After years of planning, the Leo Finance community has unveiled the first iteration of “Project Blank.” Positioned as an “Everything app” for content on Hive, the main way you interact with it is through the User Interface, or UI.
The Open Alpha version of the UI has been made public for just over a week now. As part of the large (and impressive, I might add) campaign to raise awareness, Leo Finance has been seeking reviews of said UI.
So here are my opinions, organized by:
- A quick overview
- What I like
- What I think could use improvement
- Where the future of this UI could go
A quick overview
This new UI puts microblogging at the core of its experience. While still supporting long form content (like this post), static pages (I assume) and other Hive goodies, the main experience is basically Twitter. Except on Hive.
Compare that to the Old UI at leofinance.io, which you may recognize as a heavily modified Hive Outpost page, focusing entirely on blog posts.
👍 What I like about the new UI
1. It does the basics well
The New UI doesn’t feel overdesigned. It has all the things existing where I’d more or less expect them to be on a microblogging site. Let’s face it: Twitter’s had more than a decade to perfect and refine the microblogging UI. There’s no need to totally reinvent the wheel, and I’m glad the New UI seems to have taken this to heart.
2. It feels way more personal than Twitter
Pretty much every username I see using the UI, I recognize from Hive or Discord, etc. This is a product of it being new, I know. As more users join, the cozy feeling of the space will diminish. I’m hopeful that with more sorting and filtering tools there will be ways for communities to maintain that intimate feeling (compared to Twitter, where it just seems like shouting into a crowd).
Obviously if I was a much more active Twitter user, I’d be able to find my niche and my people and experience something similar. So this isn’t so much a “feature” of the new UI so much as it is me confirming that it holds community conversations together as one should expect.
3. The Hive tie-ins are endless
This is the main differentiator. Twitter and its web2 clones have siloed databases.
The new Leo UI (and any Hive frontend, for that matter) shares some aspect of its data by virtue of being on Hive. For example, the notifications don’t just tell me when people interact with my microblogging: it can report interactions with any of my Hive content. Ostensibly, they could rig it up to show transactions, wallet balances, etc. as well.
To get communities involved, the Leo team leveraged Hive’s delegation features. They gave community accounts a large delegation of LEO tokens (risk free, since delegators can revert it at any time). This allows community leaders to reward users who elevate community topics on the new UI.
🔧 What needs improvement
1. User Experience is clunky in some areas
Thankfully, the New UI is in a bare-bones Open Alpha at the time of writing, so some wrinkles are the rule vs the exception.
But early adopters will definitely run into some inconveniences. I won’t list a bunch of nitpicks, as I’m sure the team is aware of the glaring ones. But I will say this: if mass adoption is the goal, and we want to bring in people from outside of Hive, some better onboarding documents, videos, or in-UI prompts are probably a good idea.
You know when you use some programs for the first time, they spawn up all these little “Tour” modals? Guiding you through the key buttons, what they mean, etc.? I think a future version of this UI could benefit from something like that.
Also, maybe a glossary of terms or a beginner's guide that is permanent;y available in the side menu (option to hide it).
2. Be very careful with the word “Everything”
I understand the hype and excitement of declaring a vision of “Everything,” but it’s marketing 101: if you try to be everything, you end up being nothing.
I think the UI mission would benefit from a sharp focus on a particular use case versus a sweeping, all-encompassing mandate. “Everything for Hive” is what the full statement is, and while technically better than just “Everything,” I still think it suffers from a lack of specificity.
e.g. “The Best Way to Experience Hive” I think is still in line with the vision, but paints a much clearer Problem-Solution statement IMO.
3. Bot control and strong filtering will be needed, and soon
If the new UI starts to get very popular, you can bet that it will be a breeding ground for all manner of spammers, botters, and opportunists (they’re everywhere on web2, let alone the wild west of web3!)
Simple filtering tools (what we have today) will absolutely not cut it. The future versions of the new UI need to bring web3 innovation to bear to filter / sort, and not stop at whatever was good enough for web2, IMO
This leads me nicely to…
🤩 Where the future of this UI could go
I’ve played around with a few DeSo microblogging systems before this one. The Leo Finance UI is not the first project to try it out.
- For example: https://diamondapp.com/ < tied to over $200M in VC money.
- Lens Protocol has been dubbed a “Twitter Rival” by some
- Even Hive has d.buzz, which looks quite familiar to this New UI
So in order to differentiate from the likely hundreds of web3 microblogging competitors, the Leo UI will need do one thing really, really well (in my opinion): Leverage the power of Hive
Both our people, and our tech.
The UI, in its mission to achieve “Everything for Hive” needs to look for the best kinds of problems that Hive tech solves and try to relentlessly surface them. Or: find the biggest Hive experience roadblocks and work on improving those.
New incentive structures for users, built-in systems that get people excited and motivated, etc. etc.
I imagine there’s a big list of things like this on the wishlist. And new features will roll out steadily, according to the team.
If they can get this Hive leverage right, I don't doubt many people will use the UI. For everything :)
Thank you for reading. The hero image for this post was made with a Canvo Pro license, using the Leo Finance logo.