Building Steemit and the Importance of "Connect the Dots" Ease of Access

Taking a slightly different direction from my usual content today to talk about something that often comes up, and often is a topic of discussion here: How do we build the community beyond the modest group of core users who are already here?

People have lots of different ideas, and that's great... but one of the things I often find myself considering is "what are the most common OBJECTIONS from those 'outside' whom we tell about this community?"

One of the most frequent I hear is that "it's just TOO COMPLICATED, with multiple passwords and resource credits and several different currencies" and so on and so forth.

If you have ever recommended Steemit to anyone, you might have heard something like that.

One of the things we'd do well to always remember is that we think certain things around here are fairly straightforward to understand because we use them all the time, but the vast majority of the world operates at the level at which the idea of "joining a new community" pretty much amounts to "Log in with Facebook," or "Log in with Google."

We can sing the praises of "blockchain" and "decentralization" till we're blue in the face, but those concepts make no sense to most people (and are even less likely to be IMPORTANT to them) until after they've pretty thoroughly studied and learned about them.

The main thing people want is to log in and start posting without getting lost or frustrated!

Really???

Yes, really.

One of the reasons I perhaps don't share Steemit as much as I could is that I know most of my friends and acquaintances well enough to know that they would most likely just shrug and give up because this is far harder to use and understand than most web communities.

When I first joined here, it took me several days of doing nothing but reading and clicking around before I even posted anything. And I have 25 years of web experience, 20 years of blogging experience, have built probably 30 web sites and have volunteered as a system admin and moderator in at least a couple of dozen web communities. And I was confused and lost for a while!

Playing "Connect the Dots"

I know there are a few initiatives in the works around the community to build a more user-friendly and intuitive front end experience for Steemit... and I only hope that the developers working on those truly understand the importance of Ease Of Use as a primary design component.

And I don't mean "ease of use" for a seasoned developer, I mean "ease of use" for that person who's used to "Log in with Google."

Because having that is going to be a key element if we ever hope to move this community our of the shadows and build something significant!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

How about YOU? Have you tried explaining Steemit to your friends or work colleagues? What was their response/reaction? Do you think Steemit would benefit from the start-up process being simplified for newcomers? Do leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20220528 08:34 PDT
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