I’ve had it drummed into me that before embarking on a new project, you need to ensure that you’re providing something new and you’re meeting a need – that’s where Market Research comes in
After my initial online foray into the online Lost and Found world, its clear to see that while others have already moved into this area, sites of this nature have had limited success. This could be in part due to the tough competition facing all new websites to make an impact amongst so many different websites.
Lost and found item pages on social media are a different story. Being able to follow a story as it develops, sharing pictures and commenting, all make for highly shareable content and there have been a number of high-profile stories that have resulted in items being reunited with owners. For example, a still active Facebook page from 2010 set up to find the owner of a stuffed toy lost in Thorpness has over 10,000 likes. Similar stories of lost toys in particular have grabbed the media spotlight recently with characters from Toy Story or fluffy lions sending ‘messages’ to their lost owners, posing for photos and in general enjoying inventive adventures which capture the popular imagination and that others love to share. Not only does these examples suggest that there is an appetite for a lost and found service and to read the stories, there are also a considerable number of people who go out of their way to reunite items with their owners via the internet.
Meanwhile this summer, the Next Web journalist Matt Navara drew attention to his own life after live tweeting the events that occurred after he lost his iPhone. Spawning it’s own hashtag #iPhone rescue, over several weeks Navara had followers hooked on his serial like installments in the saga that eventually saw him reunited with his phone.
While in this case, Apple’s find my iPhone app was the ultimate way to find the phone (sadly not an option for many objects) it also demonstrates the appeal of these stories and the power of crowdsourcing and community engagement in finding and retrieving objects.
One of the reasons for the success of the above stories seems to be the ability to harnass networks of contacts and allow engagement with the story – be that through sharing or comments. This community feeling is one I’m hoping to emulate with the Lost Property Box.
To find out a bit more on what features people would like to see on a devoted lost and found site, I have created a survey to get a feel for how people would like to use the site and will feed back the results into the design.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5RFRNLR
