🚀 To: Supporters, Users, and Co-Workers, Scrolller Wishes you a Happy New Year 🎆
Scrolller Weekly Update December 30th, 2021
Intro
Hello and Welcome to our weekly update. This week we are revisiting the year 2021 as we enter into next year. As we are building Scrolller in open we want to share what we accomplished this year, what are we focusing on now, and some new year resolutions.
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Happy New Year
Scrolller team wishes a happy new year to all of its super fans. Without you, Scrolller wouldn’t be growing as it is today. Your love, support, consistent feedback, and feature requests help us in making Scrolller better every day. Its been a rewarding experience working with our users and may this new year bring forth many such rewarding moments for us to share.
A Journey Through 2021
As we are entering the year 2022, let’s just take a moment and look back on how far we have come this year. Scrolller has always been known to serve the best content to our users. At the start of this year, it was a plain content viewer platform with some really complex features. The user found it really hard to navigate around the site. When we started working on transforming it into a modern-day content platform we saw great feedback from our users. Let’s take a look at some really interesting stats from the year 2021.
In this year ~72 Million users reached Scrolller.
Scrolller recorded over ~1.9 Billion page views in this year.
Our users Collectively logged ~9.9 Million Hours using Scrolller.
A Timeline of Improvements on Scrolller
The Scrolller team is dedicated to improving the user experience with every single release. We try our best to take user feedback to further refine and polish the newly launched feature. Transformation of Old Scrolller to new enhanced Scrolller came with its own set of challenges. This journey started in January when the core team decided that they want to enhance Scrolller to be a go-to platform for every content lover around the globe. We hired our first developers to work on Scrolller in February. From there, our team not only grew in number but also with every month Scrolller improved.
The graphic below represents our journey through the year.
Scrolllers’ Focus on User Experience
It is not easy winning the trust of our users as we grew from 77,121 User Accounts to 339,885 User Accounts.
When we first started working on Scrolller, the first challenge for us was to establish some metrics. These indicators would be the measure of our success or failure, so it is obvious that the team was working towards achieving those KPIs. As we worked on Scrolller our thought process changed and we worked on creating more relevant metrics to track the success.
A timeline of thought process change
User account growth was our first-ever metric for success. We thought that measuring the user account creation will give us an idea about the user’s interest in Scrolller. As we worked with it for some time we found that user account creation was not a great measure for tracking user experience. Let’s explore why it was not a good metric after all.
User account creation was the metric we measured success by, our team was focused on introducing features that will attract the user to create an account. This increased the complexity of the application and caused performance issues. This drop in performance caused the user account creation to drop as well.
This was a turning point for us. Our team started to focus on the metrics that would really help us in understanding our user experience. We made a hypothesis that if we focus on user experience only and make it better. It will automatically result in an increase in user account
After some research we discovered that user experience is based on 5 key elements:
Platform Performance
Discoverability
Filtering and Sorting
Content Quality
User Communication
We started to focus on these key elements in order to measure and track our user experience. This resulted in the prioritization of our main issue that was site performance. Also, our focus shifted from feature development towards the prioritization of resolving user pain points.
As soon we resolved the performance issues we saw a significant boost in user account creation. The resolution of user pain points helped us in reassuring our users that we hear them and care for them. Now we believe that we have the right set of tools to measure the user experience we are striving hard to resolve any issues in this area.
New Year Resolutions
As we are entering the year 2022, we want to create some new year resolutions to capitalize on potential missed opportunities from the past year, as well as new ways of operating to make the coming year more successful. Without structure, and a proper plan, it’s impossible to maintain high performance and an exceptional quality of work over a long period of time. Let’s walk through some of the key areas where Scrolller will be putting in the effort, inorder to create a more enjoyable content experience for everyone.
4 Key Areas where we want to improve.
Performance and Resiliency
Any content website is only enjoyable if users get the fastest page load speeds. We established some metrics around the content load speed on the user end. According to research, a one-second delay in page load time yields:
11% fewer page views
16% decrease in customer satisfaction
7% loss in conversions
In fact, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less. And 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds.
We want to take this opportunity to inform our users that our team is already working on infrastructure enhancements. We are making a resolution that Scrolller will be faster in terms of page load speed and content load times in this coming year around the world. Our target is to bring down the page load time under 2 seconds for all of our users.
Improving user experience with new UI/UX
A great design provides users with engaging content and easy navigation. Our team is determined to make the Scrolller easier to navigate. We want to make sure that the content is the main star of the show. In this year, we will be more focused on the improvements on the user interface, user experience on the website, and easier interactions with the content.
Addition of great new features and content
The toughest part of running a content platform is the consistent addition of new content. Scrolller has a really unique audience that loves all sorts of content whether it is NSFW or SFW. For our content-hungry users, we are focused on improving the quality of content on the platform. In this new year, we will be providing our users with the ability to navigate to full-length videos. YES! you heard it right, our users will be able to see a short video and directly navigate to full-length video with just a tap/click. Another one of our targets for this year is to introduce original content on the website, plus more features around improving its quality.
Creators Economy
Ten years ago, if you were a kid somehow making a living off of YouTube ad revenue and brand deals, you were probably told you didn’t have a real job. Now, if monetizing your creative output is how you pay your rent, you’re part of the creator economy, a humming new industry. The venture capital firm SignalFire says that creators are the fastest-growing type of small business. Despite the creator economy only really forming a decade ago, there are now 50 million people who consider themselves “creators,” and more American children want to be YouTube stars (29%) than astronauts (11%), per SignalFire.
In this new year, Scrolller is looking to work on a solution that will reduce the tension between indie adult content creators and some indie content websites that are trying to abandon them. We want to focus on providing a permanent home to these content creators and help them enjoy their financial freedom with no risks involved. Scrolller will make no false promises to its users.
By the end of this year, we will revisit this newsletter and compare our progress with the resolutions that we made. We believe in growing and helping others to grow alongside us. We hope you all have a blessed year ahead. Let us know in the comments what are things you want us to focus on this year.
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Until next time, happy Scrollling!
Miss the simplicity of the original and the recently departed old.scroller :(
I'm not sure if this is a popular demand, but I miss being able to use the left and right arrow keys to move between posts (which is still a thing) and simutaneously use the up and down arrow keys to move between the individual content if the post is an album (which got removed with the switch from old to new scrolller)