🗺 Navbar Updates, ⚡️25% Decrease in Page Load Times & 💃🏽 User Experience Enhancements
Scrolller Bi-Weekly Update February 4th, 2022
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week's main highlight is the launch of a new navbar, new and improved accounts page, Enhanced notifications, and upgrades to resolve performance issues.
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User Highlight
This week's user highlight goes to "devilgod9". The summary of user feedback is as follows:
Hi, Can you restore my account. I had it deleted and then purchased premium. Thank you.
Scrolller's Action
devilgod9 Scrolller is already working on making the account recovery process live. Currently, our users that accidentally deleted their accounts last month, can get in contact with support to recover their accounts. Once the account recovery feature is fully developed, our users will be able to recover their own accounts without any help from support. Users will also be able to start their accounts from scratch if they do not want to recover any of their data. We have also started to communicate the same once our users click on the delete button.
User Experience
351285 → 368561
Launch of new Navbar
In the Scrolller journey, We try our best to introduce features that make the Scrolller user experience more engaging and enjoyable. This week our development team was focused on the development and launch of the new navigation bar on the home page. The whole navbar experience has been reimagined by our team to provide users with easy-to-access filters and options.
Addition of New Filters
Every user has a different personality and has a very distinct taste in content that they like. Providing the facility to our users to further refine the content that they want to view will increase the engagement and interest of users. Do you want to see content that you didn’t see before, by scrolling through the home page? Now you can narrow this content to your fields of interest using filters.
These new filters are a further enhancement of what we used to have in the old scrolller. Users will be able to easily select what type of content they would like to view. The whole scrolller experience will be reloaded according to that user’s preferences.
Easy to Access Photos / Videos Filters:
Tired of scrolling up to switch content to photos/videos? Not anymore. With the new navbar, you’ll always have a possibility to change displayed content. See fabulous Photos or engage with Videos any time you want, now even easier.
Easy Access to Login/logout
Sometimes when we see engaging content it’s easy to miss that we’re not logged in to our premium accounts. It gets to us when we see ads mid-scrolling. Previously, you had to scroll all the way up to access the login button. Now you can just click on the login icon on the navbar that is always at bottom of your screen, even if you’re already engaged with the content you’ll have a possibility to login or log out.
Next Steps
Navbar enables our users to quickly access the most popular options to get an even better experience scrolling through content, but it’s not where we plan to stop. We want this handy feature to be implemented on every page. We are now planning to include this navbar in the whole website over time. Main collections, personal collections, search pages, and categories pages will benefit most from it. All the sort and filter options can be moved to the navbar for easy access, as a user moves from the homepage to a certain page.
New Accounts Page Coming Soon
The Scrolller team is focused on the enhancement of user experience on Scrolller. Before we move to any big features, we are now fully focused on the completion of essential options for our users that were missing before. The accounts page was the most basic page on our website and lacked many features such as changing the username or email address.
Edit Username and Email
In case you decided that your username no longer suits you, or want it to look cooler on Leaderboard, now you’ll be able to update it. Want to switch your email assigned to Scrolller, now you’re also able to do it. Don’t forget to verify it.
Easy Navigation to Beta & Premium Features
The new accounts page makes it clear what exactly are you able to manage. Using tabs you’re able to switch between sections responsible for different account settings. Use the Settings tab to Change essential information like your username or email, the Beta Features tab to turn auto video play on or off. The addition of new premium features to this page will help our users to get the most value for their money.
Easy Access to Billing Page and Premium Features
Some of our users pointed out that accessing their billing information was confusing. That’s why along with updating the accounts page, we made it clear, where exactly they can see and manage it.
Introducing Full content links and Source links
We are working on adding source links to our content. This feature has been requested since the early days of scrolller and we are finally ready to bring this feature to life for our users.
You might ask how are we going to get the full-length video links? Glad you asked, you are going to give it to us. Yes! you, our users are going to help us get the source links, and we are not going to leave you empty-handed for all your hard work. Whenever a user submits 5 source link that gets verified they get rewarded with one month of premium subscription.
Here is a hint for all source link hunters, we have found out that sometimes users leave full-length links on the subreddit comment section. Start your search here, if that doesn’t work out you can try reverse image search. Happy hunting.
Notifications Update
Notifications are an important aspect of keeping our users up to date with the latest updates on Scrolller. Currently, we are only utilizing these notifications to publish the recent changes on the platform but the next step is to add the social interactions notifications. These include likes, comments, updates from follows, and your favorite content creators.
Adding More Visibility to New Notifications
Our users would have started to notice a new Bell Icon on the top right corner of the home page. This provides the users with an easy way to access notifications. The notifications tray will open by default the first time you log in and if there is a pending notification that you might want to see. This will make sure that our users don’t miss any important updates.
Roadmap for Addition of Important Notifications
A basic need to improve user activity on site is notifications. Notifications are a proven way to increase the usage of media platforms. These notifications will play an important role as we proceed to create Scrolller a home for indie content creators. Our requirements are to prompt notification to the user on the following activities.≠
When any user follows your collection
When any user Likes your post
When any user comments on the post
When any user tags you in a post.
When you get listed on top 100 on the leader board
When creators you have subscribed to publish private posts.
