Now that we've finished a first rounds of evaluation, using the think-aloud protocol and we’re currently doing a second evaluation using the System Usability Scale (SUS), it’s time to get some real world users on Adify.

Currently, Adify is populated with example advertisements. This allowed us to show our test subjects a version of the website as if were actively being used. An advertisement website without people advertising on it doesn't attract interested users, which in turn makes advertising on Adify not worth the effort due to the lack of an audience. Fortunately, this circular logic is breakable by us, the Adify Marketing Team!

Leuven Junk Shop

The Adify concept was inspired by the Leuven Junk Shop group on Facebook. It allows users to simply create a post in this group to advertise a service or product.

The members of this group would be an excellent public for our website. We could try to convince them to post their classified on Adify, but the same problem applies as we mentioned earlier. This is why we’ll be offering to have us post their advertisement on Adify.

Once we got a number of active advertisements on Adify, let’s say 15, it’s rewarding for interested users to check it out. Our selling point, the whole location thing, is missing from the Facebook group. With enough users visiting Adify, sellers will automatically start publishing their classifieds on Adify to enlarge their target audience.

Virality

Of course, we want our app to “go viral”. Because we require users to log in with Twitter of Facebook, we’re focusing on those two social networks to increase awareness.

There are four goals to take into consideration (source):

• Increase the percentage of “active hosts” who actively make contact with uninfected people.
  Every classified on Adify will include a link to share it on Facebook or Twitter. Someone who is offering something benefits from increasing his or her audience.
• Increase the contact rate for each active host.
  We currently do not employ any tactics to achieve this. We’re thinking about reward referrals, but this is currently assigned a very low priority.
• Increase the duration of each active host’s infectious time period.
  The dynamic nature of the website’s content will draw visitors to come back.
• Increase the likelihood that contacts turn into infections.
  Instead of sharing the whole content of an advertisement, a shared advertisement will merely reveal it’s title. Interested parties will have to visit Adify to find out more.

During the next stages of testing, the effectiveness of our marketing approach will be bench-marked. Check back soon for the results!