Unless you travelled to the moon, you should have heard of projectBlank and our brand new Leofinance UI. Do check it out at https://alpha.leofinance.io/. In this review which doubles as a contest, I would be looking at some cool stuffs about the new UI and how it will go a long way to help the leo team achieve the 5000 MAU in the nearest future.
I will start right away with:
My expectations from alpha.leofinance.io
I have a lot of expectations from the bran new UI we are already enjoying. Let me list just 3:
- Ease of use: This is the very first and important expectation of this new UI. I have seen many great projects like this that struggled because the user experience is not a great one. Cryptocurrency is still a new sector for a lot of people. So if things are made complicated, large-scale adoption would be difficult because its not simple or streamlined for users that are completely new to the cryptocurrency industry.
When it comes to ease of use, I would say the new UI scores a very high mark. Signing in is not complicated at all. Again, not does not take too many steps for user to make their first thread. When it comes to publishing a long post, the different sections of the compose post page, makes it easy to see where to type, the post preview, where to put the tags and the reward formula to be used. The explanatory tips in each section is also cool, so the user have an idea of what to do at any section. For example, there is an explanation of what tags are under the tags section as seen below.
- GUI preferred: Yes this is another expectation I have for the new UI. The use of more icons and symbols to represent controls and formatting. I remember that in Hive, we use a lot of markdown to format output. For example, the bold, heading and other markdowns are used to achieve a certain style of appearance. But the new UI need to allow more use of icons which many new people are already familiar with with in other social media.
I can see again that the new UI lived up to this expectation. I did a screenshot below of the compose thread page. As you can see, I circled the various icons that represent various markdowns for formatting. That includes bold, italics and heading. Even the upload image markdown is represented by image icon. This is industry standard when it comes modern UI today. I appreciate that the new UI comes with quite a handy collection of icons and this has made it easy for new users to enjoy the interface.
The strong and weak sides of alpha.leofinance.io
Here are the two strong sides I want to list
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Notifications: I really love the notifications which is a new feature of the UI. Its cool to be able to see what is happening with your threads and posts. The notifications come with different color coding to distinguish the activities like votes, replies and follows. With the notifications, you have nothing to miss.
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Bookmarks: This is another cool feature. before now, we continue reblogging posts as a form of bookmark so we can go back to the post later. The new UI comes with an important bookmark feature. When you bookmark a post, it stays in your bookmark page, and is not visible to visitors of your blog. That is cool. Makes our blogs look neat, while still allowing us to go back to posts we do not want to miss. You can see I have 1 bookmark below:
Let me list two weak sides of the new UI
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Mobile login: Mobile login for now is only possible through the Hive Keychain browser. That means if the mobile user does not have the keychain, they cannot login directly from their browser. The number of mobile users is very much larger than PC users. So they should be able to login from any browser without having to download the keychain app first.
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No mobile app: Again many mobile users are familiar with apps. The new UI does not have any mobile app yet. It puts off a lot of mobile users that are not comfortable with opening a browser each time they want to access the new UI.
Should the user interface look like Twitter?
The answer is NO! The new UI should create an identity of its own. Twitter has been existing and users know how it looks. Our new UI should not be a clone of Twitter. We want to make it better than Twitter. So it should have a unique look and feel, which should be better than what Twitter offers.
The benefits of increasing engagement on LeoFinance?
- Engagement creates a thriving ecosystem where new and old users will have a sense of belonging. Through engagement, everyone would see Leofinance as a thriving community.
- Engagement is a form of reward for content creation. When we engage with threads and posts of users in the community, they feel that their efforts at content creation is appreciated.
- Increasing engagement will help the leo team achieve its 5000 MAU goal. Because users will keep on coming back to respond to our comments.
- Engagement will be crucial to selling ads on leofinance. Without proper engagement, merchants would not be willing to buy ads or run promoted content in the near future.
Comparing the the new UI with https://leofinance.io/
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User experience increased in the New UI: The old interface has lots of content, links and sections. These might look confusing to a new visitor. The new UI is focused on the important aspects of the platform that users are expected to explore - like threads. In short, the new UI is simple and easy to navigate. leofinance.io is a little complex to a new user
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Account switching: The new UI has a lot of features not found in in the old leofinance.io. One of them is account switching. With this new UI, I can switch between the 3 accounts I manage, which is not possible in the old UI.
I choose alpha.leofinance.io because of the following:
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Simplistic approach: Its easier to find relevant components of the interface in the new one, than in the old one.
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Short-content targeted: The first thing you see when you visit the new UI is threads. Of course you know that short-content contributors and consumers are much larger in number than long form blogging. The new UI highlights threads first to the visitor and that is marketing our short-content project first.
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Light switching: In the new UI, I can switch between light and dark modes directly from the first page. Thats cool.
Suggestions to developer team
- We need a mobile app for the new UI. It may take long to come, but its worth all the efforts.
- Users should be able to login from their browser without having to download keychain first
- I would also like to have images library which will contain some of the most recent images uploaded by the user
Conclusion
The new UI is a cool innovation. It is not perfect yet. But while the team releases new features and improve existing ones, I will continue to use it and support its development.
Friends invited to join the contest: @ijelady, @beautybb, @marajah
Note: All images are screenshots from https://alpha.leofinance.io/
Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha
