What I did:
Went to my homepage.
What I expected to happen:
Find links to places I frequent (incoming/my shake/friends shake)
are given prominent placement on the page.
What actually happened:
The links to places I frequent are buried in a drop-down style
widget at the top of the page.
I like that it's easy to see what tools are available to me, but
I question the prominence of their placement relative to links to
the places I am most likely to visit on the site. Of course I only
have my own experience to rely on here, but I feel like the
interface would be more useful if those links to different pages of
interest to me were more prominent, rather than buried in the drop
down.
The links to the cool tools are great, but I would imagine that
these tools are mostly of interest to"power users". Even for power
users the tools are of maximum interest the first time you see
them. I haven't tested, but does the tools menu go away after you
click on one of the links? If a user has hit the home page 100
times and hasn't installed the tools, are those links really
serving a purpose for that user?
Maybe you've made them as prominent as you have to ensure that
as many people as possible are testing/using these new ways of
interacting with the site. That would make a lot of sense in the
short term... There's also the case of where to put these links on
pages like the incoming page where there is no sidebar. I like the
idea of having each of the links always available, but maybe you
have plans for more "pages" you'll be linking to?
Either way, if your goal is to optimize for intermediate users I
would argue that placing links to Incoming/My Shake/Friends shake
above the cool tools section in the sidebar on the home page would
be beneficial to most users most of the time.
Andre Torrez