Thoughts about DeviantArt watch 2.0 beta all the way back in 2015! #throwback

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Andrey,

I apologize for cutting the call short. Again, thank you for your feedback + I wanted to just make sure that I'm able to really capture everything you're saying. I could tell you were getting to some very valuable points that our team can relate to :)

Please let me know if you have any questions! I look forward to your response.


As a New User:
1. What Top 3 goals are you trying to achieve on DeviantArt?

2. How has it been challenging achieving those goals?

3. I notice you’ve set up Gallery up pretty well, was that the first thing you did?

4. If not, what was the first thing you did and how long did it take you?

5. Have there been any features you thought you’d really like/find useful at first, but once you used them you didn’t?

6. What areas of DeviantArt feel the most fun and addictive?


In Message Center:
1. How often are you in the Message Center? We’re thinking of ways to improve its organization - focusing on its usefulness, not really the design. Do you have any ideas for how we could do that?

2. Notifications: How do you check them? By scanning the left hand side or by scanning the main area of the page?

3. As I’m sure you may know, there are Watch Notifications vs Feedback Notifications - do you check one more frequently than the other? What percentage would you say you split your time (e.g. 40% Feedback Updates vs 60% Watch Updates)?

4. Watch Notifications: Can you walk me through your process in checking Deviations Updates?

5. Are Group Updates at all useful to you?

6. Feedback Notifications: What are the Top 3 sections that you use (e.g. comments, replies, activity) Does it bother you that when viewing Comments, you cant see the content that it’s associated with it?

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Hey,

I do have some goals in mind, but the top three would be:
1. Serving the community by expressing my creativity in a way that is original to the audience
2. Looking at other people's work as inspiration and as a source of ideas for my art (the Watch feature is good for this)
3. Serving the community by helping them be the artists that they envision to be (which cannot be easily done on the site)
Other goals include making sure that my watchers get the feedback they deserve, like llamas and the like, and getting a sense of what the community is talking about.

Hmm... for these three goals, there is room for improvement both as an artist in development and further improvement in the website that I could see happening that could help me achieve the goals that I'm trying to achieve. In particular the top goal is very, very difficult to achieve with regards to my creativity and the way the website works. For example, there is no easy way to send artwork to a particular audience on deviantART who needs it. I would write poems more regularly if this was not the case.

The first thing that I considered while setting up the gallery was how the users will see my artwork as an expression of who I am. That's difficult to explain clearly in words, but I use the Featured part of the website to get people to see the most prominent work on the page. I do believe that the gallery needs much more work. An idea that I have is having a dynamic approach as to how the gallery is set up so that not much work is involved, while giving the user a chance to control this by curating the work that he/she needs to appear in the gallery section.

The features are organised well in the website and are all useful. I think the least useful feature for me personally is using AdCast to promote my work to a larger audience. I find that this is a very artificial way to promote work online which will not do a good service to both the user, the deviantART staff and the community as a whole.

I do not believe that the website should promote addiction by any means. It hurts the community and users will recognise it very quickly and leave in droves if there is a huge mistake. It happened with Digg and it can happen as well in any social website like yours.

Fun would be the key to making the website great to use! I think that llamas are fun. From my experience it's impossible to engineer fun. Fun needs to come from inspiration, not calculation. This is the reason why communication from person to person when tweeting is hidden in Twitter. Twitter is smart in doing this because they understand if they keep the people hidden from the person who tweeted the message on his/her public feed, the message will serve as "inspiration" to whoever he/she is sending the message to. I think that this has a place in a small way on deviantART, but shouldn't be a major feature on the site. The reason I say this is because deviantART is not really a social network website, but rather an art website first!

I'm on the message centre when I first login to deviantART for every session. This is the single best feature that you have on your updated website! I'm not sure what you mean by the question, but I do have some ideas on how to improve the feature:
- I can understand why you group each type of notification (e.g. llamas, watchers) but there HAS to be a way to see new notifications that have not been seen yet in a subsection of notifications.
- For the messages that I have received, I don't want to click on the link just to see what the content of the message has been received. There needs to be a preview of each message so that users can quickly glance their feed and pick the message that most interests them.
- Achievements are a bit of a distraction to the overall experience of the message system.

I don't see the watch notifications on the new version of the site, just message notifications. If you mean that the watch notifications are part of the watch section of the new site, theis are my opinion on this matter.

I glance at the watch feature like I do as a feed. For this purpose it works really, really well! I can see the artwork being placed on the website from my watchers which are curated by me or the algorithm (I'm guessing). It's very fluid and makes a lot of sense. I personally think that you shouldn't change this in any way :) Though there could be some improvements. I can't think of any because of how well the features are organised to make the watch section work!

The top sections that I use are in this following order (most used first): message notifications, watch section, explore section, search. These are the features that I regularly use.

I do think that there is heaps and heaps of potential in the groups feature. I would like to have a conversion about this. All I'll say now is that it should be as prominent as the watch feature on the website (which I think is the most prominent feature by far on deviantART

So those are my thoughts. Now for the questions:

What will you do with the groups feature?
How will you expand the community to recognise deviant artists who have contributed a considerable amount to the website?
How will you make literature more prominent on the website?
Where will the users find other people who are willing to follow them?
And lastly, where and when do you plan to take the community from the virtual world into the real world?

Thanks for the questions! I hope that you find my response insightful :D

Cheers,
Andrey

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