The new Minds interface is here
Minds,
Over the past year, our distributed team has been in the lab tirelessly developing the overall interface and user experience on Minds. We are truly proud to release phase one of this project to you today. A mountain of your feedback has been integrated into the changes you are about to see.
The initial rollout has been in Canary Mode for the past month. Anyone is free to become a Canary and help test new features. We are tracking all further development on Gitlab epic #133.
Please keep in mind that this is just the first phase of this rollout and not everything will be perfect. In the second half of this blog, we provide an outline of what we are already planning in the coming months.
Here is an overview of what’s new:
Navigation
* New grid structure optimized for web and mobile devices
* Easier to get to where you need to go
* Dramatically improved performance on mobile app
* Improved light and dark modes
Discovery
* New landing page highlighting top content for you
* Greater emphasis on content with comments to encourage more discussion
* More focus on trending hashtags across the network
* No lost functionality from prior discovery system
Search
* New layout for easier navigation
* Improved top algorithm and results for groups and channels
* Results based on both keywords and hashtags
* Added recent search history
Composer
* Custom thumbnail editor with titles and descriptions
* Unified post editing system for status, videos and images
* Hidden or visible hashtag options
* Upgraded scheduler and monetization tool
* License selector and visibility controls
Channels
* New layout for streamlined navigation
* Easily filter your feed by content type
* New About section with more details and space
* New channel editing wizard for better experience
Analytics
* Keep track your earnings, engagement, traffic and trending content
* Foundation to add more analytics as requested by community
* All open source and privacy respecting infrastructure via ELK stack
Minds Pay (previously called Wire)
* New brand name and modal design
* Added Bitcoin, Ether, Stripe support in wallet
Wallet
* New layout for easier navigation and onboarding
* Now supports Minds Tokens, Bitcoin, Ether and your local currency
* New graph of token balance
* It just looks better
Settings
* New layout for easier navigation
* Foundation to build on top of as new settings are introduced
Activity Posts
* Cleaner post designs in all feeds with option to add a title and description
* Relative timestamps
* Fixed vertical height in the Boost rotator for smoother experience
* Improved modal pager for clicking through media galleries
* Merged in full view activity pages to be same style as feed views
* Ability to enter a comment without having to press comment icon
Minds Pro
* New tile layout to ensure all post entity types properly render
* Improved settings and management tools
What's Next?
Our plan is to continue this type of work for all of our features with the goal of achieving total parity between our mobile and web applications. We are confident that we will be able to deliver an improved experience across the board on all platforms over the next few months.
In the next phase of this UX overhaul, we plan on tackling:
* Ability to search individual channel
* New “Shop” tab to sell premium memberships and services
* Ability to search specific group
* New layout for easier navigation
* Improved creation and onboarding flows
* Improved messenger integration
* Ability to link YouTube account and transfer videos
* Automatically upload new YouTube videos to Minds natively
* New CKEDITOR
* Upgraded design aligned with Composer
* Markdown and code syntax support
* Ordered and unordered lists
* Improved draft and visibility management
* Grouping of similar notifications
* More context to what notification is for
* Indication of what has and has not been read
* Better email communication of important activity
* New digest emails for your network
* Improved email subscription controls and design
* E2E encryption with Matrix protocol
* Group chats
* Organizations and sub-topics
* Media sharing
* Improved notifications and alerts
* New language support for web and mobile apps
* Better visibility and access controls
* Improved management of paid subscriptions
* Easier discovery of what people are offering
* New Shop tab on channels
* New one-time paid services (write a blog, make a video, etc)
* Cleaner boost console
* Better engagement and view metrics
* Long term campaigns
* Revenue-sharing program
* Premium content feed
* Activitypub prototype
* Arweave prototype
* IPFS prototype
* WebTorrent
As a fully open source project, we welcome and encourage all of you to contribute to the project by starring and following us at https://gitlab.com/minds.
We look forward to hearing all of your feedback and hope you enjoy!
The Minds Team
Banner Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash