Stumbling on Happiness...as an Entrepreneur

I've been reading Stumbling on Happiness. I won't review the book, but merely apply some of its observations to entrepreneurship.

Finding #1: Control, rather than outcomes, is key to happiness.

Corollary #1: To be happy, be an entrepreneur.

Finding #2: We are happier with irreversible decisions than reversible ones.

Corollary #2: When applying Corollary #1, do it boldly.

What Took So Long? (news feeds pt 1)

News on the Homepage

One of the motivating ideas behind Linkspank is that, when it comes to finding and sharing new stuff on the web, too many things are harder than they need to be. One of these way-too-hard things is reading news from a variety of sources by the use of feeds.

I could speak for an hour about news feeds (RSS feeds), sharing my relatively unique views. But suffice it to say that today we threw up a test of an original idea: give the user feeds! Don't make it just "easy" (because there is no easy way to choose a bunch of feeds), make it "done." With better versions of done to come.

We'll see how that goes. Not a huge change but I am excited about it as I am about everything.

Customer Service: MySpace's Tom, Pandora's Tim, and a robot

As part of my quest to sign up for every free service available on the Internet, I joined Pandora yesterday and checked it out.

On joining, I received this email:



An interestingly uber-personal, reply-right-to-this email approach to serving your customers. I personally thought it was really cool to receive Tim's email...but I am not sure that a similar approach would make sense for Linkspank. Pandora, after all, is not really about befriending people.

When linkspank was getting set up I thought a lot about Tom on MySpace. The idea of having a real person at the company automatically be your friend is a pretty brilliant one, I think. But the idea seemed (and still seems) a little passe to me now. People are less psyched than they used to be about friending someone online who they don't know.

Out of all this came the Spankdroid - an admittedly bizarre creation. Basically, we decided to have a mascot, rather than an actual person, be our spokesperson. This idea is little used on social networks!



The idea is that if you make friends with the Spankdroid, you then get messages from him about contests and so forth. Spankdroid is also like a little helper whom you can email with questions.

We did a lot of consumer research and determined that a robot wearing an Uncle Sam hat resonated perfectly with our users. Ok, maybe not :-). Rather, we do know that Linkspank is different, and it prides itself on doing things that big sites are afraid to do.... so we have a robot spokesperson.

Just some musings on this subject... :-)

Reactions to Google Presentation

Google released its version of PowerPoint this week, which you can try out with your Gmail account at http://docs.google.com. I jumped on the opportunity to try it, because I use the other docs services and also because I was doing some remote collaboration with people in Russia, India, everywhere this week and it seemed like this could be really useful.



My reactions, in order of appearance:

1. It's pretty cool
2. Not enough keyboard shortcuts, or I didn't know what they were
3. Default template SUCKS. The bullet points suck - too small, no spacing. Don't they know the 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki?
4. Line spacing and font size - probably THE key formatting issue in a presentation - is difficult and sucky.
   
5. I had a little trouble publishing, in that I'd publish, then edit my doc, and the published version didn't change, so I had to keep unpublishing and publishing.
6. Download to a zip file is cool. You can view your preso on your desktop or publish to a site.
7. Not everyone could view the file! In conjunction with #8 this put a huge damper on my experience.
8. You can't convert to microsoft ppt. In conjunction with #7, it means that I made a presentation and had no way of sharing it with one of my team members without REDOING the whole thing in PowerPoint. Not good.
9. On the flip side, this worked really well in IM collaboration with people working in India - I just IM'd them the link and they checked out the presentation. Cool.

Summary: it's good for collaboration, which is the key to any document. But its strength is ease of access on the web, and this is undermined by the inability to put into .ppt, especially given that it's new and has bugs. Secondly, it's easy to use, but still falling short on some of the usability basics of making a simple preso.

Will I use it again? Not sure. Maybe. I have spent lots of effort in the past getting team members onto Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs. They usually have lots of trouble getting their accounts set up and getting to the file. Sometimes it seems like it's worth it, but definitely not always. I believe in the product though and certainly it has a bright future.

I think their team should think more about Guy Kawasaki - a simpler online presentation tool is perfect for the 10/20/30 rule. It should be the strategy one-liner for their product, because it informs not just how you give presentations, but you sit down to create them.

As for the presentation I was working on today - a storyboard for a flash animation to replace our 1996 preview. So far I am PUMPED about it.

Banner Ads: 6 lessons; 3 winners

I'm calling the banner ad experiment to a halt. I give it a while and various experiments but here is the deal according to me.

