Progress on Golem’s UX

Up to now, our communication has been hyper-focused on crowdfunding, back-end concepts, and general business development. As we’ve frequently emphasized however, evolving Golem’s user experience is also massively high in our agenda. Although it is an extension of our existing prototype targeting users of rendering software, the overall idea of the upcoming Brass Golem release is to more clearly demonstrate the viability of the overall concept behind Golem. This makes our UX-related effort even more significant.

In the graph below, we identified a number of obstacles which could negatively affect wide-scale adoption of Golem among our potential requestors, e.g. installing the application, sending the first tasks to the network in a subsidized scheme, or actually paying for the first time. We are determined to address these problems before the Brass release. Right now, we are focused on making the installation process as smooth as possible, while eliminating barriers related to acquiring both GNT and ETH, which is still a challenge for many non-crypto users. Although recent listings of GNT on Poloniex and ShapeShift definitely move us in the right direction, we are working towards efficient and attractive incentive schemes (such as initial subsidies for requestors), as well as integration with other solutions, notably services enabling the purchasing of cryptocurrencies with fiat money.

Now, to those of you who had attempted to use prior prototypes of Golem and found your eyes bleeding profusely from the sheer horror of it all, you’ll be +pleased to know that there have been some significant improvements, derived from the following assumptions:

1. Brass Golem is a single, consistent application for both requestors and providers, which is particularly important for requestors willing to rent out their idle CPU cycles.
2. Our objective is to align user interface with a typical workflow of our requestors.
3. While some elements are specific to the rendering use case, most functionality is applicable to other use cases as well. This would be integrated by other developers once appropriate back-end solutions are developed in future releases. Of course, a developer is also free to integrate Golem more directly, altogether bypassing the Golem UI.

In order to make it all happen, we decided to change the front-end technology and use Electron instead of QT. The main reason behind this shift is flexibility: Electron with HTML, CSS and JavaScript implementation gives us an extremely powerful tool for future expansion of features and functionalities. Also, Electron makes it possible to design a system architecture, which is open for custom integrations and can easily be used by independent developers.

Here are some elements of what we have so far:

We really have to thank Matt Innes and his team, who have made incredible progress in designing all major views available in Brass. Once we put these elements together with the latest code, we will scale up our testnet in order to assess and verify this more advanced prototype with real-world Blender users.

Exciting times ahead, everyone!