Hi, I’m a co-op student from the University of Waterloo and as our on-boarding challenge, my co Co-Op Max and I were told to create a web app that could make $20 in four weeks (with the provision of no family / friend handouts, etc.). Over the past two weeks we’ve come up with a system that applies game dynamics to visitor retention, and would really love some feedback (if you have a few minutes...).
We came by DaniWeb because we figured there would be people who really knew what those building websites wanted. Right now we’re trying to figure out if what we’ve built is something that people would actually use (after all, life’s a little too short to solve problems no one cares about). So here’s what we do:
We're basically applying game dynamics to increase visitor retention (people staying on the site) and customer acquisition (people buying stuff) on ecommerce based websites. We allow website owners to create 'scavenger hunts' through their site by assigning points to 'objectives' (pages to visit), with the reward being a discount coupon for meeting all the objectives. Once the website owner defines all the objectives, they just download a plugin to their site - this creates a toolbar along the bottom of the webpage with all the info. The point is to give visitors a reason to stay, and to familiarize them with areas of the site / products that the website owner wants to bring their attention to.
The backstory's over at http://myplanetdigital.com/blog/series-long-and-arduous-journey-making-20 if you're interested. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve - we decided to build it in the django web framework, which neither of us had ever used before.
So what do you think? Better than sliced bread? Has potential? Waste of time?
