Make Me Lucky is a hobby site I built in part to try out some new animation techniques, but also to fulfil the needs of hapless people searching for luck on the Internet, without trying to exploit them!
I bought the domain built the original site and (which you can see here: https://makemelucky.com/v1/) to amuse and also poke fun at some colleagues of mine who at the the time spent spent what I felt was an exorbitant of money on the pokies (video poker machines that seem to be in every bar in Sydney) everyday at lunchtime.
I put Google Analytics on the site to track how many times the button was pressed and see how much it was shared. I thought of it as a joke site that would amuse some people with the absurdity on the idea that a button on a website could make you lucky, but people started coming to the site from Google who had searched for thing like “please make me lucky”, “give me luck”, “how to get instant luck” and “i need a luck button”.
Now you might think these people would have been disappointed to arrive at the site after their searches (as indeed they would have been with any other site), but do you know what? They clicked the button, sometimes hundreds of times, and a lot of them came back to click it again and again.
I decided to build a bigger and better version of the site, which you can see today, but make it layered to appeal to different people on different levels, very much like Mozart’s Magic Flute, though arguably not quite as good.
The site can still be used for it’s original intention to amuse some people with it’s absurdity. You can also send it to your friends to show you wish them success in their endeavours, or send it to your enemies and taunt them saying “This is the only way you’re ever going to get lucky!”.
People who find them selves searching for luck on Google, for whatever reason, may feel a bit luckier. I found some research by Professor Richard Wiseman who found that people who believe they’re lucky notice more lucky things in their lives which reaffirms their lucky self belief. Feeling lucky could be argued to have a placebo like effect that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now I’m not saying my site will necessarily make anyone’s life better, but I would argue anyone desperately searching for luck would be far better off clicking the button on my site than being conned by some charlatans offering snake oil magic who only want to take advantage of them.
If you peel back the layers further still, you will find there is actually a collecting game hidden beneath the surface. By pressing the button certain numbers of time, or visiting the site a certain numbers times or on a certain amount of consecutive day you can collect “Lucky Charms” (think Xbox achievements or Playstation trophies). There’s also several secret “Lucky Charms” that can be unlocked in other ways, to be honest I’d have to go and read the source code to remember all of them. Now I admit I haven’t really nailed the UX on the game part, but still there’s a small number of users who try and collect them all.
The site uses:
The button was created in Cinema 4D and Photoshop and the sound effects where licenced from Audio Jungle and edited with Adobe Audition. The “Lucky Charms” are stored in the browser with HTML5 Local Storage.
You can visit the site (and get lucky yourself!) here, do read the terms and conditions though!
The site is on GitHub here.