most vibed clients are like this … they don’t have to be though.
a little attention goes along way and starting with one feature and making it good before moving onto the next one also is good advice.
what good is an app with 20 half baked features? just make it do one thing and do it well. if you’re gonna do a forum app, make the forum replying thread structure good first… then add the cashu payments and add ons and secondary features.
Here is a list as a iOS mobile user using a nip-7 extension login:
Weird UX/UI
Main App and Navigation Menus
- The Home and hamburger menus are on the left side to the right of the main app icon--quite small for mobile too. Weird UX but still usable.
- When a user clicks the hamburger menu icon on the top navbar, instead of a menu appearing it navigates the user to the group list. Unexpected and a little weird, but it works.
- Profile Picture appears and disappears as I navigate through the app. One moment it is there one moment it isn't. Not a big deal just adds to the general jank factor which leads to distrust and discourages users from investing time into adding content that may or may not be viewable/usable in a few months years as it is unclear whether or not this will be maintained and whether other clients will pick up the Nostr event kinds used in this app.
- It is unclear to me how notifications are surfaced. I only had one notification from 20 days ago and I couldn't click on it to figure out what note it was on or the context or what the reaction was etc., just "{User Display Name} reacted to your post".
Group View
Layout
- In the group view, I'm initially greeted by 3 tabs of seemingly the same weird and importance? Posts Members and Send eCash. 90% of the time people are going to look here for Posts, not members and not send eCash. Where do you send eCash? To the group of course? To the moderator's wallet? Okay but a little weird and a little weird to prominently feature it. Members list and Send eCash should be side menu nested menu options not front row options.
eCash
- It appears users can send 0.00 use worth of eCash. Cool?. Clicking the Send eCash button launches a modal which after the user closes it, the tab switching state isn't restored. So users who view the Send eCash modal have to hard refresh before they can switch back to the members tab or posts tab.
- Pressing the $ dollar sign action button freezes the application and prevents any navigation from that point.
Posts
- Post cards are not selectable. If a user taps the text, the comments section doesn't appear as users of reddit might expect. The user needs to tap the comments icon to view them. And instead of navigating the user to a dedicated page for the post, the replies simply expand down in an accordion style which the user can scroll down right into the next post. Maybe some people like this but I think it is weird. It makes it difficult to simply swipe back or go deeper into a thread then swipe back up and out of it. The layout of the comments section also expands horizontally off mobile screens if more than 4 or 5 replies are nested. A better UX would be like reddit where a user can tap anywhere in the text content of a post and view that post with the comments under it in a dedicated view.
- The action buttons under a post are left aligned leaving a lot of space on the right where a share and report button could easily fit, but the share and report buttons are nested in the dot menu. Why leave the empty space, leave the action bar uneven, and hide the share button behind a dot menu?
- there is a little green dot to the left of the dot menu. does this mean the user is online? does this mean the user is an approved member? that they are nip-5 validated? idk.
- If the user expands a post with lots of replies, the write a reply input shows up at the very bottom of all those replies so it is unclear if the user is replying to the last reply or the initial post. And if the user wants to reference the initial post while typing their reply, they have to awkwardly scroll up past the other replies to the initially post then back down to continue editing their reply. It's an unpleasant experience.
- typing an extended reply in the tiny nested reply input is annoying. If this is supposed to be for longer form forum level writing this isn't going to work.
Trending
- The Trending hashtags section is sad looking when trends do show up ... showing +3 and below "trends" of porn and smut tier trends and a lot of the time trends just didn't show up. The time frame selection on trends doesn't always affect the displayed trends--select last day, last week, last month doesn't matter the trends all stay exactly the same... a bit suspect.
If the content and community was there and really useful people, would push through to make it work. Worse UIs have been made and been successful. However, the lack of UX thought and unreliable execution adds a lot of friction.
Just thought I'd write this out for you because of the small subset of people that will actually log in and try it, a even smaller subset of people will write their experience for you.
Allocate a little more time to UX, Testing, and spend a bit more time vibing and perfecting it before promoting it. Because, even if you fixed all this stuff next week, this application has lost my trust and I'm not sure it is worth my time to go back and do more QA on it... given what I already said above about how uncertain the dedication of its vibe stewards is and the open question of whether this app will be supported and improved.

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