We’ve started receiving some very good feedback through our Foldees Designer Survey, and we’ve come up with a few ideas on how to cater to your requests. Most of you are quite happy with the current system, except for a few things, and here are our findings from the survey.
CONTEST
- The primary motivation for submitting is the prize money, with feedback and seeing your cards on sale coming in second and third.
- Almost all of you would like to split between user-votes and Foldees Team votes for ratings to decide winners
- Most of you would like more opportunities to win (surprisingly, even many of our previous winners)
SITE
- Almost all of you spend most of your time on the Main Gallery, which was very surprising to us.
- Most of you keep up with what’s going on through our newsletters (both regular member and Designer)
- Surprisingly, Word of Mouth is first as a method of promoting your design, while Blogs come 2nd, and the design widget third. (hardly anyone promotes on twitter!?)
Also, here’s some feedback that we’ve received so far.
“I actually like all of these ideas. I am sure alot of us submit to many contests and never win. So maybe a method similar to threadless would be nice, getting feedback from the community until its perfect and foldees buys it. This might result in more sales too, since most cards are good, but just not quite there. “
“One thing I noticed once the new cards for the current contest are loaded is that most raters have good suggestions about changing the wording or color of something. I think that after the contest, designers should have the option of making those changes users suggested. Foldees can then accept or reject the changes.”
”I think the right way to pick the winners could be if every challenger can pick the 5 winners (in order of 1 to 5) buuuutttt, they can't pick their owns designs, by example, if i sent a design I must to pick 5 cards that I think must be the winners but I can't pick My Card.”“Less server errors or even better, no server error”
As a result, we are throwing around a few new rules that we’re thinking of implementing in our next contest. The reason we’re doing this now (before even the end of the survey) is because we need time to implement these things on the site. Please Please PLEASE give us your feedback on whether you think these things are good or bad ideas.
- We Vote First! – Foldees staff votes contribute 35% to the total score for all cards. However, to ensure that our votes don’t play with the competition, we will place our votes in private before we allow the public to come in and rate.
- Designers Matter! – Designers votes count based on the number of designs successfully moderated and on sale at Foldees. E.g. mdavidct’s vote will be worth alot because he has submitted 11 designs. The exact algorithm will be decided later, but the catch is, the designer does not get to vote for his own design(s).
- Tweak your designs – All cards can be tweaked at any point. However, all tweaks will be monitored and moderated by us.
- More Prizes! – The new split will be US$800, US$600, and US$400 for the top three, and everyone else in the top ten gets US$100. Total remains the same cos we aren’t rich just yet.
Please let us know your thoughts on these potential changes in the comments below or any other suggestions you might have. In the meantime, we still have 15 days for both our Survey and coincidentally, our Zodiac Zoo contest!
Don’t wait… participate :)
8 comments:
Agree laah Mr.Chak. I'll just go with the flow...
Hi Chak, during rating period, is it ok if you hide first the name of the designer? Because some of the fans or followers will just rate high for the entries of their favorite designer. "Favoritism" maybe... Some might rate based on how they knew or like the designer, and not on his/her design. I think the best time to reveal the designer's name was after the rating period. Hope this helps.
leighdoll: We'll consider it, but then again... it's difficult to curb fans voting for their favourite designer regardless. However, skewed votes are deleted by our system.
Kokuzo, our only double winner, for instance swears that the only person he asks to vote for him is his lovely girlfriend.
Yes! I am so glad for new rule #3! There are so many cards that could be helped!
One thing that I like about threadless is you post your work in progress and users can comment on it. Then you can talk with the commenter and post many revisions. This contest, for example, I was completely happy with my card. But Foldees recommended A LOT of changes, and I replied back on those changes asking questions. I know you guys are busy, but I never got a real answer to my questions on why the commenter didnt understand my message. So, last minute, I ended up making what I think those changes were asking for while still staying happy with my card.
So, in conclusion, some back and forth would be nice. I have thought about posting on the forum, but its always scary because you never know if someone will steal your concept.
OH! and I love that more people win something now too. Obviously not everyone can be a winner, but we all put alot into these cards and after having the same basic winners over and over again you start loosing your enthusiasm to submit. Do I ever really think I can win? No. Do I think I can get into the top 10? Yah, its more possible =)
oh! and I just thought of this... I am always confused about what to do d with the text area... should I leave those shapes white above my art? Can I make that basic area any color I want and let my art intersect that area and let foldees deal with covering it up?
yay! for rule number one
I consider that vote based contests should always have this kind of staff´s vote
something else I just noticed... Do we only get royalties with online purchases or do we get some kind of royalty for all of the in store deals you guys having been doing too?
wow... I've really neglected the blog here. Sorry people, we've been REALLY busy between Christmas and Vday.
chelsey: wow... lotsa questions. Ok first of all, by now you'll know that we've totally abolished the text area, so no problems there.
About the feedback, sometimes you'll have to trust in our faith of experience. While we do encourage freedom of expression, the recommended changes are usually to make the card more sellable e.g. if the point doesn't come across well. Designers on the other hand, are also welcome to argue their points against our feedback.
*WHEW* and to your final question, we pay a royalty for EVERY card sold, not just online, but anywhere. Corporate, retail and so forth. however, some purchases aren't updated in terms of royalties until we receive payments... e.g. retail typically take a month or two to check inventory and issue payments to us, at which point we will update royalties.
KAWAT: so far that seems to be the consensus so we will probably implement that in our next contest!
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