why the ratings were given for some of the major categories. These explanations (”Behind the Rating”) are not written for each product, but it tells you why the product might have performed well in a specific category without going into too much detail. It shows users that there is some logic behind the process, but the overall ratings up top are generally what we have to go off of and what we have to “trust” a bit.

Our biggest annoyance with the application is that it’s clear that it’s not meant to be a standalone product. We were so annoyed with the integration with the GoodGuide website that it almost pushed the application into the “Delete it” category.

Things like “Lists” and “Profile” could only be accessed by registering on the site via the Safari browser, which really broke the iPhone application experience. Clearly, GoodGuide wants to send traffic back to the mothership with the application, with “Share” email buttons all over the different products, but we’d personally rather have a more complete iPhone application where we can interact with the site without having to open the browser.

It has it’s goods and it has its bads, but GoodGuide still has its heart and general usability in the right place, especially after you register.