Comment by static47 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by static47 | Hacker News Reader

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Fabulous feedback rksprst, thank you! Couple of comments on your feedback:

- Currently you can only compare 2 items. (love the idea of more though)

- You can set your Swayables as private so they don't go for public voting, so you can send it to just 1 person or share on your social networks.

- Regarding items that don't have pictures - You can use any website or search any term to find an image, it's all automated, so if you do want to create a Swayable for "Africa or China" just enter those terms into our search box for Africa, then the other item for china and we'll show you image results.

- Agree with the natural and easy, working through a new revision now to make this more intuitive and better looking. The iPhone app is coming soon as well, so you can create Swayables on the go.

- Captcha, thanks for the feedback on this one.

- Thank you for the ajax tip as well.

Totally appreciate you taking the time to provide such constructive feedback, and for checking out the site...

- Lindsey

Also, wanted to mention that I think your main issue is going to be the behavioral change that your site requires. Users aren't used to making decisions by using a Swayable.

With new users that you acquire, the product might be awesome at first but once the novelty wears off, the users usually go back to making the choices in whatever way they were before.

Others might would not be interested because while this does solve a problem of deciding between two items, people have already established processes in making those decisions (be that asking their significant other, looking at product reviews online, or asking friends). Using a Swayable doesn't make the decision making process so unbelievably simpler to make a user take the effort to change the way in which they make decisions. As a rule-of-thumb, products that require a large behavioral change (and I think this is one of them) need to provide a 10X improvement for the user in order for them to consider making a change.

I'm sure you've probably thought about these issues, would be interesting to see how you address them and how consumers respond. Although this might just be "fun" enough that makes them use it.

BTW, there's a great paper on this topic: http://hbr.org/product/why-consumers-don-t-buy-the-psycholog...

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