We make mistakes. Even though we continue to get great positive feedback for Only Human, we are determined to find more and more ways to improve the user experience.
Sprint 2 begins this week and here are some of the mistakes we’ve made while running Only Human and how we plan on fixing them:
Posting without Registration
We made the mistake of: Solving problems we didn’t have
One of the biggest hurdles of starting a community is easing the registration process. There’s countless reasons why we chose to make users register but the main reason was the fear of spam and irrelevant posts. While it has reduced the amount of spam to zero, its stifled growth by restricting people who want to share their story immediately and don’t want to register up front.
We were trying to solve the spam problem before we even had a spam problem and that came at the expense of alienating casual users. So we’re coming up with a new system that eases that joining process and promotes growth in the community.
Rating System
We made the mistake of: Not understanding how important feedback and validation is to users
There’s many different motivations for posting a story on Only Human. But one we didn’t account for in the design stage was that users like getting multiple forms of feedback. People want to know that their story has been heard and how it affects other people in the community. Its a basic human desire and we haven’t done a great job fostering it. But that will change with this new rating system.
The new rating system will be a two-fold improvement to Only Human. In one sense, it will give users more ways of providing relevant feedback to other users. It another sense, it will provide an extra way to sort through all the stories and find the type of content you want faster.
But wait…there’s more!
These are just a few of the ways we’ll be improving Only Human in this next sprint. If you have anymore suggestions you can personally email both me and jason. Thanks for your support and stay tuned.
