Petteri Pyyny
5 Feb 2007 23:24
Last year, we launched a small competition to our users called innovation contest 2006 in which we wanted to hear innovative ideas from our users on how to improve our site.
During the competition, we received 500 submissions that included thousands of suggestions. Ever since the end of the competition, our staff has been reading through the ideas you guys have sent to us. Some of the ideas were good, some of them were -- unfortunately -- quite bad :-) and some of them just excellent. It was extremely difficult to select the entries that truly provided something "different", but after long consideration, we are certain we picked the right ones.
The grand prize, 1,500 euros in cash, was won by our user called lawndog. The other runner-up prizes, "AfterDawn goodie bags", went to these members: chopper, bulfrog15, Dfram, pahis, bscd, kiiveri and gwendolin.
As some of the ideas were very good and haven't been implemented to our site yet, we can't tell you what the winning suggestions were. But the competition was quite an eye-opener for us in many ways; it proved couple of things that we have suspected for years. First of all, it seems that we have thousands of users who aren't aware of the fact that AfterDawn contains sections like Software or News. It seems that there's a large proportion of users who think that AfterDawn is just a discussion forum site. And equally big chunk of users who have never "found" our discussion forums, but have read our news for years now. Seriously, some of the submissions asked for AfterDawn to "add a place where one could download video-related freeware and software tools".
Furthermore, couple of users were asking us to get rid of our advertisements, altogether. Well, if we would do that, you wouldn't see any news, software updates or guides from us -- ever again :-) Some people suggested to change the site's look and feel. Some people wanted to change our site to Photoshop-related site. Some users wanted us to cover music news and gossips. And yes, some users simply wanted to tell us not to change anything, as they like our site the way it is :-)
Many, many suggested ideas we have had on our "to-do list" for years now, but obviously hearing them from our users (sometimes with very good reasonings..) obviously helps to prioritize things in future.
To summarize; before this contest, our "code and site development to-do list" had stuff for our code team for about next 24 months. After the contest, the list has now stuff for more than three years.
Thanks for all of those who participated to our contest and congratulations to all the winners!
-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com