Today I'll be looking at Coil, specifically the blogging aspect of the platform. Since this article is a review, I'll be focusing on various aspects of the blogging platform, as well as any critiques I may have. These things are not factual, and are merely my own personal opinions. Design and aesthetic (and essentially everything else) will differ depending on an individuals personal preferences.

With that in mind, let's get started. The first half of this article is going to focus on the good stuff, with the latter half focusing on things that could be improved.

UI Design

The acronym UI stands for User Interface, and is essentially the focus on aesthetics when it comes to the things we use. This term is mainly applied to digital design, such as websites, application, programs, etc.

It is in this User Interface where users interact with the products they use. As an example, the phone or computer you're using to read this has an operating system. In said OS, you're usually presented with either a desktop (for computers) or some form of homescreen (for mobile devices).

It's these desktops and homescreens that present to you a User Interface, displaying various different shapes and colors to bring context and ease of use to the operation of the device. Having a well designed UI allows users to more easily distinguish the various funcitons they can do, as well as creating an aesthetically pleasing look to your screen.

And all of the various applications and programs that you use in this space have their own UI designs. Some may look similar to the “main” design that you may find on your respective devices, others may have a completely different look.

When it comes to UI, designers usually strive for a balance of appealing visuals and functionality. Straying too far to either side can create confusion and irritability.

UI Design – Profile Page

Now, let's take a look at Coil with all of this in mind. We'll first look at the user profile page. I'll be using my own profile for the screenshots that follow.

Personal preference is going to play a big part in what people find pleasing to the eye, but as someone who enjoys clean interfaces, I can confidently say that Coil has brought us what other platforms have not: simplicity.

Sure, other platforms offer clean looking profile pages, but never to the extent we see on Coil. Here, we're presented with only the most essential information:

• A simple profile picture, centered towards the top of the page.
• The name of the author.
• The authors username handle.
• A description for the profile page.
• A follow button.
• A follower count indicator.

All of this is centered on top of one another, and is placed on top of a clean background. While I'm sure many users would like the option of displaying their own background, I personally love this clean look. It's simple, straight to the point, and offers no disctractions.

Below the profile header we find a feed of articles from the author. Sitting above this feed and between the profile header, we find four controls:

We are given the option of choosing the order of the articles. As far as I can tell, the default is New with no way of changing it on the creators side of things. This default makes sense though, so I can see why this setting option isn't available.

But, as you can see, we are presented with a clean, no frills interface. No sub-menus (apart from the one “Filter By” list menu) to sift through. Instead we have simple, quick buttons to change what we see in a single click.

After this, we are given a list of articles from the profile:

The simple design philosophy can be seen here as well, with each individual article having its corresponding title, the header image, the type of post (A for text, and a chain icon for links), as well as the date the article was published. To the left of each article we have the number of votes, as well as a single arrow to give the article your own vote.

All in all, the profile page is clean, intuitive, and to the point. And with this being a blogging platform, having full focus on the content is a big, big plus.

UI Design – The Articles Themselves

Now let's take a look at the articles themselves, and how they are presented. I'll be using this article for the screenshots.

Here, things get a bit more interesting. The writer has the option of putting a header image, which will be displayed at the top of the article in Coil, as well as being used as a thumbnail when viewed outside of the article, wether that's on Coil itself or on other platforms, such as Twitter.

The header image occupies the entire top of the page, extending to both edges. This gives us a nice spot to display the image, as its both impactful and is the first thing you see when opening an article.

Below the header image, we essentially have two parts:

• To the left, we have the users profile information, as well as a follow button below it. Sitting below this we have the votes displayed, as well as sharing options.
• Centered on the page we have the article itself, with the title, text, and any images associated with it centered in the page.

This is where Coil truly shines, and is essentially a dream come true for me when it comes to blogging.

Far too often I find myself reading on platforms that seem to treat the written content as a means to an end. They will use the article as a sort of hook, and proceed to litter the sides of the page with advertisements, lists to other articles, etc.

But here, it's the article. That's it. No cluttered sides, no ads, none of that. Just a pure focus on the content that you clicked on.

I've tried countless blogging platforms, and have always struggled with trying to create a clean and focused look to what I would write. Short of creating your own website, you can't really get this clean look anywhere else. And while some may find this aspect of Coil trivial, I personally wish other platforms that are focused on written content would take this same approach. It respects the authors content, as well as the reader reading said content.

