There haven't been a lot of releases on https://peakd.com/ recently let's discuss that.
The short answer is: A ton of UI / UX changes.
WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE COMPANY
There have been a couple vacations in the team and a bit of work by our team on supporting the amazing success of @splinterlands with our other website peakmonsters.com, we've also been doing small projects like upgrading witness servers and other parts of our infrastructure... however the primary reason for the delay of recent upgrades is actually a sign of some cool stuff going on behind the scenes.
The good news about PeakMonsters.com work is that it helps the entire Peak Projects company to be more economically capable of HIRING new developers (more about that at the end of the post)
A CHANGE TO PREPPING FOR UI UPGRADES
The biggest reason for the lack of the recent releases is that our next updates are pretty big and they're very visual updates and we have changed the way we are approaching UI/UX upgrades. In the past the burden for design was placed too heavily on @asgarth the developer and in order to free up more of his time @jarvie has spent dozens of hours learning how to use Figma UI/UX mockup designs in order to present those mockups to dozens of users or potential users and get their feedback.
In the past peakd.com has built and released fast and then spent a lot of time tweaking after release based on feedback. Now we're just gonna move a lot of the feedback up front and not have to involve as much time from the developer. (And get even more feedback from users and potential users)
Letting the users talk
So the month of august we have put most of our ideas into mockups and then spent dozens of hours on calls with users hearing them talk about the mockups and what they think. Not selling them on the ideas but just getting their feedback.
- What do you think this button will do?
- Now that you clicked it were you right about your intuition and what do you think of the results?
- Do these menus make sense?
- Do you understand all the menu options? (We are asking people that have and haven't ever been on peakd.com in their life)
- Does all the wording make sense?
- Do you have suggestions of wording that make more sense?
- Does the page look good?
- What would you do next on the page?
It's not just about if they intuitively understand buttons and menus but about putting things in the places that make things easiest or make the most sense. We have tens of thousands of PeakD.com users now and a lot of them have gotten used to certain placement of stuff... we have to consider them and we need to consider the millions of users to come in the future and what is also best for them.
After coding the changes we'll continue to talk to users (JUST LIKE YOU) for hours on end getting their feedback and test out the UI/UX changes on beta before we release. Getting their feedback of what they love and what would make it better. But we'll be doing a large part of our testing on people who have no clue about the site and we'll see if most of it makes sense.
To that note if you're super passionate about this sort of stuff you should reach out to @jarvie on discord or on the chat here on PeakD.com. I don't have a lot of openings this week and we've already done many many hours of reviews of current mockups but again if this is your passion then you're exactly who we should talk to. We'll need a good list for when we move from mockups to beta testing as well. This means you talking into a mic for sometimes up to an hour. You articulating your thoughts on different menus and buttons and layouts.
What areas of the site are the focus?
An ongoing challenge for PeakD.com is that we are going to be adding more features so how do we make a site that is complex feel intuitive to someone that has never been here before. We think a lot of that has can be done with a better menu system
What else to focus on?
- Better menu systems
- Better user settings interface
- Upgrades to layout of posts in the different view styles. (For looks but also for intuitiveness)
- More consistency in feature layout between areas of the site and specially the different content pages (topic pages, badge pages, community pages, collection pages, curator pages etc)
- More intuitive icons that users can remember and connect to actions ... and to repeat their usage throughout the site.
- We'll also start to develop new pages to help users find content easier.
MEANWHILE... ONBOARDING
All of what we've mentioned above is UI/UX aka design type stuff... but we need to carve out some time for some big projects like delegations to any PeakD user when they login to our site we can make sure they have the Resource Credits they need to do whatever they want with PeakD.com.
We also want to help with a super simple 1 click custodial sign up system. Not forgetting that our entire peakd philosophy is based around giving users true ownership... but hopefully transitioning users from the old style of websites where no one truly owned anything to helping them want to care about owning their content and connections and some crypto and thus be willing to have responsibility for their keys. Maybe for now all your mom wants to do is make a quick comment on your post and she doesn't care about true ownership ... so we can help be custodians until she does care and maybe educate her to want to care and then take control of her keys.
But the truth is... a UI upgrade to the site to achieve being even more intuitive to new users is a huge part of onboarding in our eyes and we're excited to have a pretty upgrade which seems to be getting a great reception from non-users.
ADDING TO THE TEAM
So that brings us to this small plea to the community for help finding a good fit for PeakD team. We are still constantly looking for the best possible new member of our team. Obviously with particular emphasis on developers... so our long list of features can go get released even faster on our end as our users are used to.
Here's the issue: it seems that everyone else is also looking for what we're looking for ... aka really good developers. It's a very competitive market and recognizing the right talent (and sifting through those that may not be good fits) and then offering that talent enough value (including cash) to come here, over another job, is not easy in 2021.
Our small team isn't really in a place that it can take on part time or beginner developers because they take up too much time to help coordinate and train and our time is already spread thin. I guess the exception to that rule is if they're already very familiar with HIVE and passionate about the project.
On the other hand we're happy to work with people as they do their own projects... we have worked with a lot small part time or one off projects that created features that all Hive sites could use.
- Tipping API by @cardboard
- Hiveonboard to help users get accounts easier by @roomservice
- BeeChat by @aggroed and the Hive-Engine team developed by @reazuliqbal
- Market features from @coingecko
- Search api from @good-karma
- Lots of node features and API ran by lots of different users.
We like this sort of stuff and as developers create more of these types of things for the entire hive community we're happy to integrate the features the community wants.
However integrating more and more outside features still takes work from our team and our own list of upcoming features is still pretty long and so we're really looking for is more experience developers who are self-motivated and can jump in faster and be self-driven to attack things on their own without slowing down @asgarth's own work. We like the type of person that has passion and a vision and can create and not simply code. We're just asking you keep an eye out we aren't going to rush at the expense of the wonderful system we have going right now so we'll wait for a great fit and we know it will come our way when the time is right. We can pay and hopefully they're passionate about our mission and purpose of changing social media and helping people have True Ownership.