Working out our new concept

We decided to work out the idea for mining and rating news. We will first explain how this new concept will work, and then explain what we think the benefits are compared to our old concept. However, if users prefer the old concept we will go back to the previous one.

A user will have the possibility to mine freely in the underground. In this underground, he will find different minerals that represent articles. When his friends haven't rated the category of the article or the total ratings aren't positive or negative, it will be a rock. A more valuable mineral will represent an article category his friends liked. The more they liked it, the more valuable mineral will represent it. A diamond will represent the most valuable article categories. A non-valuable icon, like talc will represent an article category that was rated negatively by his friends.

The user can earn badges with the actions he does in the game. There will be badges for reading articles attached to a specific mineral. For example "diamond lover" if the user read 100 diamond articles or "persevering" if he read a lot of articles rated as talc. The user is still allowed to choose like or dislike after reading the article without consequences for the badges. The rating system is to help his friends, so the reward for pressing the right button is that the user will get more relevant news later on, depending on his actions. We will only attach badges to how often the user uses the application, not how he uses it.

Since we have a clear view of what categories of articles a group of friends like, we can create graphs to indicate the common interests of the friend group. This way a new user can find out what his friends like, just by adding them. Without even reading a single article. The graph could also show the difference between what the user likes and what his friends like, allowing him to remove friends that have totally different interests. If you just want the articles you like, just don't invite other friends.

For finding friends easily and making it easy for our application to spread, we would make this as a facebook application. This way users don't have to register and they can just select their friends in a list to play together. It is also possible to give users the option to post badges on their wall when they earned them, allowing to attract more new players in our application.

So what are the advantages of this new concept?

• The users have a clear motivation for playing the game. If they rate articles, they will get news focussed on what they like. If his friends rate a specific category, this will also give the current user more news from that category.
• The application still has badges, but now the badges also make it possible to attract new players. In the old application badges only made the current users attached to the application.
• We think the application should be simpler and the concept more clear. We dropped the highscores and the selling system, keeping the application focussed on 1 thing.
• Users can now indicate if they didn't like a specific article. This will make sure the current category will be shown less often. They won't feel we are bullying them with articles they don't like, we are just trying to learn what they like.

We will create a storyboard for this new concept in the following week and start to test it with a paper version once that is finished.