A product wish list for the Steemit team 🚀

Steemit is only in beta and the early traction is impressive. That said, there's a lot of product and design improvements to be made to increase user growth and engagement (the only two things that really matter for a new tech product). 

Here's a few of the highest impact areas for improvement and suggestions (listed in order of priority):

Onboarding messaging (high priority): 

When a new user visits Steemit for the first time, they are met with a big "Welcome to the Blockchain" banner. "Welcome to the Blockchain" doesn't describe what Steemit is nor does it mean anything to most people. 

Suggestion: Change the welcome message to describe what Steemit is as clearly and concisely as possible:

Welcome to Steemit. A community operated social network that rewards you for your contributions.

Discovery (high priority):

Discovering good content on Steemit is difficult. Currently, users find good content by monitoring the "trending", "active" and "new" categories on the main page and searching individual tags and users. This is not very convenient and requires a lot of time to do it effectively.

Suggestions: Add a "follow" stream for users. The "follow" button is already live on the site, so I'm sure that the stream is in the works. Also add a "lists" stream and allow users to follow curated lists (similar to Twitter lists). I believe lists on Steemit could be more widely used than Twitter lists because of the incentives to identify good content early. Lists and the follow stream will increase engagement (posts/day, replies/day, etc). 

Note - it looks like @originate has the same idea and is building a cool product called Steemshare. @Ned also talks about this among other product improvements in an interview here.

Branding (low priority): 

Steemit could benefit from a mascot that represents the brand. Reddit has Snoo (aka the Reddit alien) and Twitter has the Twitter bird. What will Steem's lovable mascot that makes the brand more relatable be?

Suggestion: Stevie the Steem Engine. I'm not a master at branding, hopefully this get's the ideas flowing :)

Improve search (low priority): 

Search on Steemit currently relies on Google and is very basic (no advanced search capabilities and ability to filter results).

Suggestion: Add advanced search (allowing users to search by username, tag, etc) and also add the ability to filter results by time, upvotes, comments, etc. 

One of the great things about a community-operated social network is that we can all be de facto product managers, suggest product and design improvements and see the good ideas surface to the top (while also getting rewarded for it). Make your own #productwishlist if there's features or product enhancements you think would add significant value to the community.