The Dev Team contemplates a new user flow for Boardwalk.

The Swarm City Dev Team released “Boardwalk” on June 15th, 2017. Boardwalk is the second of three major development milestones, and introduced the use of smart contracts to the Swarm City ecosystem. In Swarm City smart contracts are hashtags, and with the release of Boardwalk the first hashtag called #pioneer can now be used.

Soon, users will be able to create their own hashtags to transact over. This will be used by entrepreneurs building their businesses in Swarm City. For more information about how hashtags are used in the Swarm City ecosystem, please read this article.

Updated User Flow

The current user flow was created with the release of Terminal in February, 2017, and a lot has changed since then. This necessitates a reworking of that flow. For example, in February the ability to swap ARC for SWT was the most important user capability, second only to creating a wallet. That meant it needed to be highly visible right from the get go.

Well, now that almost 80% of all tokens have been swapped, it is less important to accentuate that capability. It still will be incorporated into the user flow, just not from the second screen a user encounters. Instead, now that commerce is possible in Swarm City, the communication/transaction experience will take precedence, along with wallet security. In the new user flow, one cannot proceed past the wallet until making a wallet backup.

The User Flow Design Process

The Swarm City Dev process is a bit unique. They build something that works, and then release it. Many other projects spend years perfecting their app to the specifications of what they believe their users would want. The Dev Team does the opposite. They release early so that the user base gets a chance to play with it right away and give feedback. Then the Dev Team can use that feedback to dial in the experience.

The same is true for the user flow design process. The Boardwalk user flow released on June 15th has now been used by the Swarm City community for a couple weeks. Community feedback gathered from users on Slack, particularly in the support channel, gets fed through the Support Hive to the Dev Team. Dev then makes adjustments to the UI/UX to better serve the needs of the users. Please follow @swarmcitydapp on Twitter for more frequent production updates.

Connect With The Dev Team

There has been an influx of new Dev talent! However, the Dev Team is always on the lookout for other developers who want to get involved. If you have Polymer or Solidity experience feel free to reach out to #devhive on the Swarm City Slack. You can get a peek at the project by reviewing Github, here, or if you’d like to be involved in testing new releases, please join #testersignup on Slack and read the pinned post for instructions.

More to come soon. Cheers!