This is a post on how i think the current design and model of steemit will be a winning factor.

Design Thinking

I took this subject thinking it will probably help me as an engineer and truely, it did. Sharing a little on what is Design Thinking. From Tim Brown's Design Thinking, it is

Methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos.

Simply put, it means that innovation activities should always be user-centered and design from the user’s perspectives. Because for any product or service to succeed, the most important stakeholder is the user.

Over the years, we have seen practically useless innovations designed by engineers and scientists. All those fail because no one think it is useful. These engineers and scientists fail because they lack a user perspective.

For example, just take a look around your surroundings and you can quickly identify products with good designs and bad designs. Or just take a look at the photo below and you will quickly know what i mean.

Got it? Clearly, the designers did not think from the users' perspectives and the reason is that they are not the users.

If you are interested, you may want to read Design Thinking wiki and Design Managment wiki

It then becomes clear to me that the founders of Steemits are really Design Thinkers. See my analysis below based on Design Thinking aspects.

Empathy

Clearly, they have really high empathy and can think of how Steemit can be useful to many groups of different people. The groups of people include:

• Readers want to read quality and unique content
• Writers (freelance, professional, etc) want to write for a living
• Bloggers (freelance, professional, etc) want to blog for a living
• Cryptocurrency enthusiasts want to read about and use the cryptocurrency
• Cryptocurrency traders want to read and get tips.
• Reddit users want to vote up good content and vote down bad content
• Just anyone who wants to write something
• Just anyone who wants to earn money.

It means creating user experience for all groups above using steemit platform. This is truely “people first” approach. I kind of got the feel from reading a Conversation with Ned Scott. From the interview, it seems that both Ned and Dan have thorough thoughts on who will be the users at steemit.

Integrative Thinking

The integrated model of social media and cryptocurrency as incentive for posts is working really well. As I can see, the steemit site is full of fresh and unique content. Something that many other popular content sites may be jealous of in future. On the other hand, the content sites also happen to be what many writers and bloggers are also hopping to get referenced in and sometimes even beg. And here comes steemit! Anyone who writes here get to earn steem and increase their profile.

In my opinion, it is an improvement on many existing options that the users have now in terms of content, social media and cryptocurrency adoption.

Concluding...

So in my opinion, you can't fail if you design for the user. That means you and me. :-)