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by jawns 4623 days ago
The blog and the 11% for IE11 landing page both imply that if you complete the challenge, you will win the prizes described.

For instance, the blog entry says: "If you can get 11% better page load performance from your site, we'll send you and your team some 11 goodness." I'm no lawyer, but that sounds like a valid unilateral contract to me.

Similarly, the landing page says: "Show us how you got 11% better page load performance in your organization's home web page and we'll send you all this goodness."

But in the fine print, it says: "The first 11 organizations that meet the qualifications above will each receive the following: 11 pizzas (in the form of a $120 gift card), 11 year-long subscriptions to BrowserStack (ARV $240 each), and 11 copies of Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac (ARV $79 each)."

There's a heck of a big difference between "If you do this, we'll give you this" and "If you're one of the first 11 people to do this, we'll give you this."

The fact that there will be only 11 prize winners should be made more clear. After all, there is PIZZA on the line. And there's nothing like a pizza bait-and-switch to get developers angry at you.

3 comments

@jawns. We have updated the blog post to clarify. I encourage you to try out the new tools and I hope the perf testing is worth the pizza+.
Thanks. I hope you'll also update the landing page of the challenge.

A little more feedback, which I hope you'll take as constructive:

As I said above, there's quite a difference between "if you do this, you'll win this" and "if you're one of the first 11 people in the United States to do this, you'll win this."

As I see it, if I have any chance of winning the prize, I've got to drop everything right now and scramble to complete the challenge, and even then, who knows how many other people are doing the same thing?

So, my incentive has just dropped from, "This is exciting! I have a decent shot at getting pizza!" to "It's extremely unlikely that I'll win. Why bother?"

I would therefore suggest that you look for ways to increase the value proposition to developers. I'm not saying you have to spend millions -- but maybe find some creative ways to reward developers outside of the first 11, such as by featuring some of the success stories on your blog.

You bet. Feedback well taken jawns and thanks! This has been live for 2 hours so I still think you have an opportunity here.
Well now I just feel cheated. How do I un-vote up a story?
You can flag it.
What if the plan is to change the page after 11 orgs win?