OnMyList Blog

I’ve been spending lots of time trying to think of ways to increase participation in OnMyList from the thousands of users who visit the site each day. Generally, we get about 6-7000 users a day, but only about 6 or 7 signups, and usually only a couple of new lists. Not a very big percentage. I’ve identified a few area that I know can be improved upon.

(1) In order to make a list you have to be signed up. Right now if a user attempts ot make a list, they are first taken to the signup page. Kind of a buzz kill. We are going to remove this requirement and take them directly to the list creation first, and ask for singup at the end, but not require it.

(2) I feel many users land on a list page and dont even realize that they could make a list. They might think that onmylist is simply a personal website or an editorially driven one. We are going to make some changes to the messaging to more clearly encourage participation. In order for this to be more effective we are also going to work on simplifying (ie removing) unnecessary words or functions.

We’ll see how this works out…

Over the last month, we worked very hard to design and implement a lot of new features and improvements for OnMyList and we’ve been so anxious to let the world know about it. Well, we finally did it! If you go to the site now, you should see a brand new user interface. It has a lot of cool new features. Here are some of them:

• Improved profile – The new profile page now makes it easy for you to see lists you created, lists you made as favorites, lists you rated, people you subscribe to, and people who subscribe to you. You can also sort lists by new to old, old to new, or view count. The Latest Updates tab shows a newsfeed of your OnMyList activities, described next.

• Newsfeeds – You can now spy on any list or anyone very easily because you will get notified when you make a list, comment on a list, someone else comment on your list or on a list that you commented on, subscribe to someone or someone subscribe to you, someone made your list a favorite, ...etc. We hope this will help our members to stay on top of lists that you are interested and facilitate interactions between members.

• profile questions & answers – When you go to your profile page, you will find a link at the bottom of the right sidebar to add new profile question and answer to show off your personalities. We’ve also made the editing more obvious with the Edit buttons (We feel the in place editors were too subtle).

• ticker news – There is a Overheard box on the homepage that shows selected lists that we’ve picked that are interesting. Pretty cool, huh?

• invite friends – Want to let your friends know you are an OnMyList superstar? Want to show off your lists and what your favorites are? Have a list of images and videos that you want to impress someone? We’ve made it easy for you. Look around at the top of the site.

• crop profile picture – We know you’ve been wanting to show your whole face in the profile picture. Now you have it.

• facebook app – We have a facebook application for some time. You can show off your lists to your friends whenever you create or update your lists. You can make a list of favorite gifts for my birthday and have it show up in facebook, and hopefully get a few presents. Isn’t that cool?

• widget – Just like the facebook app. And what’s more: You can choose to display your latest/favorites/highest rated lists. It just gets better! Get your widget to show off in your own blog or website by clicking My Widgets in your profile page now.

Please let us know whether you like it or not. Enjoy and list your pants off!