My application for @ned's Steemit Bounty Management Forum: Milestone 1: Design Phase
This is my partial* application for @ned's inaugural bounty, for design and implementation of a Steemit bounty system.
*It's a partial application because designing a bounty system for Steemit is very complex (at least for a blockchain n00b like me). There are many different ways to implement this system. I feel like I need more collaboration with developers and the business to fully understand the technical constraints and business objectives. As @jesta said in his post yesterday:
TLDR: This project, done right, really isn't as simple as it sounds.
Anyway, for now, the most valuable thing I can do to contribute is to post some lower fidelity (not polished) mobile web designs that outline my proposed Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience (UX). Once we can agree on the right content and feature set for the MVP version of Bounties, I'd like to polish the visual design and create desktop designs.
Assumptions and mechanics
I agree with most of the mechanics outlined by @jesta in his Steemit Bounty System proposal. If you haven't read it, please check it out. There are a few things that I want to challenge though:
I think that the Bounty system should live within steemit.com (and not on a separate domain). There are pros and cons of this approach but I think keeping bounties native to the steemit.com ecosystem will create the most long term value due to it's ease of use for most non-advanced users.
– I propose that it lives at: http://steemit.com/bounties
– In case bounties are required to live on a separate domain for technical or legal reasons, perhaps it could live on the http://bounties.steemit.com subdomain.I'm leaning towards requiring bounty creators to be registered and logged into Steemit.com to post a new bounty.
– This would make posting a new bounty very similar to posting a new blog post.
– It would also enable people to fund bounties using a similar mechanism to 'Promote a post' (instead of transferring funds to @bounty via steempay.io/shapeshift/cli_wallet commands as proposed by @jesta.
– Requiring registration for bounty creators should increase the overall quality and reduce the potential for bounty abuse and misuse by increasing accountability and Steemit reputation transparency (like that outlined by @mrosenquist here)
Design ethos
Since these designs are intended to live on Steemit.com, I've tried to adhere to Steemit's visual styles and retain it's interaction patterns for similar tasks. For example:
– Creating a bounty should be as easy and as similar as posting a blog post.
– Funding a bounty should be as easy and as similar as promoting a blog post.
Competitor analysis
To kick off the design process, I reviewed several comparable website earlier this week. Check it out here:
Information Architecture
Here's my proposed structure for the Bounties website:
Although I'd love to include a Bounty Hunter leaderboard and user profiles, I think we should keep the MVP as simple as possible for now and include it in a future version.
Content and features
Now that I've outline the page templates and structure above, the Content Hierarchy diagram below shows a high level view of content and features to be included on each page.
Mobile UX designs
Below are the mobile designs. Note: All copy, images and icons are placeholder for now.
Bounties home / landing page
Post a bounty (excluding milestones)
As per my previous post, adding milestones to bounties increases the complexity of the whole bounty system.
My gut feeling is to keep it super simple for version 1 and exclude milestones. People could still create individual bounties for separate tasks and link related bounties within the description.
This design excludes the concept of milestones.
Post a bounty (including milestones)
But if people feel strongly about keeping milestones, here is a design.
Bounty template
Submission template
Submit work
My bounties
A place to keep track of all the bounties that you've posted, entered, or watched.
Filters on the bounty home / landing page
Questions or concerns?
Message me on steemit.chat (pkattera)
Thank you
A few people to thank for inspiring me to design the Bounty System:
– @ned for kicking off this initiative
– @jesta for this post
– @steve-walschot for this post
– @blueorgy for image hosting (SteemIMG gets better and better!)
Acknowledgements
I used a few icons from The Noun Project. Credit to:
– Ryo Sato (filter icon)
– Kid A (calendar icon)
Some photos are from unsplash.com – a free image site.
Update: For anyone interested, here's a link to a ZIP file (36MB), which includes all the unannotated designs and raw Sketch file (Sketch is a vector based design tool, similar to Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop). Use it to build upon my designs or create your own. If you don't have a Sketch licence, you can download a free 30 day trial version.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6057864/Steemit-Bounties-Assets.zip
Great submission, thanks for getting this out there. While I was reading it, I was wondering what you used for the mockups. Not only did you answer that in the comments, you provided a zip of your work. You're a scholar and a gentleman!
Thanks @paxmagnus! I've been using Bohemian Coding's Sketch for the last few years for 90% of my design work. It's the most intuitive design tool I've used!
I'm repeating myself, but great work on this!
I really liked your competitive analysis the other day, and was intrigued by your selection of primarily freelance work platforms as competitors, as opposed to another format, like bug bounty sites.
I was curious what takeaways you had from your analysis of those sites, and how they impacted your design here.
Again, I think this is great stuff. I think your work and @jesta's stands above the crowd, but from different perspectives; his being a bottom up, somewhat technical, system design and yours being a high level visual exploration. They mesh well and I look forward to them coming to life.
Thanks again @paxmagnus
I started my competitor analysis looking at some of the leading developer bounty sites as listed by @kurtrohlandt (Cobalt, Bug Crowd, Bountify, HackerOne, Github Security). But as I cast a wider net, I started to resonate towards the freelancer platforms like 99 Designs.
My main takeaways:
– There are a lot of different ways to run a bounty/task based site.
– What's important is for Steemit to create one that feels native to its platform and easy to use for ordinary non-technical people.
@jesta's work is next level—I love the way broke down a complex challenge and figured out an elegant way to make the whole system work with @bounty bot!
Let me know how I can help.
Nice design concepts! Things are forming around the project. Why not team up and start, I can work/help on mobile app and we can port it to make web app...
Thanks @good-karma! I'd love to team and collaborate with other people. I'm still not entirely sure what is technically possible—I hope that this post creates some debate and discussion that leads to further clarity on what would best serve the community.
This looks great so far, and I bet a LOT of people can and will get behind this. Well thought out and it's great to visually see what you're after. Excellent layout so far!
Thanks @roses3913! Still a lot of design work to do but I'm happy to share it with everyone to build upon it.
You have put a lot of effort into this post and put forward some well structured ideas. Good luck with it and keep at it until you get tangible results. You have got a great start!
Thanks @roland.haynes. Yeah, some blood, sweat and tears went into this little project! Cheers
Why not to use the existing forum ?
http://forum.steemitforum.com/
Whythe steemit bounty system need to be decentralized ?
Why a system only for the steemit community ?
Great work, congrats !
Aside from the purity of purpose in a system designed explicitly for bounties, I'd imagine trust would be a huge component of why you'd want a system like this over posting to a forum. Without a decentralized system using some sort of escrow, and mechanics for minimizing abuse and resolving disputes, all bounty hunters would be at the mercy of the bounty creators' good faith.
This could be mitigated by some sort of trust and reputation system, but it would still have an element of risk and not be streamlined for finding bounties you might be able to claim.
Once the creator and the hunter agree on a solution, the hunter can describe the solution in a steemit post and the creator agree and give the price he will pay in the reply. I do not see the advantage to have all the database, the queries, the discussions on the blockchain.
I actually wasn't aware of http://forum.steemitforum.com/ – let me check it out to see if bounties could be elegantly integrated.
The bounty system certainly doesn't just need to be for the Steemit community. I designed it this way based on @ned's note in his original bounty post brief :
Based on this, it makes sense to me to build it primarily for the Steemit community and use established Steemit conventions and currency.
Owner of SteemitForum.com here. Let me know if you want to use it for anything such as this. It is open-source and everything. Email me: [email protected] if you want to talk.