Oh boy, it's been a while since I've published one of these. Lots of non-codey stuff going on, I suppose. On the plus side, bringing together 3 weeks of changes into 1 post does make for a slightly more robust summary :)
A lot of our Influencers report struggling to understand how SubmitHub works. Some of this has to do with information overload, so I decided to code a new "simple" mode for them (as default). It basically means that all additional information is hidden and it all boils down to you and the song.
Did a little cleanup of the homepage feed that artists see when they log in. Not exactly revolutionary, but still looks nicer than what was there before.
Right, so this one actually had a bit of an impact on submission volume for some folks. I didn't actually add or subtract any information. Instead, I organized it so that things were categorized a little bit better. The typical listing shows 3 columns, each with a "score" header: 1) Genre match; 2) Quality; 3) Influence.
The "big change" was to move the approval percentages and genre history under the genre column, where it rightfully belongs. Prior to this update the information was actually hidden/scattered through the quality and influence sections. There was no rhyme or reason to the way it was presented, in large part because I've just been adding, adding, adding over the years.
Another important bug I found in the process was that if a user chose 2 or 3 genres, the listings weren't accurately conveying which of those genres the curator wasn't interested in. For example, if Indie Shuffle likes Indie Rock, but not Folk, the listing should say "Indie Shuffle has approved 1,234 Indie Rock songs (1.5%), but isn't as interested in Folk." And it was actually "Indie Shuffle has approved 1,234 Indie Rock + Folk songs."
Fixing this bug and rearranging things means it's become a bit more obvious to submitting artists who they should use their credits on. Ultimately this has positives for the artists and might also mean better genre-targeting for curators. On the downside, a few folks have seen substantial drops in the # of submissions received as a result of artists being able to easily tell when their odds of being approved are next to nil. There's a delicate balance to be struck between the two!
For years now I've said I'm not going to build a mobile app. That's because building mobile apps sucks (I've made a few, including the Indie Shuffle app). With the onboarding of hundreds of influencers, though, it's looking like it'll be harder and harder to avoid the app for much longer. Fortunately the underlying architecture used to build SubmitHub also has a readily accessible Cordova integration, which makes it pretty straightforward to create a "web wrapper" for any given app. Step 1, then, is to make the mobile website look as much like an app as I can. And with that in mind, I've been working on a new navigation bar that sits at the bottom of the website. Expect to see it live sometime next week :)
Influencers now have 7 days to share a song they've approved. This should help 1) reduce concerns of impatient artists; 2) reduce admin for our team; 3) help folks get more-timely coverage across social media. I realize it does put some undue pressure on folks who like to take a bit more time to share, but the site-wide average for Influencers to actually share songs they've approved is ~2 days, so I reckon most folks won't even notice!
This was a big change, but fortunately there wasn't too much negative blowback.
For the first week of April there were roughly 7,000 free influencer submissions. That's a chunk. And perhaps unsurprisingly, only 24 of those were approved. That's a 0.3% approval rate (vs ~5% for curators). It meant users were essentially throwing away their free credits with almost zero chance of approval.
When one further considers that standard/free submissions add an element of complexity to the UI/UX (we're trying to reduce complexity for influencers, right?), it seemed like a no-brainer to remove free submissions to influencers.
Speaking of free submissions, we're forging ahead with a program that sends out a bunch of paid submissions (at SubmitHub's expense) to influencers on behalf of artists who have been growing on the platform (primarily sourced from the popular chart). It's a cool way to give back to the community AND keep our influencers engaged and checking in regularly. In the last week we've sent ~1,200 submissions and had 217 approvals. That works out to a ~19% approval rate, which puts us below the average. Oops. Clearly there's room for improvement :-D
When you load data on SubmitHub I try to cache it in the browser so that if you navigate around, it doesn't have to re-load. I've been storing that data in localStorage, but that has a 5mb limit. Generally not an issue, but over the last month or two I've seen notices pop up about it once or twice. So in the interest of improving all that, I've begun a gradual migration to IndexedDB, which is built into pretty much all browsers and works quite well given we're already working with json objects + mongodb.