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.