Seth's Blog : Bongo 4 - Thinking about power users (skive!)

Bongo 4 – Thinking about power users (skive!)

Power users are tempting. They know what they want, they’re happy to share their preferences and they show up.

But power users can also be a trap, because their specific needs might not match the market you seek to serve. When you pick your customers, you pick your future.

Brooke Husic is a power user. She’s a creator of extraordinary crossword puzzles, wicked smart and culturally aware. As part of the founding team at Puzzmo, she was one of the early testers of Bongo.

Sitting next to her, I was amazed to see her beat my high score easily. She played SKIVE, a word neither of us know the definition of (it means avoiding work).

If you need to know a word like SKIVE to play well, the game isn’t as fun for some people. This is what Zach Gage calls the Scrabble problem–it rewards abnormal vocabularies. In 2015, Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble championships, and he doesn’t speak French! Instead, he memorized the French dictionary.

Zach’s insight, which I instantly embraced, was that we’d give bonus points for common words. Now, Brooke is playing on the same terms as everyone else.

PS today’s Bongo is fun. Here’s my best word to get you started. Play with your family while you’re cooking dinner. That’s what it’s for.