Sharing Out Loud — Issue #1: LinkVault
Here’s a free idea for you, and some designs to go with it…
by Jason Li
TEN FOLD is a personal practice for design, writing, and problem solving. Every few weeks I will share high-level designs and commentary on one of my ideas. Everything is up for grabs but my content will serve better as inspiration. Now let’s get started.
LinkVault is a tool for curating and sharing online content.
I’m sure there’s similar tools out there, but this is my simple version:
- Curators create a LinkVault for any purpose they want (tech news, puppy videos, fashion articles, restaurants to try, reading lists, whatever)
- Curators populate their LinkVault with URLs
- Curators can choose to share their LinkVault URL publicly or privately. Anybody who subscribes will receive a daily email digest at 12am on the previous day’s links.
Above is what I have for the design from the Curator’s interface. Some notes on the design:
- Dropdown for account settings, general analytics (on subscribers, link clicks), and managing multiple LinkVaults.
- Manage button to edit LinkVault title and description, access subscriber analytics, and privacy settings. Maybe also an option to manually choose when to send out an email to subscribers, instead of a daily digest.
- Single input field for URLs.
- Option to browse through previous day’s links.
- Edit, rearrange, and delete options for the content
- LinkVault will automatically populate the Title, description, and source from the URL. Pressing the pencil icon will allow the Curator to populate the item with their own text.
Adding URLs should be super easy and Curators shouldn’t always need to return back to this page. A Chrome extension makes a lot of sense here.
Above is the interface that a public user sees. If I were to critique my own design, I’d say there needs to be a call to action on this page encouraging the user to create their own LinkVault. I would also like to see a subscriber count for social proof that I’m not the only one on this page.
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If the user presses the Subscribe button, a simple form appears. Again to critique my own design, I think there needs to be some explanation to what subscribing means and why we need an email address.
Above is what a subscriber will see in their inbox. I wanted to keep the experience similar to the web view but I also stripped out some UI elements because coding emails suck. In fact, the fonts might not even be rendered as shown.
There are many ways to price this tool. The freemium model made most sense to me. Additional features can include white-label, custom URL, and more detailed analytics on subscribers, views, clickthrough rates, etc.
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