Here's my summary of the presentation based on their slides and what I remember:
1. Why should we care about this application and why it can be popular
well, the group answered this question from both user and developer's views. Among these points, I think the most important reason is that users "want to ask sensitive questions to their friends". In other words, they like to play this HonestyBox because they are actually caring about what their friends think of them. And look at those default questions, e.g. "what do you honestly think of me?" "what do you think of my personality?", you probably won't ask such serious questions to your friends in real life. but you can easily spam your friends by clicking HonestyBox.
if your question itself is random, then the entire interaction is just to help you to reconnect with your friends and enhance the bonding within the network.
if you seriously asked the question, then honestybox becomes a psychological game:) once you've asked the question, what kind of answers do you expect? Some friends may also take it seriously and give you sincere answers; but some may just randomly answer the questions and play fun with you. Hence, you need to tell which are their real thoughts, and which are just for fun.
I'm not sure if it is true, but I believe that most of users will say they play honestybox for fun, while subconsciously they are expecting the *real answers* from their friends. That's the fun of Honestybox, a game between true or faulse among your friends :)
2. What is nice about HonestyBox?
Anonymity. I agree on it. Honestybox will become less popular without anonymity. anyway, your friend won't know you said that, you can just post whatever you want. Don't have to act the yes-man, saying all positive comments on your fiends. Frankly, I would like to hear more negative comments from my friends so that I know where I should improve more. And you may feel even happier to hear good things about you from anonymous friends :D
I think 1 and 2 are the core features of HonestyBox. Simplicity is beauty. I would like to use this small application if it just like that. However, HonestyBox is more than that. it makes life complicated :( This is just from my user's point of view. On the other hand, as a developer, I can truly understand why they put those additional features to help spread the application, make users to play it frequently, and more importantly -- make money!!!
The point system is acceptable. Usually the point system or level system will make users play more as it sets a target for users to gain more points. Then what can I do with these points? Buy profile backgrounds? buy Avatars? or Bribe your anonymous friends to tell you who they are! I can't see anything attractive to me from buying profile backgrounds or buying Avatars lol. but they do attract a lot of users. These features remind me of the biggest online chatting company in China -- Tencent QQ. QQ is originally a only chatting software like ICQ. They then added a lot of additional customized features in the software. For example, users can go to QQ shopping center to buy clothes and choose different hair styles for their virtual images. After Tencent launched QQ space, users can further customize their space by buying various profile backgrounds and other decorations. The payment is similar to HonestyBox. You can pay by home phone or credit card. Surprisingly, a lot of users enjoy decorating their virtual images and QQ spaces. It turns out that it's an alternative way of making profits because people want to be special even in games:)
So, what can we learn from HonestyBox and QQ? Customization. Give more options for users and let them feel special. That's also the idea of BoomzCart (hahahaha advertising now). If BoomzCart is just a platform for users to buy and sell stuff, it's no difference than another Marketplace. What we are trying to do (though not fully implemented) is to let the users to manage their stores. As the seller, you are the one in charge of you own store. Maybe we can also add features to let sellers to decorate their own stores and choose their own advertisement :)
No need for apologies. The problem with publishing late is that you might not get comments 'cos people have gone on to other things.
ReplyDeleteRemember: early bird gets the worm! :-)
One of the problems is that users cannot post anonymous messages themselves, instead they can only answer questions sent by the user.
ReplyDelete"Don't have to act the yes-man, saying all positive comments on your fiends. Frankly, I would like to hear more negative comments from my friends so that I know where I should improve more. And you may feel even happier to hear good things about you from anonymous friends :D"
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure if this is true. In fact, I think whether the message is positive or negative, users tend to want to know who the author is. I think that this is one of the driving forces which helps the revenue model of this app. (Advertisement: check out my blog about comments on this issue @ http://dilipthekkoodan.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-thoughts-on-honesty-box.html)
On a different note, I completely agree with you about the default questions - they seem to be rather impersonal and it is quite unlikely to get any response if you pose such questions. In fact, I used to get lots of these rather bland questions from my friends, which got me really irritated. One of my suggestions to improve Honesty Box would be to remove these default questions from the home page.
@prof: noted. I was thinking is it always a good thing to focus. I can easily focus on one stuff but have poor capability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. I was taught the concept of separations of concerns, but frankly I'm still figuring it out.
ReplyDelete@Orry: you can except that you have to go to another new application called "Ask me anything by Honesty Box" which you can find the link tab in HonestyBox. I have no idea why they want to separate these two though.
I find it more fun than HonestyBox itself cuz you can ask questions anonymously to the person you are interested :P
@Dilip: yes, it's the revenue model of HonestyBox. however, I don't think most of their revenue will come from *buying* points for bribe. in fact advertising is still the main source of income.
I do believe the answer itself will make you decide whether to spend some points to bribe friends. if you got alot of answers from your friends, will you bribe them all?
I just think of another problem of HonestyBox.
If only a few of my friends are using HonestyBox, then I can somehow easily tell who answered my questions. it will lose fun then~~ This means, HonestyBox must have large user base. So, before you answer your friend's question, make sure you are not the only one who plays HonestyBox in his friends list :P
woah.. Dilip is advertising his blog post here!
ReplyDeletePeople weren't commenting on my post and I was starting to think that nobody knew about my blog... but I think it worked out for the best (:p)
ReplyDeletesee the power of advertising :P and now you get more comments than mine hahahah~ good writing~
ReplyDelete“I don't like most of the facebook applications lol. ” Yeah, I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I feel that the biggest contradiction is that I can't find out the attractive points from the hottest application, e.g FarmVille. I can't understand why so many people like it. No, not like it, they are *crazy* about it.
Maybe that's the reason why I can't develop the hottest app :P But anyway, I always try to do something which can really make people's life easy^^
I also don't like facebook applications! But ironically I like to create one to attract others..
ReplyDeleteBut actually I like these kind of simple apps like honesty box. Although you said it's not really that simple, but I think I prefer interaction as compared to those games which set traps for you to keep coming back and play. But to each its own.. And I think the genre I like is not what most fb users like, which is like farmville and cafe world..
- Hong Jun
we all don't like those hot apps. but we do like to create one we think may be attractive to users :)
ReplyDeleteI guess some developers they may not really like the games they create but they know users would like it?
I don't like those apps cuz I see nothing exciting and playing them is just a waste of time. but it seems a lot of people like the way to spend their time. and the app. must be very easy so that you don't even have to think. just click. In fact, they are the majority of fb app. users.
so..as a developer, will you create an app. that you think it's really cool to you and may be useful/meaningful to users? Or make the app. appealing to most of the users?
If I work for Zynga, I probably just choose the latter. of course a better solution is to balance but it's not easy