Fine Tuning

So the SOMD website has been online for almost two days. I haven't started actively promoting it yet, and this is for a couple of reasons:

Idling: Just like starting your car in the morning when it's still a bit cold, and you let it warm up a little bit before you floor the gas pedal and make your way to work. I don't want the website to (somehow) get rush hour traffic in its first couple of days. First I wanted to observe my friends trying it out and hear what they had to say.

Fine-tuning: And I received very valuable feedback. I answered all the new questions they asked me in the FAQ section. Some did not bother reading the FAQ section. A click is a very expensive user action. So because I consider the FAQ section, especially the first 2 questions to be extremely important, I decided to move this section to the main page. No one in a right state of mind will donate me a dollar before at least asking the first two questions (my mum doesn't count). So the user should now see these important questions written in front of him before he even thinks about asking them. This way I dont just spare the user from having to click, I even spare the user from thinking (or i hope so anyways).

Incentive: The one and only incentive for a user to donate a dollar is to be able to have a say in how to spend one real million dollars. Just a bit of fun really. However, people want to be recognised. So I decided to give participants the opportunity to have their name, a few words and a link of their choice listed forever on the website. Participants will have the option to remain anonymous. The listing will be in order of time donated. Participants will submit their choice of words and links during voting time.

Impatience and lonelyness: So everyone wants to know how many donations have been made so far, and anyone would want to be sure that they're not the only person participating. So the counter sounds like a good idea. Hence I put a manually updated counter on the front page, hoping that it does not scare people away because we have only just started the experiment.

So you ask, what next? I'll start pushing the gas pedal a little bit, but I will leave the car on nuetral for a few more days. I would like to get a bit more feedback and feel, and have some time to think what else I can improve before I start marketing the website a bit more seriously.

have a good day