We know how it goes. New apps come in; old apps go out. We had Busy.org, Partiko, and others, they stopped updating, now Esteem moves from Steem to Hive with a rename as Ecency, and they bring in an excellent change in looks.
The new website is looking great, and the mobile app needs some polishing, but it’s becoming the new simplistic look for Hive, and it’s promising for those who just want to browse without much struggle. It’s mobile-friendly, minimalistic, and, for someone who browses too much on PeakD and Hive.Blog, it’s utterly refreshing.
However, some aspects seem to me like they should be a little friendlier, like they should work a little differently, especially with a few years of experience of other Steem and Hive front-ends.
Here are some suggestions about features that should be/could be added, which would make it much easier for me to switch for my daily browsing.
One of my pet peeves about communities is how hard it is to find them. Esteem makes it more comfortable with a dropdown, but it only shows the most popular communities and doesn’t even include GEMS, for example, which is a major one that I use for most of my posts.
A solution for this is a quick lookup from the browser to the Hivemind database, which would request maybe 100 communities, index them by name on the front end and use Javascript to make it searchable.
The way this would work is a small search bar under Tags/Communities where letters could be written. Alternatively, once one writes hive-, one could write letters, like hive-GEMS, and have Ecency suggest a clickable hive-123123 numbery option for the lazy poster.
This is on almost every front-end except the default condenser. Upvotes and Downvotes have the same UX hierarchy. It shouldn’t be too hard for a stakeholder to see who is brave enough to press the down button on her posts. (looking at you, blocktrades 😒)
Right now, the upvote list is unfortunately only findable through the little person icon:
This is extremely unintuitive, as upvotes and downvotes are conventionally expressed with up and down arrows. And it’s also unintuitive because there is only one icon, making it impossible for the observer to know whether one’s post has been downvoted or not, and by whom, until we reach the last page, as is shown in the following image.
And it’s sorted in descending order, which means that the biggest downvote is at the bottom. This makes a lot of sense mathematically, but this is UX we’re talking about, not a math textbook.
When we look at our wallet, we’re isolated in the Hive world. How much do we have? Ah, 100 tokens called Hive. How much is that? Who knows. The lazy browser like myself will simply open up PeakD to check her wallet. I’m not going to open Binance and check the current trading price!
I made a quick (actually not that quick) mockup of how this feature would look like. It’d have a currency name, price, how much it has moved recently, its BTC and USD value, and, optionally, a small graph.
Another optional feature that I didn’t think about is a source link, something displaying where the price was gotten from (CoinGecko API, for example)
Something clear in Hive wallets is the massive abundance of transaction types and instances that can be made in a day. From spammers sending 0.001 Hive messages with “Hi, check out my app,” legitimate incoming and outgoing transactions, curation reward claims (made easy, fast, automatic, and very spammy by tools like hive.vote).
Most front-ends have, or wish to have, a way to filter these. Even in 2018 Steemit, Steemit Plus came out as a browser extension whose main attraction was wallet filtering and upvote/downvote amounts. Given that Ecency already has the latter, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to add a simple Javascript filtering for the transaction type. I could probably make it in half an hour, so I’m sure their devs wouldn’t have much trouble with this given that they’re more experienced.
Right now, the Ecency wallet is barely browseable for me, and I have to go to PeakD. So there’s simply no point in me trying to use Ecency for my day-to-day status check until this feature is added.