Besides the benefit this provides to creators and readers, I imagine this type of design helps Coil as well. With the current layout they have for articles, the resizing that needs to happen between desktop and mobile devices should be extremely simple. With such a few amount of elements, and all of them being centered, resizing becomes a non-issue, and makes viewing Coil pages a wonderful experience, wether you're on a computer or mobile browser.

There's not much I can say when it comes to the UI of articles. It's just really good. I do have some suggestion on how to further improve it, but before we look at that, let's look at User Experience.

UX – User Experience

Wether you're making an application, website, or any other type of digital program, the one thing you want to make sure to get absolutely right is User Experience. This is usually abbreviated as UX.

What I mean by User Experience is pretty simple: the experience the user gets while using your product.

Let's use websites as an example.

I'm sure you've encountered a handful of websites that just didn't feel good. Sure, when you first clicked on that link and saw the website for the first time, it might've looked pretty good. It may have even caught your attention, if for a brief moment. But as soon as you start scrolling, you notice that it's not behaving like it should. Instead of a smooth, quick scroll that follows your input, you find yourself looking at a page that is scrolling in a janky or laggy fashion.

Or perhaps you try to click on the menu they present at the top of the page, and are greeted by an exagerated animation that lacks fluidity, and increases the time it takes you to click through the sub-menu.

This is bad User Experience, and is something that may seem irrevelant when developing digital products. But in reality, it is the glue that holds everything together.

The interesting thing about UX is that, if it's done well, users won't notice it. This is because good UX is designed with that very thing in mind: being invisible.

With good UX, you are giving your users a platform that just works. If you have good UX in your products, you're essentially guaranteeing that your users will continue to use your products, because they work as advertised. There are exceptions to this, such as that site you have to use to pay bills, etc. Here, you don't really have a choice as a user, and so you have to fight through the convoluted menus that they display because there is no other choice.

But when it comes to consumer products (either digital or physical), creating a good UX is essential if you want to keep your users. The cool thing about User Experience is that, if you have a good User Interface to work on top of, this becomes much easier.

Coil – User Experience

When it comes to Coil and its User Experience, all I need to say is one single word.

Perfection.

The reason why I say perfection is simply because, coupled with its good UI design, the entire act of using Coil simply just works.

Sure, some may be turned away by its simplicity, especially when looking at the text editor (more on this later), but it's because of this simplicity that we're able to get such a beautiful experience when using it.

When you want to do something on Coil, the actions you take on the website to do those things are given to you. No hassles or annoyances, it just goes straight to the point.

And really, that's all I have to say about Coil's UX. It just works, and that's what good UX is all about in the end.

The Editor

The editor that Coil offers is pretty good. In fact, when it comes to website editors and blogging, Coil's editor is easily my favorite.

However, when you first encounter the editor, things might seem a bit... empty.

Compared to your typical blog editor, the Coil editor looks very empty. When you create a new article, these are the things that you first see:

• At the very top of the page you have the Public or Subscriber Only toggle, which allows you to have the article either public to everyone, or locked to Coil Subscribers only. To the far right we also see the Publish button, which is self explanatory. Next to it (the three dots) is a submenu, giving you the option to either save the current draft, or delete it.
• Below the aforementioned toggle, we see the Add header image button. This allows writers to add a header image to their article. As previously mentioned, the header image is also used as a thumbnail for the article itself.
• The next section we see is dedicated to the article itself, giving you a Title input section for the articles title.
• After the title, you have the actual writing space. Here you can write, add images, links, etc.
• When your cursor selects an empty writing section, we see a small lock icon followed by the + symbol. We'll get to these two in a bit.

As you can see, the editor is pretty barebones. Some may find the lack of features a hindrance, but I've grown to love the simplicity it offers. Wether you're writing an article or reading one, Coil offers its users a simple, clean design.

Now, if you've never used this editor, you may be wondering where the character formatting options are? These simply pop up once you've selected any amount of text.

When it comes to character formatting you may find the selection rather limited in size. And while more options wouldn't hurt, the essentials that we see are plenty when it comes to writing a blog post.

I previously mentioned the Lock and + symbol, and these only appear if you select an empty row in the editor.

The lock allows you to section off the rest of the article to Coil Subscribers, meaning that those without this subscription won't be able to see content that sits below this locked section.