Ability to Turn Off and On Social Features
As Scrolller enters its new age, these social changes might be something that some of our users do not like. There are a number of users that visit Scrolller only to enjoy the content in peace. For them, we will introduce a specific option in the Accounts setting where they can choose to turn off all Social features. This will allow them to enjoy content without interacting with any other users. No notifications will appear on their account.
User Experience
Content Recommendation (Testing)
Sort and Filters on Categories (In Progress)
Account Page Updates (In Progress)
Scrolller Extension and Enhancements (In Progress)
Scrolller APP (Back Log)
Pro-Metric Advertising (Blocked)
Revenue
Updates on Performance Fixes
Our dev ops engineer is working on eliminating all the bottlenecks on our servers that were causing the performance issues on our website. We discovered that some of our servers were overflooded with requests while other servers were not serving any requests at all.
We balanced the traffic going to all of our servers, offloading the servers that were hitting the upper traffic limit and giving more load to the underutilized hosts. In the picture below, host 4 was using its entire bandwidth and was slowing down the website (1/4 of the website images and videos were loading at as low as 100 Kilobytes/sec, which means that it was taking 5 seconds for loading an image and 20 seconds or more to load a video). After re-balancing the traffic, that bottleneck has been eliminated.
These fixes have caused the overall page load time to drop significantly. The page load times in America and Europe are now getting more stable as we can see from the graphs below. Our target is to achieve a homogeneous experience throughout the world for our users. This is only possible if all of our users are being served with the content through the fastest routes available.
The graph below is produced from the user experience data that we collect. This gives us actual insight into how much time it takes to load content on our user's end. It can be observed from the graph that the recent fixes have eliminated any uneven performance and now we are serving content at a very steady rate to our users.
Page Load Time (seconds) - America
Page Load Time (seconds) - Europe
We would love to have your feedback on the performance fixes. Your valuable suggestions will help us in improving the website around the globe.
Roadmap for Growth in Revenue
Exclusive Features for Premium User (In Progress)
Monetization Optimisations (In Progress)
Scrapper Updates (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Social Traffic
2.0% → 2.7% of our overall traffic
Outreach Team Update
The team has already started investing time and effort into reaching indie content creators in the NSFW community while keeping their normal workflow going, so far, only a few were contacted.
Last week, we talked about automation of one of the main tasks that give us social traffic: Sadly, this can’t happen right now because of a lack of developer resources. Thank you to everyone who is a premium subscriber, you help make this possible. Without sufficient resources, automation of a part of the outreach team’s workflow isn’t a priority for us right now but it could happen in the near future.
Social Traffic Update:
Our traffic this week has a notable spike due to big efforts from the team on the Reddit end, also, the productivity on the time invested there has increased. Special thanks to Tim for providing the data the team needed to make a better job at the task they were already doing here.
The team is trying to reach indie content creators while reaching other NSFW accounts and maintaining (or increasing) the current amount of traffic.
NSFW Channels
The outreach team figured out a way to add URLs to videos on our NSFW channels, this is a great opportunity for changing the way we deliver the content to these NSFW channels and get even more link clicks from the same amount of impressions we were getting.
Based on this promising insight, the team is already hyped up to see the potential results that this might get in terms of traffic, will the traffic stay still? Or will it increase?
As our NSFW channels are really important for the social traffic we get, we now need to wait and learn from the overall outcome of this new trick that just got implemented into their workflow.
Content Creators Outreach
The Outreach Team is now starting to reach rockstar indie content creators to invite them to work with us on our platform, part of this approach includes our transparency on their numbers; we won’t charge them any fees if they decide to work with us.
This approach focuses on two kinds of creators:
Stars that already built a big audience
Diamonds in the rough with a lot of potentials that we can provide with some audience and can grow in our platform
Our target is to get 20 indie content creators to schedule a meeting with us. We will walk them through the Scrolller content creators side and will explain to them the benefits that they will get with becoming a part of Scrolller as a pioneer content creator.
Roadmap for Growth in Social Traffic
Implementing Reddit (In Progress)
Working with influencers to encourage Scrolller link sharing (In Progress)
Content creators outreach (In Progress)
Team Highlights
Team Updates
Scrolller Team Highlights for the week!
Karol — Resolving all issues related to current release.
Valentin — Building our outreach team, training Tomas, and improving our process.
Tomas — Working with Valentin to get in contact with content creators.
Tim — Working on content to content recomendations.
Sergiu — Identifying issues with Scrolller performance. Improving our hosting system.
Mannan — Working on making content creators economy and creating vision for the next 6 months.
Chris — Working on finalizing the funding for Scrolller. Making sure that the team is moving in the right direction.
Have any feedback for us? Don't hesitate to share it with us in the comments sections. We like hearing any feedback you have for us.
Road Map
You can share feedback with us about any of the new features below. Using this Airtable Form. Looking forward to your comments
This week
Exclusive Features for premium users (In Progress)
Monetization Update and Optimization (In Progress)
Scrolller as Content Creator Platform (Design Stage)
Scrapper Updates (Design Stage)
Enhancements to Auto Scroll Feature (Backlog)
CDN for Premium Users (Investigation)
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Until next time, happy scrollling!
Finally a bit of a UI change! Still takes 10 seconds to load the leaderboard and the "Data saver" button is still lying there without any purpose... In 6 months we got a download button and now a new nav. I know it's more than that and things are building in the background but as an end user we don't see much upgrades...