kylemann
commented
3 weeks ago - re: the navigation changes this direction makes sense. alternative is to centralize the navigation, by moving the sponsor/maintainer toggle to the left nav atop
- the marketing site has the toggle too, but it only changes the header copy. perhaps iterating on the header copy clarifying usage for both cases, then can remove the toggle...
- i'm aiming to get thanks.dev it in front of some user next week (that haven't seen it) to get an idea of their perception. i'll likely have more notes/thoughts after that!
- re: coloring, that sounds more like a branding question. depends on your thought there... one example is if you wanted a dev-centric look: flipping the black an white to have a black/dark dominant background - that's a very dev-centric brand approach (think: vercel). not a suggestion, but just where my visual styling direction mind would go – recently read a study that 88% devs use dark mode. On the other hand, you're looking to appeal to non-dev orgs that are signing the check, so that could influence the direction another way (blue=color of trust)
- while the black/white might not be exciting, i don't see major usability issues atm – it gets the job done - so in summary, i'd suggest layering styling in based on your brand goals
vladh
nehzata
The thanks.dev website can be broken up into two parts: “for sponsors” and “for maintainers”.
We saw recently on Discord that this distinction is not very clear to some users.
I'm opening this issue to start discussion on this topic, and also to suggest two things we could do to make this better.
Navigation Changes
Say I'm a maintainer, and I log in to thanks.dev. The text “For sponsors” is ambiguous. Does this mean that this is the part of the website that sponsors should use? Or does this mean that I am configuring how the repos I maintain will appear “for sponsors”?
The uncertainty is amplified by the fact that maintainers might use both sections — they will receive money from sponsors, and pay upstream maintainers of their own dependencies.
The toggle at the top of the website is modal, in that it changes how the rest of the website works. This is confusing, because as a maintainer I have to toggle between two modes to understand everything that I can do.
It may be clearer to show a user all the available options, in the sidebar, grouped.
This new wording makes the available actions clearer. You can either “sponsor your dependencies” or “get paid”. And all available actions are always visible at a glance. You don't have to switch website modes to understand what you can do.
Many users will only care about one of these two things. For those users, we can at one point or another ask them how they would like to use thanks.dev. Depending on how they answer, we can either (1) put their main navigation section first, so maintainers would have the “Get paid” section first, or (2) make their unused navigation section less visible, for example by minimising it with an option to expand it.
Colours
thanks.dev does not really use any colours other than black or black-adjacent tones. This looks fine, but it introduces a usability concern. Colours are a good way of distinguishing parts of the website from each other, and if we can't use colours, we lose one tool for distinguishing things.
In particular, it would be useful to make clearer the distinction between parts of the website where you “sponsor your dependencies” or “get paid”. We could use colours for this.
Here's a general illustrative example of colour-coding different parts of an app.
We could choose one accent colour for all sections related to “sponsoring your dependencies”, and a different colour for all sections related to “getting paid”.
@nehzata @kylemann What do you think? This is just a general proposal, so I'm sure we can tune the specific details together.