Interesting feedback on BitShares from an outsider ...

[mike623317]

There are projects in the pipeline that will hopefully expose simpler, more mainstream interfaces to the Bitshares blockchain.

Cant wait for these to come online. I think we need this badly.

[svk]

This is mostly pretty good feedback and I agree with most of it. The main problem we have is that none of us currently working on the GUI are designers or interaction designers; we're developers who dabble in a little bit of everything and obviously the general UX of the GUI has suffered from it. The focus has also been on trying to expose as many functions as possible from the very extensive feature set that Graphene has, building in tandem with development on the backend. We're still not feature complete in terms of exposing functionality from the blockchain, and until then our focus will probably still be on that.

There are projects in the pipeline that will hopefully expose simpler, more mainstream interfaces to the Bitshares blockchain.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

@svk @cass can take a look at this and consider the suggestions.

[Pheonike]

It also should be obvious to us. The bitshares login page should have instructions on the what needs to be done and why. It should be an assumption the when someone comes to the bitshares site that they have not visited any other site about bitshares. If someone has to leave the bitshares page to figure out how to do something, that is an instant FAIL!

[EstefanTT]

I also thought so. I hope we can learn something out of it and do something based on the conclusions

[Akado]

Input like this is very valuable

[bang-king]

 

[EstefanTT]

I was speaking on polo trollbox with a guy who beleived BitShares was a dead project. I suggest him to PM me in the forum so we could talk about it if he wanted to know more about this not-dead-at-all project. He kindly accepted and gave me his impression after going throw bitshares.org, read the web site content, created a wallet and start using it. It's very interesting and we could grab some important points on his experience.

Here comes the message :

My recommend:

- Make a list of tasks that you think users should be able to perform
- Find some trial users that match your demographics
- Ask them to video record their session trying to perform the tasks from your list
    (randomized order is best but that's a dev thing from unit testing)
- Watch the videos and try to understand where the user is faltering vs succeeding
- Revise the UI to be more demographic attuned

I haven't studied your back office stuff (block chain & other implementation aspects) but the website promises a lot of features with clean, clear descriptions and iconography and the Wallet app just... has a bunch of fields you have to figure out

Some critiques on the Wallet app:
I have two accounts now (one several months ago and one yesterday) and can't tell how to switch between them
When I made my new account yesterday I put 100% in for witness fee because I didn't want to dig through the site and forums to understand the semantics of what I was deciding or how it affected my acct
Assets in a giant scrolling list all blend together and don't encourage investigation
Transfer has To, Memo and Fee fields but no amount field... send is disabled and nothing changes but the icon if I put my other acct as the To target
There isn't any nested context for the app navigation so the highlighted tab doesn't really reflect what I'm doing... only way to poke around is blindly clicking things that look like options and then hitting back to find familiar screens
Landing page assumes you know what each app is about, I have to leave the app to figure out what a witness vs committee is or click in to explore
I click on witness and it's like a Polo screen... maybe great for power users but there is no context or tool tips to understand that this is the runtime for the delegated proof of stake (which I only know from reading lots of other docs)


Check out the docs and follow the tutorials from the Maid release.

It doesn't actually do much (and several people in the box, including myself, were unimpressed with the features set comp to say eth) but the tutorials are clear, the call to actions are obvious, it felt good to use.

For what it's worth, hoping the honest critique is helpful.