BitShares Forum

Main => Stakeholder Proposals => Topic started by: startail on July 22, 2018, 08:18:30 am

Title: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on July 22, 2018, 08:18:30 am: Dear Bitshares Community,

The previous worker for the UI team, 2018-02-bitsharesui (https://www.bitshares.foundation/workers/2018-02-bitshares-ui), have come to its end and the team have submitted a new worker for a continuation of the work. During the last worker we've completed many things, including the addition of TradingView and a unified style guide based on Ant. We also had some great talents helping us with UX work.

We will keep the existing bounty program, including the requirements for UX work.

The biggest change for the new worker is that we will be three people with a fixed work hour, where I will take over most of the GitHub issue coordination and bounty program assignments. Bill Butler will continue with issue coordination and managing the funds and Sigve Kvalsvik takes care of code review as previously.

Let me present myself
My name is Magnus Anderson, and is known as 'startail' ('sc-steemit' on Steemit)

I have a long background in webpage and server management and maintaining. Most of my previous work is dynamic webpages with database backends, which involves languages like PHP, JS, CSS, jQuery and MySQL databases. I'm also well versed in Linux and server management, and I run both a Steem and a BitShares witness as well as a Bitshares public node.

Since the end of last summer I've worked together with the UI team, and made much work and some of the large changes to the UI. My involvement so far have given me great knowledge of the code, something that will greatly assist me when managing the GitHub issue planning.

I've come to learn a very good team of people and think we've found a good way to work together.
I feel we have a good group that can work together to bring great updates to the application.

I look forward to continue working for adding great enhancements for the Bitshares UI and hope for great support from the community.

New worker

This worker proposal will continue to enhance this effort by:

- Creating a more modular exchange experience.
- Migrate to ANT components complete with a style guide.
- Further refine the navigation moving away from the sub-tab model.
- Create an easy way for exchanges to brand their own wallet from the reference wallet.
- Establish a more methodical QA and testing phase before releasing each version.
- Create a series of automated front and backend tests to reduce resurfacing bugs.

New worker: https://www.bitshares.foundation/workers/2018-08-bitshares-ui
Previous closed issues so far can be found on https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/milestones?state=closed
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: Bangzi on July 22, 2018, 08:34:06 am: Voted! The community have high expectation on UI team +5%
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: fav on July 22, 2018, 01:26:51 pm: voted, of course.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: oxarbitrage on July 25, 2018, 07:41:25 pm: fully support this worker. voted for it.

there are obvious reasons for me to support it, i already know the team, it is the reference wallet, work here must continue.

but most important is that i was impressed with the improvements on the light wallet in the last time. i had an old version and installed the last just today, changes are notorious and all for good, everything i tried worked, something that was not the case time ago.

keep up the good work!
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: kimchi-king on July 25, 2018, 09:10:14 pm: Thanks for taking the time to publish this new WP.

I was chatting with Stefan Schiessl today about this and here is what I had to say.

I really appreciate this insight into the inner workings of the UI team. Unfortunately, from the community perspective the changes that we've seen have been mostly superficial. That's because we are not developers and don't know how much effort goes into making all the changes along the way.

Since the majority of the community uses the appearance of the reference wallet to guage the effectiveness of the UI WP the lack of major changes leads us to believe that the money has been misspent. I'm sure you can understand why we would think that way.

Bill was doing a good job a posting Steemit articles for every update, but it has been a very long while (4 months ago) since he did that so we just assumed the work had slowed to a trickle even though the WP was receiving funding.

Now I'm aware that this was related to a manpower issue, but this could have been communicated to the community in a more transparent way. Not everyone knows how to use GitHub so that's not the best way to keep every non-technical member on the same page.

I will contact a career specialist I work with to see if he has any UX/UI designers that might be interested in working with your team. The company I work for, CareerFoundry, is an online bootcamp that teaches UX design, UI design, and Web Development courses so we are always looking for new jobs for our graduates. I know we (BitShares) are looking for someone with more experience so I will also engage with our mentor/tutor team to see if they have any leads for us since the mentors and tutor we use have much more experience in UX/UI.

For now, I will support this WP, but if I continue to see very little changes made on the outward appearance and ease of use of the reference wallet I will strongly consider retracting my support until such time as my supports and I feel it's worth their votes.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on July 26, 2018, 04:14:34 pm: Thanks for your support and your feedback.

@oxarbitrage:
I'm happy that you've noticed the changes we've worked on during the last worker. Happy to see your support of our continued work.

@kimchi-king:
I'm glad you've taken the time to have a conversation about the worker with Stefan Schiessel and that you've decieded to give your support to it for now, and I hope I can help with making you able to comfortably continue to do so over the comming period as well.

