Opinions are like… well you know the saying. That is why you’d never think getting opinions on an idea on the internet would be a problem; believe it or not, it actually is.
Getting people to throw racial slurs at you or tell you that they hate you is pretty easy, but getting valuable, focused and non-A.D.D.-riddled input is the trick, and that is where PickFu comes into play.
I became aware of PickFu this morning actually after seeing a Tweet from Duck Duck Go’s creator and founder Gabriel Weinberg:
Gabriel tends to blog and tweet about technically interesting topics, which I dig, so I clicked over and read his review. At first glance I thought “Isn’t PickFu basically UserTesting.com?”, but then I realized the brilliance of it: it’s way way way simpler than that.
- You submit a question and TWO answers.
- You specify how many you replies you want starting at $5 USD for 50 responses.
- You hit GO and wait for your replies.
It’s so frigging simple. As soon as it dawned on me what it was, I had to try it out myself. So I created a question:
How would you rather pay for an online service?
And I created two answers:
- Credit or Debit Card
- PayPal
I purchased 200 replies for $17 USD and made the question public so everyone could watch it. You can click here to see how it is currently doing (or if it’s complete).
As of this writing there are 48 responses (out of the 200 I paid for) and the breakdown looks like:
- 35% – Credit/Debit Card
- 65% – PayPal
Honestly I would not have guessed this going in. I would have guessed that using a Credit Card was hands-down the preferred choice for online payments so it was surprising to see such an uneven split, even with 48 responses.
I would expect that the gap closes as more respondents come in, but that is just the point; as someone working on a startup, I can make all sorts of decisions on my own about what I think people want, but asking them is a hell of a lost faster and can sometimes open your eyes in ways you didn’t expect.
Disclaimer: I do realize this is an imperfect testing method to based absolutes on; sample sizes, group biases, etc, but the purpose of this post is to point out how useful a simple service like PickFu can be when you need it.
With PickFu you can also post images, so you could imagine some quick A/B testing for a designer might look like “Which button do you like better?” then posting two screenshots of two different buttons he’s designed and seeing what people think.
If you end up using PickFu for anything interesting you don’t mind sharing (either anecdotally or sharing a public question link with us) let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!
Update #1: The effectiveness of PickFu seems to have worn off as my 200-answer poll asking “How would you rather pay for an online service?” has been stuck at around 100 responses for the last few days. I think this thing might die of old age. Here is the current tally as of 12:05 PM MST, 6/22/10:
- 47% – Credit/Debit Card
- 53% – PayPal
Starting to even out to about 50/50 it looks like. Another 100 replies would certainly help.
Puffgames-Thanks very nice idea again thanks