The Ad Model I Want: More like Gmail, Less like AdSense

Linkspank has no ads on the site, but if and when we ever put any on there, this is what I want.

NOT: Traditional AdSense style

• Ads based on content of entire page
  
• Ads driven heavily by words in URL and page title
  
• Ads load pretty much only on page load

WHAT I WANT: Ads behaving like Gmail Ads

• Ads load specific to a portion of a page (e.g., a Gmail message)
• New ads load when a new page loads (e.g., a Gmail message)
• Ads don't care so much about the URL or header.

This would be useful in particular for the Linkspank Inbox, where you pop up messages of interest to you. If you have tips on the subject, let me know! :-)

The Lost User, and Allegories of Gmail

What is Gmail's "value proposition"?

Try to tell me, right now, in ten seconds, what supposedly makes Gmail better than Hotmail or Yahoo!.

If you can do it, then in my opinion you are a rare individual. Because I have rarely heard Gmail's value proposition explained well. That would include Gmail's site:

Big list, little meaning

These four things about Gmail are not particularly unique, compared to Yahoo! and Hotmail (although some of them used to be).

Here's my answer: "Gmail, the first web service that allows a layperson to be as fast and efficient as an expert user of pine and other tools in a Linux environment."

It's a pretty simple idea, but it's hard to explain to people. Pine is very geeky:

Comparing something to Pine may not be desirable

Sometimes simple things are hard to explain to people, if they aren't familiar where you're coming from. And if you're coming from a different place from your users (and as the designer of a technical product for laypeople, that's always true), it's hard to know what will be clear to people.


Lost Features, Lost Users

I'm not picking on Gmail - I like Gmail a lot, and so I'm writing from experience. I have a lot of experience explaining keyboard shortcuts, search syntax, and filters to people in Gmail.

Also, I remember what it was like to first start using Gmail. It was a new environment. Yet now, it's so simple... to people who know it ;-).


Parlez vous Spank?

I've been thinking about the old "Gmail challenge" because I keep discovering how many Linkspank users - even people who obediently, regularly check their inboxes - don't understand what a spank is or how to do it.

(So if you're among them, don't feel bad.)

As I always do, I'm blaming it in part on UI issues, and a solution is in the works. But the challenge does not disappear with a good UI. (After all, Gmail's UI is pretty good.)

It's really a new concept, which savvy UI and tutorials can educate on, but which is still new... even if it's very simple.

My new mission: get people to understand what a Linkspank is.

Like I said, new UI is on the way. Until then, the best way is to try :-), and maybe refer to our primitive tutorials (especially the first two):

How to Spank

How to Spank Faster

How to Earn Points

On the Fancy-ness of Navigation Menus

Mission: Make Menus Prettier

The eternal quest for the perfect spank experience led me back recently to the navigation menus on linkspank. People had suggested to me that the right menu of popular sites and categories was ugly. Also I felt the top menu and the left menu could stand for some beautifying.

Our philosophy along the way has been to focus on making something that works well and is easy to use and fast, with beauty trailing behind as a distant priority. Nevertheless, "little things can make a big difference," and I didn't want to alienate people who were trying out Linkspank just because we have ugly menus.

The easiest way to construct beautiful menus is to use images. This allows you to use any font that you want for the text. You can also create elaborate backgrounds for the images and use javascript to make the menu tags do neat things when you hover over them.

Some Menus on Well-Designed Sites

But a lot of big great sites that work well shy away from images. Some examples.



Gmail uses a text-based menu with very little formatting. It used to be even plainer, and over the last year or so they added the "more" menu and the line under the menu.

Pros: loads very fast. You never have the problem of an image failing to load on a page. Easily confused users can recognize that the menu elements are in fact links (which can be a problem). It's pure and simple.

Big pro: if you change the size of the text on your page, the menu gets bigger. (not really doable with an image).

Cons: a bit ugly.



Facebook's menu has similar pros and cons to the Gmail menu. It's actually a text menu with css formatting, but it is as attractive as many an image-based menu. It makes clear that links are links by using changes in color, rather than underlining.



YouTube has two menus: an ugly but very clear text menu, with traditional blue color and underlining; and a set of tabs. The tabs look like images but if you change the size of your text you can see that they are actually images with text overlaying them.

Casual Conclusions

You can get the hint from these quality sites that there are major virtues to text menus. YouTube uses some images, but in what is still a text-based menu, and employing wide tabs that wouldn't work if you had more menu items (and which take up a lot of vertical real estate as well frankly).

So, how do you spice up menus without images?
(1) gmail says, "you don't"
(2) facebook says, "use colors and css"
(3) youtube gives a mixed answer.

Linkspank's menu (For Now)

Gmail's menu and YouTube's plain menu is very close to where we are starting, which we have deemed a bit ugly. YouTube's vertical marks are interesting though - we stuck them in since our menu items have multiple words and the links are not underlined, leading to some link parsing confusion.

YouTube's tab method doesn't work for Linkspank's menus, once again because they have multiple words / are long.

The color / css style used by facebook is probably best for most sites. It doesn't work well in Linkspank's color environment though - it's more a minimalist design overall, much like Gmail.



We ended up using an old trick from the (paper) publishing world: just use a different font. Open up some books: you may be surprised at how often section headers, in addition to being a bold font, are also a totally different font (often a rounder font).

Gmail, facebook, and YouTube don't use the other font method. Fonts are generally tricky since there aren't many fonts that are supported by various browsers and computers. But I figure, hey, it must be ok to use TWO fonts, and in fact I think this would be an improvement on an all-Arial world. So we're trying a little Trebuchet and we'll get back to you on how it goes. If you have suggestions - or the font isn't showing up for you correctly - let me know ;-).