Whereas it's great that you're hiring more talent from the developer pool (And I sincerely hope the hires will be "internal" from the considerable talent already familiar with the Steem and the Steemit community) I really hope you would also consider adding someone from the Usability/Human Factors field.
I'm an old fart now — and I know well that Usability Engineers were high on the devs' "most hated" list when I work at Dell, several decades ago — but if you're sincerely interested in seeing this show grow beyond just a "specialized niche," it would be a good thing if more emphasis were put on the end user experience.
Seems you guys have lots of things working at the "wholesale" level (Apps, SMTs, etc), but I don't see much happening at the "retail" (end user) level.
Maybe you feel it's not a priority, but I hope you won't lose sight of the fact that a superb/positive end user experience is the greatest free marketing tool you can have... and how ultimately things go mass market.
I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but Farcebook didn't end up with two billion users because of developers, it ended up with two billion users because end users kept saying "Facebook is pretty cool-- I'm on Facebook, are YOU on Facebook?" Same holds true for the hundreds of millions of eBay users... even if a totally different market segment.
Just throwing that out there, for your consideration.
P.S.: Just to address one common "yes, but..." it's TOO LATE to hire usability specialists when everything is already built... they need to be there at the planning stages, otherwise it's an "eternal retrofit" situation.
Exactly right. And when you have a site that's barely usable at all, run by a company that holds the single largest stake in the underlying blockchain, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in investors nor does it convince the user base that they ought to stick around for the improvements that will never come.
Whether they want to accept it or not, Steemit is the flagship site for the Steem blockchain...run by the people who ninja-mined a massive stake in it so that they could make improvements along the way and use Steemit.com as the showcase for what's possible on Steem. When this site is what showcases their grand, experimental vision, it's not surprising to see that there isn't much interest in either the blockchain or the site/company. It's a very poor representation of what can be done with Steem and they really ought to be aware of this fact and realize that their lack of effort/caring does all of us and this blockchain a great disservice.
With millions and millions of dollars at their disposal...it's just a shame that more isn't being done. It's really sad. I'm not sure what else can be said. They could have hired some of the best designers and engineers in the industry over the past two years. But what have they done? What are they doing? Where's the vision? Where's the innovation? Where are the deliveries of their projects?
Can they see outside of their bubble?
Quick Answer: No
Long Answer: Definitely Not
I SHALL QUOTE LUKE:
"BECAUSE IT"S OUR BLOCKCHAIN!"
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@lukestokes/eos-is-alive-object-computing-steem
Let's just start doing the dev ourselves... ;-)
Mobile?
Did someone say Mobile apps?
WTF @ned...
Completely agree with both of you. We need something more user friendly and more mobile friendly. Please!!!
You got the point! Except of the last point, a good usability expert can get the current mess fixed over time if he gets full support from the team and has a good user interface designer in his team!