The + symbol is where you'll find ways to embed media, such as photos, videos, audio file links, and normal url links.

With such a simple and straightforward editor, I feel less distracted. Back when I used other blogging platforms, I'd usually write my final draft of the article in a separate word processor, and then proceed to paste sections into the platforms editor.

But with Coil, I have no need of using an external word processor. I now write the articles in the editor, and have started to even write the drafts themselves here, cleaning up the mess as I write the article. All in one place.

Again, the lack of options may turn people away, but I find that having such a clean writing place greatly improves ones focus when writing an article.

Improvements and Suggestions

This section is going to focus on the changes I believe could further improve the Coil Blogging experience. I'll provide mockups for some of these suggestions as well, so as to have a visual aid that can accompany them.

Categories

My biggest gripe with Coil is the missing categorization. And while the current simplicity in terms of article categories is fine at the moment, I feel like a category system could greatly improve the experience.

With the option for categories, creators would have an easier time organizing different types of articles. This also gives readers easy access when it comes to choosing specific topics they may be looking for from their favorite creators.

Implementation of a category system could be simplified as well, where we would treat each category as its separate “page” on a users profile. This would mean that users would only be able to choose one category for their article.

Here's a mockup of how this could look on the profile page:

Keeping in line with Coil's clean design, the categories could exist in the top section of the profile page, below the follower count.

In the above mockup I placed some categories that would apply to my blog, specifically: Crypto, Rambles, and Reviews.

The “All” button to the left of the categories would be there by default (if the user has created categories, that is). This would also be enabled by default, meaning that clicking on a users profile brings them to this “All” section, which is essentially the same as what we have currently with Coil. Note that creators would have the option of sharing links to a specific category “page”, leading readers to the creators profile page, but with the category chosen highlighted. (The “All” button in the mockup is highlighted, so highlighting a category would mimic the same darkened effect.)

To the right side of the categories we could find a “Show More” drop-down menu, where the rest of the creators categories could be found. This means that creators can create as many categories as they want, but only the first three or four would actually appear in the profile page. The rest would appear in the “Show More” menu.

This would retain the clean look of profiles, while still bringing funcitonality to the table.

Tags

While not needed, tags could further increase user accesibility when it comes to searching for topics. Tags could be displayed at the end of the article, hidden away from the main thing but still there if users want to further explore different topics relating to the article they're reading.

Here's another mockup on how that could look like:

They would sit at the very end, going below the “Subscribe to unlock” box, as is shown above. Tags would work in the usual way we're used to, giving us more relevant search results when searching for an article.

Editor Additions

In terms of character formatting, I don't really have any suggestions. While yes, more would be nice, the current selection gets the job done nicely.

But one function I'd like to see is some way to create seperations within an article. What I mean by this is having some form of separator (usually it's just a line) that one can place in their writing, which kind of sections off different parts of the article. This is a purely visual separation, and a simple thin line should suffice.

In this very article that you're currently reading, I tried implementing this type of separation with the use of an image. It's only a black line over a white background, and using this gives a similar effect. But a built-in function that provides this out of the box would be greatly appreciated.

Other Smaller Changes

Apart from the prior suggestions, here's a quick list of smaller things that could be implemented:

• The addition of social media links on the profile page, allowing users to visit other pages that their author uses (Twitter, Cinnamon, Facebook, etc.)
• The option to have titles in articles centered.
• A grid option for images. This could be as simple as having four images in a grid, where users can click/tap on a specific one to get a closer look. This could useful when showing multiple images linked to the context of what is being read.

Conclusion

In summary, I have been happy with what Coil has offered me as a blogging platform. But we cannot forget that there is so much more to Coil. Blogging, content monetization (be it YouTube or Twitch), Cinnamon Video, and more. The Coil platform as a whole is something I would have never imagined seeing, and the future of web monetization is something I'm keeping a keen eye on. Though I only covered a small part of Coil, specifically the blogging section of it, I feel that this part of Coil deserves its own attention.

And while I gave suggestions on how to improve things, I can't be too critical as this is a growing project. And with that in mind, the product Coil offers is one of the best I've encountered in a long.

Also, I’ll be publishing a sort of part 2 to this review in the near future, where I’ll focus on the monetization aspects of Coil. Stay tuned!

Stay safe out there, and thanks for reading.

The following content is exclusive to Coil subscribers

Continue reading with a Coil membership.