The top performing ad: It's the shizzle, but still fizzling expensizzle

On Ad Placement

1. Network-wide banner ads suck. They are like sending everyone on the planet junk mail - it has some return, but you are essentially polluting. <1% can make money but it is pollution.

2. Domain targeting makes a difference. Your banner ads will consistently perform better on some sites than others. You have to experiment to find the right ones.

3. Search advertising is great, but it only works if you can offer something in a language that people are looking for on a search engine. (Sometimes people don't know what they want, or don't look for it on a search engine.)

Performer #2: The reason I tried banner ads, and as usual, someone else's idea at a bar.

On Copy

4. Some of my ads had the linkspank logo; others were clever and obscure; others were in-your-face. The best combination seemed to be "in-your-face, but slightly obscure."

5. White text on black background wins. I learned this in Ogilvy on Advertising and I recommend the book.

Performer #3: Maybe visionaries click ads more often than other people.

Summary

6. It's too expensive, and doesn't feel good, compared to other methods of promotion - like the contests.

What does it all mean to you?

I don't know, but I'll offer an opinion in an area that is interesting to many people right now - mobile phone advertising -- and especially mobile-phone promotions and contests.

Google has launched "Adsense for Mobile" -- namely, banner ads for mobile, so you want to know, should I be putting my banner ads on people's phones?

I would say, try going to the mirror and saying to yourself, "I run a junk mail business." If that sounds accurate, go for it! ;-)

People also have a blithe notion these days that by offering customers the opportunity to win something, you are immediately their friend and they won't mind constant contact from you. (E.g., constant text messages.) My dos centavos is that you should keep in mind that a good chunk of people - possibly 100% of your target market - will assume that it will be impossible for them to win, even if it is not that difficult (I learned this in the case of linkspank).

AdWords/the search context is just a way way better way to reach people, if it makes sense for your medium. Otherwise, go for some PR stunts and work on using your consumer evangelists - they WANT to receive your text messages. :-)

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

Possible New Prize: Jawbone

One of the most fun things about running the contests is the satisfaction of giving people their prizes. I have been able to hand some prizes over in person -- like djperry1973's iPhone, Naytrain's Bose Sounddock, nrogers' Sounddock, and MrZach's Apple TV.

Prizes are fun.

The Jawbone may have the makings of a future Linkspank prize.

I'm not sure if people would bust their humps spanking for a few weeks to win a Jawbone. But it might make a decent prize for something like the Spankathon. It's a bit cheaper than some of the other prizes, so maybe we will give away a few more. Many spankers are corporate types and hence they may salivate over this product. What do you think?

One other reason I was looking at the Jawbone is that the time is approaching to spruce up Linkspank's preview, which doesn't do any justice to the site. The Jawbone demo is awesome, and while it's a very different product from Linkspank, it's good inspiration.

Special Power Experiment: Flair

Today we're trying out a "special power" for spankers. It will be interesting to see if people like it (the only way to REALLY know is just try it I believe). You can see the official post for what the feature is all about.

It would certainly be possible to build an elaborate environment of special powers, based on Level achievement by spankers. I'm not averse to such a possibility, but I'd like to keep the special powers tied to the bread and butter of linkspank, which is links or content. Not everyone relates to winning points or achieving (in fact only a minority do), but everyone (on linkspank at least) likes good links and an environment that enriches that would be rich indeed.

More Fun with Menus

Lao Tzu writes:

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.

Spank Tzu may have written:

Governing a small startup
is like playing with a large pinyata.
Beat the crap out of it.

In other words, I am often pushing changes too quickly to be able to measure their effects scientifically, or let things take their course fully. :-)

Today's experiment is a further push with menus. I am proud (so far) of some of the recent menu changes described in this previous post, but I still faced a problem: the browse menus on the right weren't being noticed by people.

The problem seemed to be that the menu was located to the right of the page:

Browse menu at the right of the page

... where spanker eyes were not travelling to.

So let's try the menu on the left side...

Browse menu at the left of the page

Along the way, this inspired a shortening of the dark gray box at the top left, which was probably warranted anyway. (With regards to the other post, note the formatting of this menu somewhat like Facebook.)

The main trade-off of putting the browse menus on the left is that they have eliminated the "random profile" listings and the Spankathon/contest reminder. But I want to experiment with more sophisticated ways of sharing information about people and the contests in the context of the home page anyway... hence the experiment is underway! I'll get back to you on whether people browsing behaviors change.

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.

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 ;-).

Impending Sweetness

A new feature is in the works which I'm very excited about. Small, but enriching.

Pesky Labor Day is interfering with testing it and putting it up but hopefully it will get up there on Tuesday or Wednesday.