[Austin] Yup, in-app notifications are absolutely lacking in our site :P
[Austin] Agreed that the trade log is pretty noisy; could condense to a comments-only view, and have a volume chart. (Or maybe hide it altogether? I'm noticing that more "consumer" fintech sites like Robinhood/Coinbase don't include it at all)
[James] The most useful info from the trade log is the most recent activity for the market. You want to know
The normal graph is somewhat a substitute, but not really. The volume chart fills this need, I think, but might be hard to decipher for regular folks.
Maybe we could have one line with the 24 hour volume: e.g. “$50 YES and $10 NO bets in last 24 hours”. If that volume is 0, then instead show 24 hours from the most recent bet: “$20 YES and $5 NO bets 7 days ago”
[Akhil] Yes, a few different options to retire the full trade log. Could do with or without the volume chart, or even integrate it into the main chart (see screenshot).
Though to take a step back, generally what I’d like to know is:
There are a few different design elements that can communicate most or all of this without adding to the noise or using too much text.
Seeing my positions, an important piece of info, is currently a hidden menu option
Can be subsumed into my Profile and called Portfolio
The fact that it's not public can be communicated via text/lock icon
More information dense with Qty, Cost Basis, Current Value, Daily Change, Gain like in the screenshot
Many of the dropdown filters can be pills/tabs and sortable columns
[Austin] I've wanted to do this for a while now haha; both "merging Your Trades as a tab in your profile" and "replacing Your Trades with a table/spreadsheet". Thanks for including the screenshot - curious, what site is that?
[Austin] Actually - I've wanted to make Your Trades public, at least for the trades that have resolved (and possibly all of them), as a form of accountability, and as a way to see people's activity. Curious if you have any gut reactions to this. (Possibly the easier sell would be showing all your comments, publicly on your profile)
[James] I like this. Each row is a market, but maybe if you click it, it can expand / popup to show your individual trades for that market.
One reason we don’t do this already is it’s hard to fit a table on mobile. (Especially with long market questions.)
[Akhil] Yeah, I’d really like to see this info personally (Austin, orig screenshot I pulled from image search based on what looked clean UI, not sure which app). If the market question is on its own row followed by the position data row, should be mostly doable on mobile too.
[Akhil, via email] Oh, and yes - Austins' point that the predictions default to public for public questions makes a lot of sense; I'm also more likely to engage in markets that my friends / people I follow have interacted with; and to see how they've bet - all of which make being able to follow people (or import social connections from other platforms) an important part of the ecosystem.
[Austin] We did think about this actually, especially when Loans just came out. I'm in favor, but think it's lower ROI than the other suggestions (it's a bit technically complex, I believe).
[James] I think these are good ideas. Very trader friendly.
[Akhil] One of the big reasons for suggesting this, is in order to drive updates to predictions. An overall question that emerges is whether one imagines a buy and hold approach to most markets, or news/comments driven updates to existing positions ⇒ more engagement.
Also, adding a position, or increasing/decreasing a position should probably use the same UI element. Click UP/YES or DOWN/NO followed by Confirm. Long press or multiple clicks have some amplification behaviour. Reduces me having to enter numbers using the keyboard.
[Akhil] re: technical complexity, You’d lazy load the portfolio data on most pages to be able to add user/portfolio specific context, so shouldn’t be too technically complex?
[Austin] Yeah, my very rough sense is we've leaned too far in the direction of "free for all, anything goes" to the detriment of the typical user browsing our site, and should test a more moderated approach (e.g. having major platform-owned categories of "Sports", "Politics", "Finance", "Crypto" that we curate).
[Austin] I'm less sure about increasing info density (though, I did hear the exact same feedback from another product person I respect a lot!)
[James] Better browsing could have great ROI. I think we should invest in this as well as the feed.
Perhaps the default Explore view (formerly Markets) should be organized by category.
One reason to focus on the feed is for mobile. You can only only show 1-2 markets at time on a mobile screen. Average users don’t want to click to navigate to different categories, they just want to scroll.
[James] Re: density. A unique part of markets is you want check back to see how the prices/probabilities changed. A denser, dashboard-like view for all the markets you care about seems like a use case that we should fill.
[Akhil] More on browse in the twitter vs. reddit question below. re: information & engagement density - at the risk of stating the obvious, but relevant to many of the suggestions:
The Portfolio would probably cover the dashboard like use case; the important question is what info should be included by default everywhere in order to drive engagement and prediction updates. My guess is that Daily/Recent Changes and my existing position on the market would likely be some of those things.
[Austin] We've thought about a personal affiliate link, more similar to Coinbase/most financial sites that pay for direct referrals. Tracking signups from a market instead is super interesting - reminiscent of what StackOverflow does when you link to an answer.
[Austin] Maybe instead of signups, we should gamify views/traffic; we could just show the number to start, and think about explicitly incentivizing via payments later. Signups are super spiky/rare, traffic is much more granular; if you tweet a market you'd usually get 0, maybe 1 signup. Relatedly, I thought this new section on Reddit was super cool:
[Austin] So far we've considered viral growth mechanisms less important than making the core loop good, but I think soon (in the next 1-2 months) we'll want to change our focus from retention to growth.
[James] Good idea for the near future. Agree with Austin
[Akhil] Yes fair enough. Nailing the core flows and product before opening the floodgates makes a lot of sense.