thomblake comments on PredictionBook.com - Track your calibration - Less Wrong
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Comments (52)
Just out of curiosity, are you a startup, a non profit or a guy doing a side project?
I predict the site's userbase will not explode overnight but will escalate in the shape of a hockey stick. That's how these things usually happen. You will have to keep improving it even while the userbase is still low, otherwise people will think the site is dying and they will stop showing up. Interesting things need to already be happening on the site before a larger audience will keep coming back to it, not vice versa.
Also, you need to add documentation no matter how simple and intuitive you think the sites features are. They don't seem as intuitive from the outside. By 'documentation' I mean a short and EXPLICIT description of what each feature does. I like the 'help' button near the timeframe for the prediction. You could add help buttons next to everything. Also a faq would be nice.
Overall I think the site has great potential. Keep up the good work.
We're Investling, which is a handfull of startups and an IT consultancy. We're for-profit, with some non-profit projects on the side (in part because we'll make more profits if we can help save the world from surprise conversion to paperclips). The majority of our non-profit work is SIAI related.
Some projects follow that pattern. Some projects never hockey-stick. How can you tell which curve you're riding?
We have many projects running: some have maintained exponential growth since we became involved; some are too young to judge; and some are on the low end of a curve that may be a hockey stick and may just be a project that doesn't have any legs. I very much hope that the LW crowd will latch on to PBook (keep coming back, tell your friends, etc.). If you do (we do - several of us are very keen LWers) and we see traffic growing, we'll flood more resources into the project. If it languishes we'll continue to host it and may even open source it, but it seems more sensible to flood our resources into projects that are winning. I really don't want to see PBook die, but I'm trying to count warm fuzzies consciously.
We know the documentation is sparse (or, more precisely, the user interface isn't intuitive - documentation is evidence of a UI failure and good design is self-documenting). If you guys are still around in 14 days we should talk about more dev resources.
Yes yes yes. Four times yes.
Right now the UI is so slow / bad that I couldn't see myself using it.
Agreed on the UI being incredibly confusing (and slow).
In terms of usability, if they just moved the judgment buttons down below, added text like "Render final judgment on this prediction" to make it obvious what judgment does, and changed "My 2 cents" to "Submit Estimate" or something like that, it would be a huge improvement over the current. These sorts of very minor cosmetic UI changes would be trivial to make.