I think a speedometer better shows the ability to “improve” the award. A banner basically just says “wrong” or “good”, but a speedometer says “room for improvement” and might trigger the buyer to up the award.

An even better way might be to provide a slider for the award money (instead of the current text field). When sliding the scroller (in increments of let’s say $25) the “estimated number of entries” updates as well. This way the buyer really FEELS the impact of a higher award instead of just KNOWING it.

You’d basically have one slider for both the award money and the estimated number of entries.

Of course this all based on the assumption a buyer really is looking for “more entries”. I’m not so sure if there’s a real difference between 40 and 75 entries though. “Estimated number of designers working on your project” would be more meaningful to me. I don’t care much for the amount of entries, I’m looking for diversity. And diversity is more about the number of designers than it is about the number of entries I think.

The speedometer seems to clash with the general style of the site and while the flat bar is appropriate (stylistically speaking) it doesn’t put the price into context…it’s just saying “this is bad”. I liked marckohlbrugge’s suggestion of a slider bar/bar graph. It allows for the style to be preserved, while providing the point of reference inherent to something like a speedometer.

marckohlbrugge – Good thoughts about the speedometer. We had those same thoughts when we decided to try it. I really do like your concept of a slider. It’s a neat way to accomplish what we want to do. We might try it as part of our testing.

The number of creatives vs. number of entries is an interesting comparison. I’m not sure yet where I fall on that question…have to think.

Clever too the extra $$ for browsing. I am not sure we can anticipate this, though, since projects are constantly posted and so we couldn’t really guarantee any spot. But clever thinking…

Sinnick – you’re right that the speedometer is a bit different. As many of you saw when we tested some variations on our home page, we’re willing to depart a bit from the design for testing purposes, but once we get some baseline results, we try hard to focus on what truly works. For example, after numerous tests, the only change we ultimately made to the homepage (in this round of testing) was to replace a blue button with pink and rename it from “how it works” to “what you get”.

I would use statistics, the color bars and sliders are arbitrary values that mean nothing to the buyer. Because you guys get a percentage of the prize amount of course a higher bid is “Best” but it doesn’t directly imply that the buyer is getting their monies worth. I would do a little ajax thingy that does a calculation on the entered amount and displays the average number of entries for a project of that type and value and then maybe a call to action for “upping your prize amount to XXX would result in XX more entries”. They don’t even have to be dynamic, but it’d tell the buyer that you’re that you’re suggesting amounts on their behalf, not yours (not trying to be negative but you ARE a for profit company so any recommendations you give are colored by default).

danielc – interesting suggestion. I don’t know that the histograph will be easy to digest for most buyers, but we’re going to think a bit about this because you’ve suggested a behavioral approach that’s worth exploring to see how we could present information to buyers to help them.

Jace – We’ve debated internally the use of such statistics. Quantity doesn’t equal quality, and once you get beyond a certain number of entries, it’s not clear that a buyer would appreciate the difference if they never posted a project on crowdSPRING. Remember that typically, a buyer might see 1, 2 or 3 designs. Telling them, for example, that for $300 they’ll get 30 but for $500 they’ll get 45 designs is meaningful to some people, but a bit out of context (in our view). Our goal is to provide contextual advice that’s easy to understand so that a buyer truly gets why setting higher awards ultimately helps them. That’s a tall challenge, but we have some more ideas up our sleeves.

Out of the two ideas I think the bar is a more fitting with the site layout. But…., I don’t see the point of either of them. When the buyer sets 200$ he knows its low when he sets 1000$ he knows it’s good.

If we wanted to really help the buyer we could give him statistics. Actual values. What is the response being like for projects that have set the value for 300$ in the past week, in the past 4weeks. How is the respond growth during the course of the project. What are the trends?. how the response is depending on the time. Maybe a links to some recent completed projects that have set that price under that category. what have the stats being if they added +10$.

Is it possible to come up with a stat page, an analyzing tool? The data should already be there. SO it would be a query on the time period and price range with project numbers of the last five project ID’s . Just a thought )