A more usable guide

Things are finally back to normal this week, and I was able to catch up with various efforts.

The biggest task this week was to figure out a good way forward with what has been a bit of an amorphous blob so far. Over the last year or so, as guide content has evolved, our idea of how it should be structured has evolved quite a bit, which is a positive thing. While we were focused on creating content, a host of small tasks around the overall experience built up, which now needed to combed through and organized. We discussed this in the jam session on Monday, then had a 2-hour brainstorm and planning session, then summarized it all in text, visually, and as a video (more here). To gather further feedback, we set up 2 open feedback sessions and will also discus on the next community call on Wednesday. The goal is to do this as public as possible with plenty of opportunity to give feedback. I still assume few people will closely tune in, which is why we also need to be super public about each individual task as it’s being worked on. This will not only ensure that people like the changes, but also help spread awareness of what is in the guide (for example, one change is to introduce a new “How it works” section). I think this will be a good step forward.

Which leads me to a bigger thought. The guide is quite a beast now and the content has gotten very detailed in certain areas. I assume this makes it much harder for newcomers to contribute. Several people joined the community the past week and messaged me and others about contributing. Luckily we now have the New Members Mixer and Learning Bitcoin and Design sessions, as well as various useful pages on the site to facilitate things for newcomers. Still, there will always be a need for matchmaking by people who are in tune with what the community needs at the moment, and what people who want to contribute are interested in.

Also nice to see this week how the Bitcoin Design Sprint group had a call to present UX concepts for a new Blixt onboarding flow. There are 3 concepts now on the table that can be merged into a single one that will hopefully be a solid improvement for Blixt, as well as a nice case study for this community effort.

FOSS backstage was yesterday and today, a conference about the behind-the-scenes of open-source, which I find super interesting. I volunteered again for the UX clinic to help projects with design problems. Just like last year, a handful of people showed up and we had a good conversation about wide-reaching topics around collaboration, design systems, education, etc. The other talks have been interesting, although it does seem a bit like everybody is constantly figuring things out as they go along with few stable, long-term frameworks and approaches.

Next week will be the Shock the Web hackathon Johns is organizing. I’ll give a workshop on the guide and UI Kit and help as a judge/mentor, which should be fun. I tested lots of Lightning apps over the last year or so. Many didn’t work at all or had serious bugs, and I’ve been pretty disappointed with the quality and creativity. I hope the hackathon and surrounding efforts can level things up in this regard. Would also love to get hands-on sometime and design and execute a Lightning app. Hope to get that chance at some point.

Lots of other cool things going on, which always becomes clear when working on the newsletter. Make sure to check the next edition and join the community call on Wednesday.