Reading your response makes me understand that one concern is clear updates on what is going on, what has been done and what the future plans are. As new Project Manager of the team I can promise that this will change from now on and I will start to write at least monthly updates on this, making sure that everyone understands what is happening, and why something may not be happning. I've previously posted updates about releases of the client on Steemit, something I'll also do as part of my new assignment.

I believe that while the current github setup, with issue and hour tracking, have been thought to be transparent enough we can definetly find ways to be even more clear. We are paid by the bitshares community after all, and should provide some details on what is happening.

Reading that you have potential UX designers that could help out with designs to be worked on is a really good thing, as we've so far had to few people with this skill on the team. We've started to recruit some new people, but we're always interested in having a buffer for now.

Right now we need to coordinate the team with enough work and UX designs to be worked on that we can see the improvements that the community wants and deserves.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: kimchi-king on July 27, 2018, 12:26:12 pm: @startail

I'm really looking forward to what your leadership will bring to the community.

I've located what I consider a qualified UX/UI designer who has experience designing for the Monero wallet and website. I've passed his details to Gibbs. Additionally, I have sent him all the links he needs to get started working on outstanding UX issues on GitHub.

Here's the link to his portfolio. germanysbestkeptsecret.com
Here's the link to his work for Monero on GitHub. https://github.com/GBKS/monero-wallet-design
Here's the landing page he designed for Monero. https://www.exploremonero.com/
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: R on August 04, 2018, 11:27:18 am: I fully support this worker proposal, it's highly productive and allows for community oriented bounty claims.

@kimchi-king - I don't get how you can claim this is misspent money nor how you've failed to noticed any of the changes that this worker has brought to the reference wallet implementation. I've easily had 10+ of my own issues addressed and resolved via the bitshares-ui repo/worker in the last year, plus the UI has undergone large changes (see tradingview charts, ant design, increased responsiveness/efficiency, new modal pop-up modules, etc).

---

If I were to provide one suggestion for improvement, it'd be that bug reporters aught to get a very small % of issue bounty reward, for bringing an issue to the table that was worthy of implementation. It'd attract functional testers and encourage more users to report their annoyances with the UI if they knew they'd get a couple bucks for their time writing up the issue.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: kimchi-king on August 09, 2018, 12:21:26 pm: Quote from: Customminer on August 04, 2018, 11:27:18 am
I fully support this worker proposal, it's highly productive and allows for community oriented bounty claims.

@kimchi-king - I don't get how you can claim this is misspent money nor how you've failed to noticed any of the changes that this worker has brought to the reference wallet implementation. I've easily had 10+ of my own issues addressed and resolved via the bitshares-ui repo/worker in the last year, plus the UI has undergone large changes (see tradingview charts, ant design, increased responsiveness/efficiency, new modal pop-up modules, etc).

---

If I were to provide one suggestion for improvement, it'd be that bug reporters aught to get a very small % of issue bounty reward, for bringing an issue to the table that was worthy of implementation. It'd attract functional testers and encourage more users to report their annoyances with the UI if they knew they'd get a couple bucks for their time writing up the issue.

You just need to ask the community how they feel about the progress made thus far and you will quickly learn how disappointed people are. They are expecting UI/UX changes to be made that allow the wallet to be easier to use which will lead to greater adoption. Instead we get a bunch of resolved bugs, but very few design changes that offer a better user experience. I know the reference wallet is supposed to present all features offered, but why not bring back a well designed "Easy" wallet version?

You talk about TradingView which took forever and a day to be implemented. We're glad to see it added to the wallet, but without a complete redesign of the rest of the wallet the addition of TradingView doesn't really help very much. It's like adding a really nice paint job to an old car without first ensuring the body is without dents or rust spots. it looks cool at first, but then people start noticing that things aren't as nice as they could be.

I've recently discovered that they lacked designers and developers which explains why certain things fell off the table, but the lack of transparency only made our negative perception that much worse. Let's see what Startail and his team can do during the coming months.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: R on August 10, 2018, 10:12:58 am: Quote from: kimchi-king on August 09, 2018, 12:21:26 pm
You just need to ask the community how they feel about the progress made thus far and you will quickly learn how disappointed people are. They are expecting UI/UX changes to be made that allow the wallet to be easier to use which will lead to greater adoption. Instead we get a bunch of resolved bugs, but very few design changes that offer a better user experience.

People really need to do more research on the contents of worker proposals then before they vote perhaps? Big new exchange redesigns and user studies are great, but maintenance of the current released codebase is highly important & it's not a task covered by either of the new Bitshares exchange redesign workers which push their own maintenance off to future worker proposals.

Quote from: kimchi-king on August 09, 2018, 12:21:26 pm
I know the reference wallet is supposed to present all features offered, but why not bring back a well designed "Easy" wallet version?

There is the 'basic' web view mode, and there are several android wallets with simple interfaces, if you don't think such work is out of scope of this worker proposal, then why not raise an issue on bitshares-ui requesting such a feature and perhaps offer to complete the bounty yourself?

Quote from: kimchi-king on August 09, 2018, 12:21:26 pm
I've recently discovered that they lacked designers and developers which explains why certain things fell off the table, but the lack of transparency only made our negative perception that much worse. Let's see what Startail and his team can do during the coming months.
I don't think it's fair to claim there's a lack of transparency - what do you specifically refer to? I find the operation of bitshares-ui repo maintenance by this worker proposal highly transparent & the workers easily contactable. If you go on the bitshares-ui github repo then you can see everything this worker is doing, check the issues, commits, branches, pull-requests and the project boards to see what's happening & if an issue you're interested in has no traction then voice such concerns in the issue.

Your exchange redesign concerns/criticisms would be most appropriately voiced in the following bitshares-ui exchange redesign github issue: https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1477
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: spark on August 15, 2018, 03:04:49 am: Sadly, I must agree with Kim becuase unlike customminer I am not in the inner circle, so my bug ID and bugfix contributions to the repo are derided, my bounties reduced, and I have been openly called a dick by the project manager here for simple discussion.

My words, my time, on github issues has been fully erased. Really, really unlike any other open source repo on earth.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: R on August 15, 2018, 08:46:54 am: Quote from: spark on August 15, 2018, 03:04:49 am
Sadly, I must agree with Kim becuase unlike customminer I am not in the inner circle, so my bug ID and bugfix contributions to the repo are derided, my bounties reduced, and I have been openly called a dick by the project manager here for simple discussion.

My words, my time, on github issues has been fully erased. Really, really unlike any other open source repo on earth.

Can you provide examples of your issues being fully erased? AFAIK it's impossible to outright delete issues - they can only be closed (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3081521/how-to-completely-remove-an-issue-from-github). I don't see any rejected/closed pull requests in the last few months neither?

What's your github username on the repo so that I can see what you're talking about?
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: sschiessl on August 15, 2018, 02:40:35 pm: Probably referring to e.g.

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1529

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1570

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1634

The insult happened, could not find it now. It was more than simple discussion though.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: Digital Lucifer on August 16, 2018, 06:58:51 am: Quote from: sschiessl on August 15, 2018, 02:40:35 pm
Probably referring to e.g.

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1529

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1570

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1634

The insult happened, could not find it now. It was more than simple discussion though.

You cant find it because worker manager/repository manager can delete, hide or even alter/edit comments.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: R on August 16, 2018, 01:26:54 pm: Quote from: Digital Lucifer on August 16, 2018, 06:58:51 am
Quote from: sschiessl on August 15, 2018, 02:40:35 pm
Probably referring to e.g.

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1529

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1570

https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1634

The insult happened, could not find it now. It was more than simple discussion though.

You cant find it because worker manager/repository manager can delete, hide or even alter/edit comments.

It would actually appear to be here: https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues/1529#issuecomment-398521094 (one of the quoted hyperlinks)

Not deleted. fake news === fake drama.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: xeroc on August 16, 2018, 01:38:15 pm: It may be worthwhile adding a "code of conduct" to the bitshares-ui repo just to have something there that you can argue *with*
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on August 18, 2018, 10:52:14 am: Adding a code of conduct to the repo would be a good thing. I will make sure we apply one soon.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on September 05, 2018, 04:40:04 pm: Bitshares UI supports Beet in long-term development

A recent addition to the family of Bitshares applications is the Bitshares Companion application, now called Beet. The app was initially drafted and by clockwork, which handed over the source for the Beet application to the community.

The goal of Beet is to make it easier for third party applications to work on the bitshares network, without having to worry about handling the private keys on these applications. Beet will be the handler for signing the transactions, while the application using it can focus on usability and functionality.

The bitshares teams believes that Beet fits nicely under the current UI worker in long-term development. Beet development will for the moment be supported by the UI worker and agreed to compensate for the initial development as source was released to the community. The project manager of the UI worker will handle issues, assignments, compensations in the same way as the current UI repo works today.

We see great potential of development for Bitshares applications with the addition of Beet. While Beet is still in very early alpha, having it compensated under the current UI worker will make development speed up, improving the ecosystem.

Beet Gihub Repo, https://github.com/bitshares/beet

The UI team also wants to inform that it will receive some extra support by Stefan Schießl during the month of August as Sigve is on a well-earned holiday.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: xeroc on September 05, 2018, 04:45:40 pm: +5%
This is excellent news!! Looking forward to using beet more actively!
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: sschiessl on December 21, 2018, 03:27:37 pm: A quick summary of the ongoings in the BitShares UI worker

https://whaleshares.io/bitshares/@sschiessl/the-bitshares-ui-worker

The worker is currently inactive, which effectively means the development is stopped due to lack of funds. Please have a read, and if you like the latest progress please consider voting for it!
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: iamredbar on December 21, 2018, 10:36:21 pm: I have made sure that I am currently voting for this proposal and urge others to do so as well.

