You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Thoughts on GRC [002] – How the user experience could be improved (1)

in #gridcoin7 years ago

Our current Home Page contains this information, with links to everything you asked for. Displaying it all on one page would be impossible to navigate. Further details are provided in your BOINC client, and on the individual project sites, depending on exactly what stats you want.

I don't suggest to have one single page displaying all available information. I suggest to have a wiki (like wikipedia). The current home page does not contain all the information, just very basic info. It requires people to visit other pages, the information is spread everywhere which makes it very tedious. Having all the information in one place would be beneficial in many ways.

Scientists are busy. We work on VERY tight funding, to VERY tight schedules. Celebrities like 'Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene or Carl Sagan' make money by being science figureheads. They are not traditional scientists.
Even so, all projects that I keep tabs on are very active in updating their users on developments, from new research outcomes to server issues, and even publications. Some projects even publish the names of teams or individual crunchers in their publications.

This is not about scientists doing more promotional work - it is about the GRC community to help them with promotional work. We support them with mining - why not support them with PR as well?
Wouldn't you like to have someone who constantly checks your project's site, gathers all news and promotes your project for you, posting on various subreddits and social media so people develop an interest and maybe start mining GRC because someone was able to promot your scientific work for free (or a small GRC bounty provided by whales)?

There exists, on the project homepages, in great detail where appropriate.

I'm aware of that (which I already wrote in the main article as well) But again, it would be beneficial to have all this information in one place. Why should people have to browse ten different project websites to get their information if they could just check out one wiki instead?

There are many different places around the web to access the total list of all BOINC projects, and anyone with more than 100,000 GRC is able to initiate a vote to have one added or removed from the whitelist. This has happened frequently in the past. In fact, you can review all past votes!

You are missing the point here. The suggested "project suggestion hub" would be an additional feature to make it easier to gather information in order to make a decision before voting. How many pages of forum entries on several boards should people read to get the necessary insights? How many past poll results should they google, how many hours should they spend on reddit, IRC or slack, going through tons of comments in order to get the full picture? The more time it takes, the less people are inclined to participate. This is the same for real life elections. Why can't we try to provide a place that bundles all relevant information?

All projects I have crunched for have this already in the form of badges. Many BOINC users chase these badges to add to their collection, and ammass huge amounts of them to add to their forum signatures. This therefore also already exists.

Fair enough. In that case I won't bother suggesting anymore ideas on this point since it seems there already is a perfect system in place.

Sort:  

The current home page does not contain all the information, just very basic info.

You should go browse the home page, talk to the authors, and talk to the community about the website. The home page has TMI, if anything - a LONG shot from very basic info.

It requires people to visit other pages, the information is spread everywhere which makes it very tedious. Having all the information in one place would be beneficial in many ways.

This is how a webpage works though. Do you envision collecting all the information on everything to do with GRC on one page? How would we navigate it? We could split it up into sections, and then we have the same thing we have now.

Regarding promotional work, I would 100% not want the community writing about my work. I see no benefit in someone copying the content from my hypothetical project feed and trying to run social media for it... The Gridcoin Twitter does a good enough job as it is for overall news, and if people want project news they go to the project page.

You are missing the point here. The suggested "project suggestion hub" would be an additional feature to make it easier to gather information in order to make a decision before voting. How many pages of forum entries on several boards should people read to get the necessary insights? How many past poll results should they google, how many hours should they spend on reddit, IRC or slack, going through tons of comments in order to get the full picture? The more time it takes, the less people are inclined to participate. This is the same for real life elections. Why can't we try to provide a place that bundles all relevant information?

They should spend time to do exactly all of that! People should be expected to make an informed, educated decision on projects by doing their research. If that weeds out 99% of suggesters, great! It means that the inclusion polls posed will be quality selections. Bundling everything is both impossible to keep up to date, and makes it easy for false information to be spread on a project. Decentralised, remember?