A few hours creating a tiny image

Despite the spartan layout on Linkspank, some spankers are confused about where the menu is, or what they can or should do when they receive a spank from another (slightly savvier) user of the site.

a picture of the menu

I've tried various tactics to address this issue. For a while, the "spank" and other links were formatted as big red buttons. Some people liked that, but it started to drive me nuts with all the red on the page. I felt that red as a highlight color was being overused and abused.

Today I decided to try creating an image that would go at the left of the spank and call attention to the links. My first idea was to create a little icon with the hand in it. Some work led to this icon:

first stab at the icon (bigger size)

But when I shrunk the icon to 40 x 40 pixels, it looked crappy. I decided ultimately that it wasn't my lack of skill that was causing the problem, so much as the fact that the hand is a fairly intricate shape to be presented at such a small resolution.

After despairing briefly, I got the idea to use a caret-shaped image to call out the menu:

the spanky caret

This took me about two seconds to make, and I like it so far. All I wanted was something that says, "Yo! Look here. This is the spot," and the caret does a pretty good job of that. It also looks a little like a command prompt, or an arrow, both of which make sense in this context. It's also a use of red that seems to be in line with the usage of red on the rest of the page.

Finished product:

Drew Barrymore yech!

That is all. As for the Seal of Spankiness, I'm using it for the time being at the side of the page to promote the Linkspank Toolbar, which is getting high reviews so far.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into random minutiae. Have a nice day.

The REAL Story Behind the "New Facebook"

If facebook sent you an announcement indicating that Applications were being deleted from the site, how would you feel?

Possibly, a mix of relief, indignation, and apprehension. Relief that your facebook experience wasn't going to be so chaotic anymore. Indignation that the efforts of all the little people out there to build apps were suddenly being shut down. And apprehension that, with apps gone, you might be missing out on something great.... something great that you could have used or played with if apps had been around.

Well, prepare to unleash those feelings. I am sorry to report that the "new facebook" has been introduced primarily to brush Applications under the carpet. Sure enough, applications are still a part of facebook. But they are a hidden part, one that facebook makes you work extra hard to find. And they are harder than ever to receive: all the work you do sending hatching eggs to your friends goes quite unnoticed now.

Consider this: what is so "new" about the new facebook? Here are some of the differences you may have noticed:

+ Some of the stuff that was on the left was moved to the right, and vice versa;
+ Some borders and shadings have been removed or added;
+ Stuff has been moved into "tabs"

These changes, especially the last one, make the site a lot "cleaner." Basically, a lot of junk that you were looking at before (i.e., applications) is back in the invisible tabs now. You click on them sometimes. Sometimes. Kinda like how you click on advertising sometimes :-).

What's in the front tab? It looks kinda like facebook used to look... before the whole applications thing got started.

There are three main ways to interact with facebook applications: through your own mini-feed; on the profile pages of other people; and via emails that you receive. The latter method of communication is restricted almost to the point of making all of the apps worthless. Now, the former two methods have also been hobbled.

There you have it. May the relief, indignation, and apprehension commence. Personally, I feel mostly relief. I liked a lot of the facebook apps, but the quality is "inconsistent" and it's part of a grand strategy of trying to be everything to everyone -- which, as it turns out, is the exact definition of not having a strategy. Of course, now that the apps have been shuffled away, it looks like maybe facebook did have a strategy: the apps were helpful, for a while. If you believe that, you may want to move your "indignation" slider a bit to the right. But maybe it would be wrong to credit them with that idea, since technology companies tend to be short on foresight. And now we are back to the basics of facebook, and the basics are a beautiful thing.

a rounded element.

Those roundy buttons are a small new experiment

This is a pretty microscopic issue, but it's a little piece of shared thinking lovingly from me to you.

In setting up the UI of linkspank, I wanted something that was clear and non-trendy. To this end there has been little in the way of rounded elements, which are cute but maybe a bit cutesy too.

Now though I'm trying to highlight that the spank and more buttons are buttons, so we're playing with the rounded corners. The size and redness of them appears to be appropriate for the inbox, but a bit overwhelming perhaps on the browsing pages where there are lots of spanks. Generally they are helpful for the newbies, a bit outspoken for the experts.

This Ain't Your Daddy's Search Function

A dorky and slightly technical post today.

As just mentioned on the super-official blog, we have put up a new "quick search" feature for testing. (This was the "small but cool" feature I was excited about in last week's post.)

This feature is interesting to me for three reasons:

1. It gives a new perspective on search
2. It is an interesting topic to discuss the use of "AJAX" vs. web 1.0 programming
3. It is the latest chapter in an interesting story about the design of linkspank's user interface


1. Can Search be Improved?

Google rules the world of search (image courtesy of google earth). I remember when I first tried Google (sometime around 1998) and immediately felt, wow, this is something truly new and special. The rest of the world agreed, and since then lots of people have asked, Can search be improved? What is the future of search?

To me, search is not a sensible place to compete as a little startup because it's a bloody "red ocean" of competition.

But there are two kinds of "searching" that I feel are being underserviced right now: searching for "new stuff" (including news articles, but also new websites!), and searching for or organizing links that we view, share, and receive.

Linkspank quick search is a little step towards addressing these consumer needs. Even at Linkspank's young age, I already think the quick search does a great job of helping to find new stuff and keep track of quality links.


2. On the use of "AJAX"

The quick search feature allows you to search for links and browse results without opening a new browser window. I think it's a pretty cool use of ajax technology.

Fact: Stuff that loads or processes right in the page is cool for the user, because it's so fast. But that fact stops being true when the thing in the page takes a long time to load and it would actually be faster just click a normal link.

So the challenge in making an ajax feature is whether it will be (and stay) fast enough. One interesting thing is that ordinary web search like google is generally not fast enough for ajax, whereas searching for new links IS fast enough (or at least way faster). I'll leave the argumentation as a puzzle for the technically minded. :-) If you're not familiar with ajax and you want to read about it, see this wikipedia article.


3. An Interesting Story about User Interface (UI) Design

In December 2006 I developed a very strange-looking, very slow prototype of Linkspank. (It was called "stuffmoo" at the time!) Part of what made it so slow was that I wanted people to be able to view screen of links without loading a new page in their browser. (In the terms of the last paragraph, I was using too much ajax and it was too slow.)

I hung onto this design concept. When I gave up on it for most of linkspank, I still tried to use it for searching for links within linkspank. I was foiled again: searching for links and viewing page after page of links within one page load was way too slow...

...and in fact, the "normal" search function (as an ordinary page load) was itself way too slow.

But this problem turned out to be an opportunity - through rethinking the way to format the search and display results, it was possible to make a search engine using ajax that was faster than the "normal" way we had it implemented.

Lesson to self: hang on to the design concepts you believe in - technical problems can foil them in the short term, but they may eventually sidestep, or even solve, those technical problems.