I was writing a witness testament and trying think about how provide a uninterrupted & pleasing user experience. From the #witness-* groups on https://steem.chat all of us had a good understanding of what each of the witnesses is doing.

For example, this @bitrocker2020 replayed 9 nine times after which means, a minimum of 5 hours spend on it.

One thing I was trying to understand by reading comments was, how exactly did the users reacted. But, I realized, there was communities on discord and elsewhere who worked with members and handled the situation.

The people to ask for the impact of HF20 & how they responded to will give developers, witnesses and all the stake holders to decide on the best course of action will be the communities & curation trails.

So, here is a request to the communities and curation trails on STEEM platform to publish your feedback as end users to the technical community.

This is generally how usability testing (UX), A/B testing etc is done. The software or tools will be released to a smaller sets of people in a controlled fashion and we will collect their feedback either using programmatic tools or even by filling forms. In the blockchain scenario, this is not very practical as Hard Forks can never be released to a small group and do a controlled testing.

STEEM HF20 Feedback from communities

In this section I will give a write up on the list items the technical community will expect. For the sake of this excercise, the user base is split into 4 groups.

1. End users,
2. End users with software development background
3. Witnesses
4. STEEM Developers

The highest priority will be of hear from Group1 and then the feedback from Group2 can bring clarity in the final reports from the communities.

The three distinctive phases required will be

1. Problem Statement
2. Problem Specification
3. Design the solution

Problem Statement

Many might think that the problem is very easy to write. But writing down the problem in concise words will be the only means to arrive at a specification and finally the solution design.

After the planned Hard Fork 20 of the STEEM blockchain, there were unintended side effects & we need a permanent, long term solution to make sure that such events are not happening in the future.

Problem Specification

The problem specification needs data and information based on predefined questions/surveys. Designing the solution without a problem specification leads to expectation mismatches. This is a classic software development problem and in our (STEEM) scenario, we have a unique method to collect the data and arrive on solutions addressing the concerns.

The communities can help with the problem specification to make sure that we are seeing the same version of the truth.

What the communicaties can provide can be similar the following to but not limited by the 9 questions.

1. A clear definition how the problem impacted everyone. For example, there might have been fund raising initiatives happening. Was there any impact ?
2. How many of the community members planned to make a withdraw and buy something with it and it didn't work ?
3. How did communities helped to keep the STEEM users together ?
4. There was other platforms to which users migrated or at-least created accounts. Are they back yet ?
5. What will be non-technical user expect from the blockchain ?
6. What will be the feedback and suggestions from the users with technical background on QA, deployment process, Continuous Integration, TESTNET participation etc ?
7. How was communication from the stake holders ? How can it be improved.
8. What will you do differently next time ?
9. Finally, What if the user experience deg-ration that we experienced happens again?

Solution Designing

We have talked about numerous approaches to alleviate the challenges. Personally I will be publishing a witness testament based on precise data and will wait for couple of days to see whether there are any responses from the communities. Meanwhile will be continuing to work on the plans outlines in Witness update & suggestions for the future of STEEM.