Chris from boxedup.com here. We’re a start-up in the shopping/wish/gift list space (we’re all about connecting people and the products they love). We’ve got a dual focus on the personal and social utility in tracking, and interacting around, the things that you want to get from anywhere on the web (so it’s basically social bookmarking meets social networking for the stuff you want and are into).

Not going to pretend that we’ve nailed everything yet from an experience perspective, but we’re getting there (we’re pushing improvements out fairly continuously, including iterating the design as we understand more about interaction opportunities and needs – drag and drop to re-order lists coming tomorrow!).

As far as invites are concerned, we’ve got a more minimalist, but still generic, message that goes out right now, so room for improvement here in terms of personalising the message (but that’ll be coming). The standard message performs fairly well in getting the desired result (i.e. people signing up in response), but since it’s a message that often arrives in your inbox out of the blue a generic message doesn’t give the service the all-important personal context (or maximise conversion potential). So thanks for reinforcing this point!

There are obviously lots of sharing and communication opportunities in this type of proposition, whether it’s on-site comments, messaging or content sharing, and it’s certainly something that we think about a lot, and look to embed throughout every level of the service. We’ve definitely found that people love using the communication tools to share thoughts and comments.

Anyway, thanks for the post, and for all the good thought-provoking stuff that you write on Bokardo!

When I saw their form letter, I guessed immediately that it was for security reasons. Other large web sites have gotten around the security-issue aspect in so many ways.

Your point about gift-giving is right on. But I would like to hear more about “An underlying assumption of UX is that what’s good for the user is good for the company, but sometimes it doesn’t quite mesh”…

Maybe that’s why they did it. Amazon’s goal is to get people to buy their things. This can be accomplished by getting people to use wish lists and to create their own for others to use. I bet they committeed this copy and decided it would get them more sales than what an average user would write, and maybe that’s even true. An underlying assumption of UX is that what’s good for the user is good for the company, but sometimes it doesn’t quite mesh. Gift-giving is about fostering human relationships, not about buying as much as possible from Amazon.