Sharlene would like to be added as one of my friends!

I got a MySpace friend request from Sharlene.

I don't recall ever meeting her or talking to her in any way shape or form, but she is pretty cute!

Plus she has personality to back it up:

Ah, it's kind of fun. Since most of my friends don't do much on MySpace it's nice to meet a whore-bot every now and then. Maybe I'll let her catch a glimpse of my USB dongle...

Beers and the User Experience

This week we hosted an event where we gave people free beer to bring their laptops and Join the Spank. The objective was to test the user interface and user experience of joining the spank and trying out the site.

We had 6 or 8 people, which was about a perfect number. The event was hugely useful and easily worth the $70 bar tab. There were many comments and little discoveries. Here's a sample of some of the more interesting ones:

• Some of the Ajax (fancy technology) was prevented a couple people from joining, so a lower-tech (and faster, actually) process for Joining is coming soon.
• Multiple people, once they logged in, ignored the orientation page and went straight to "Start a Spank." Not what I expected but oh so reasonable in retrospect.
  
• After spanking or adding a link people wanted to see their Wall. Once you get used to spanking you don't look much at your own Wall (you know what's there!) but it's of primary interest initially.

All in all, lots of good improvements in the process for our upcoming launch. I shudder to think how many people have tried and failed Joining due to the first part above! Though the positive flip side is that our growth rate should increase.

It also goes to show that this method of learning gives different results from the pipeline of feedback from friends and users (though that pipeline is quite important).

Update on Site Statistics

Some interesting news in the ongoing study of site statistics.

Fact: 42% of spankers have been active in the last 30 days. This number was about 91% in August. Did something go wrong? I don't think so. I think it's part of the business of building out the network. Your friends are what pull you to the site, and most people on the site still have only 0 or 1 or 2 friends. As the network builds, the average frequency of visit should build.

Fact: the average (mean) duration of a session on the site is 3.7 hours.

Wow! I have to go now so I'll be brief on this one. As you'd expect, the number is skewed by a very small percentage of very long visits. Also, it includes visits that may involve plenty of open browser windows.

On the other hand, this figure is calculated as the time between the first page load and the last page load of a session. So, if you visit your Inbox, spend 15-20 minutes viewing links, and then jet without any other page load, that was counted in the 3.7 figure as a 0 minute visit, not a 15 minute visit. In other words, there is some slop on both sides, but the figure is real.

Linkspank is sticky! Yay. That's a good Christmas present.

Spank Statistic

As of now, 19% of spankers have actually sent a linkspank. This percentage includes those individuals who merely sent a spank as part of a tutorial.

I had been estimating the figure to people as 10%, so it was nice to find that the truth was shinier than my expectation. But the most important question might be whether 19% is a great figure or one indicative of some failure.

I believe it's a good figure. It's much higher than the percentage of users of other user-generated contest sites that actually are generating the content. (The comparisons are difficult because not everything is obviously comparable but I still believe that statement is true.) And the number will go up, by virtue of user experience improvements and consumer awareness of the spank.

Of course, 19% is much smaller than the % of people who have ever shared a link by email or IM (north of 90%). We have a long way to go toward being as used as email and IM :-).

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 ;-).