Steemit became so awesome platform, it's just blowing my mind. It's fresh, trendy and agile. I love the way the whole structure is working, and the idea of getting payed by adding value is the most important one.
However like all new platforms, especially the ones that becomes incredibly popular Steemit has a lot of things to work on.
You probably noticed that the actual website encounters performance issues. No, I don't tell that the website is slow. It will be wrong because it's fast like crazy. But chances are you noticed some errors that are displayed from time to time during the last week or so.
Obviously, Steemit reached the point where security and scalability are two most important questions to resolve. The number of users is growing exponentially, which is insanely great. The more people know about it, and share their experience, the more trusted community will become. I believe it’s only a matter of time when Steemit will have its first million of users.
At the same time, people trust software, which works all the time correctly. To clarify here, I mean that all of the errors and notifications should be, in my opinion, dedicated and directed to ordinary people.
To be honest, I’m studying for a software programmer, and I can understand what it takes to create such an astonishing project, and keep maintaining it in an excellent fashion. I adore Steemit team, and I can only wish you guys patience and persistence in improving and developing the platform and community around it.
However, from a stand point of normal human being to observe Internal server errors or unavailable service is simply unacceptable, and here is why. Imagine tens of thousands of people are signing up every single day on Steemit, which is going to happen very soon. Imagine all of those people are creating posts, upvoting, commenting, in others words using Steemit. And all of a sudden, when they are writing their post or browsing through their favorite category, they see 503 or 500 or whatever. I personally, will be frustrated, then pissed off, then eventually I may calm down, and will try to post or read again after refreshing the page. However if this exact same thing is going to happen ones a day even, I would rather quit than stay. That’s just how human psychology works.
Unless there are clear explanations in a friendly way of what is going on with the website, I will freak out because of some weird error that is displayed on my screen. Not everybody can understand what does those errors mean, and they shouldn’t. They just have to be insured that the software/website is going to be okay.
A really cool example is a dribble 503 page. It’s still telling that the server is temporally unavailable but in a more attractive and sociable way, not a geeky one.
I know it may sound like not a big of a deal. But hey, who tells that there is has to be something big happened in order the customer leave you. Please, take it more seriously. I, and I guess thousands of people are going to say a huge thank you. It takes about a couple of minutes of work but it will save lots of complaints in the future.
There is also one thing concerning notifications that appear on the left side, when you do something wrong or unallowed. Please, use more socially accepted terms to explain what you mean. Less technical language is the key. If you really want to make Steemit a global platform, it has to be easily understood by others.
For instance, when a person tries to upvote lots of posts rapidly, there has to be a clear message like this, “You cannot vote more than 1 post per second (or whatever the interval is)”, instead of Transaction failed. Elapsed_seconds >= ...
Therefore, my conclusion and proposal I would say that focusing on user experience is very important. This is social network website, or at least it can grow to such, which means that the more users are satisfied, the more they will come back. And having in mind that Steemit has a potential to be used by millions of people, make sure you make it as simple, as friendly, and as socially acceptable, as possible.
