2 major platform updates 🥳

With the Frontend Mentor platform still in its infancy, there are still a lot of UX refinements to be made.

The most glaring issue has been a lack of peer-to-peer engagement. So my whole focus lately has been around supporting that engagement and finding ways to stimulate conversations.

This week I've launched two major changes to the platform, which are two big first steps.

The first change that went live on Tuesday was a complete re-working of the scoring system. Now, every user has a single Mentor Score on the platform and certain actions carry varying point weightings based on contribution back to the community. This is a first step into gamifying the platform.

Within this change, and arguably a bigger deal was a re-factor of the comments data structure. Comments used to be a nested resource on the solution model, whereas they've now been broken out to their own collection. This will allow me to show the latest comments from a user on their profile page.

The comments re-factor also allowed for the second major change, which went live yesterday.

This change brought in a dashboard for logged in users. Before, logged in users on the home route would still see the actual homepage. Whereas now, they see the dashboard which will include 4 initial tabs:

• Questions: A timeline of the latest questions that are being asked when solutions are submitted.
• Community Feedback: This will highlight feedback happening on other people’s solutions. A lot of lessons can be learned just by reading the feedback on other people’s solutions, so this tab will make these comments easier to find.
• Wall of Fame: This tab will highlight the Top 20 users (based on Mentor Score) from the last Week, Month, Year and All-Time. I’ll be looking to add more features (and prize draws) around this in the future.
• Personal Feedback: This is where you’ll find all of the latest feedback on your own solutions.

The dashboard will help bubble conversations and questions to the surface making it much easier for people to get involved in conversations.

Only the questions tab is active at the moment, so I'll be adding the other tabs over the coming week. Then it will be onto the next round of changes!

If anyone has any experience with growing an engaged community (including @csallen 😉) and has any input I'd love to hear it.