This has been a crazy year and I am not deterred by not having a “weekly” update or something of the sort.

If you observe Github, you can see that this team has been hard at work. They have earned my trust to continue to improve and expand on the BitShares UI.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on December 22, 2018, 09:36:05 am: @iamredbar thank you for your continued trust.

It has been a crazy few months, and we've had MUCH work to do on the UI. Thanks to the funding from the community we've been able to have plenty of community support by react developers in various stages of exprience. The main team have had plenty to do and learned alot along the way. Remember that we've all started in the middle of the project at some time or another, none of us was in the start of this.

Just during the last month of the year we had plenty to do to add functionallity for globally settled assets that was added to the core a while ago. Since bitUSD, and plenty of other assets, suffered this from the fall of BTS price. The whole team enganged in added new functions and test them to make sure they worked as intended.

Despite comprehensive testing tries, we do sometimes have issues coming up afterwards. One of the biggest changes we did was also to change the release schedule to also have a 'Release Candidate' before the actual release. We do our best to catch issues before they get out to the main release, but since the team is still not a large one, we rely heavily on othes to help us test. Once an issue is identified in a release candidate that is major we will make a fix for it before we do another standard release. This has been a big change, and something we've had to grow into and find good ways to work with.

To visualize how much issues that have been created, addressed and closed by the team since the community started funding the worker of Bitshares-UI.
We appreciate the support from the community to be able to do this work, and to continue enhancing the UI.

(https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmfMCUBSFKZa812RbQsCL3SjES2KNPbTDwkzUE63Un91r4/image.png)

Repository activity for the last month.

(https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZsbV2m2CEBuD76MUNZR5oGsNNHnzdRQDCVs6phubDuF2/image.png)

Sources:
- https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/pulse/monthly
- https://repohealth.info/report/bitshares/bitshares-ui
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: Digital Lucifer on December 23, 2018, 03:02:21 am: Thanks to few individuals going around and promoting this worker, believe that since this early AM, BitShares UI Worker is Active and just ~2M votes above refund400k.

(https://content.screencast.com/users/YourWBS/folders/Jing/media/9fcd075d-ede2-4472-bc45-a0fbf138794c/2018-12-23_1004.png)

Please keep giving in Your votes.

Chee®s
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: iamredbar on December 23, 2018, 03:38:17 am: Quote from: Digital Lucifer on December 23, 2018, 03:02:21 am
Thanks to few individuals going around and promoting this worker, believe that since this early AM, BitShares UI Worker is Active and just ~2M votes above refund400k.

Please keep giving in Your votes.

Chee®s

This is great news right before the new year. Here's to a great 2019!
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on December 23, 2018, 02:28:24 pm: Quote from: Digital Lucifer on December 23, 2018, 03:02:21 am
Thanks to few individuals going around and promoting this worker, believe that since this early AM, BitShares UI Worker is Active and just ~2M votes above refund400k.

Please keep giving in Your votes. [/center]

Chee®s

Indeed appreciate these that help us promote this worker. At the moment the worker have passed the refund100k worker as well.
Looking forward to a great 2019 with great progress and development for Bitshares!

Happy holidays everyone.
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: iamredbar on December 25, 2018, 08:04:07 pm: ~~How could you not want to vote for this worker? Look at this easter egg:~~

I found this Easter egg in the UI. While being a cool feature, this was not implemented by the UI team but by the underlying software. I found it interesting, but after reading about the Easter egg the situation is a little more serious than that.

This is all addressed below by @startail

(https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZvp3JMRyyUngP4JvhwDwh5475oX9mDohjbrLNTS2dqCD/1%20(1).png)
Title: Re: [Worker Proposal] Bitshares UI Renewal
Post by: startail on December 25, 2018, 08:35:33 pm: I'd like to address the Easter egg that was visible in the application today.

The UI decided a few months ago to start implementing a style guide framework. We decided to go for ANT Design.

One of the coders at ANT Design decided that it would be a great idea to implement an Easter egg feature, without notifying this in the change log. To include a thing like this in production build on a framework that is used in a wide range of applications is a very bad judgement on their part. There was a hard coded feature in ANT Design that made this "feature" activate on the 25th of December. They have since the appearance of this "feature" released an official apology and removed the code responsible for it.

Their reputation did drop with this, as quite a large amount of repositories relying on this started reporting issues with this.

Let me be very clear, we take this most seriously.
We will have their work looked at before merging for now.
In the future, as we've finished implementing the new framework (the bitshares-styleguide), we would have the possibility to change freely on what dependency framework we would rely on.