I want to write down more concrete ideas for UI/UX which I think can be worked on in the near future and have positive impact into the involvement of users into our democracy system.
I am not a UX guy, so here are some very rough mocks:
The goal is to make a proactive and simple to use application for people to vote with.
- Users can be notified on their mobile / desktop when new proposals are available to vote on.
- Users are presented with a card containing all the relevant information users need to make their decision.
- Voting can be as easy as swiping left or right to the card.
- Users can go through all proposals and make their decisions.
- At the end, a summary page is shown to the user, and a single batch transaction is submitted for all of the votes.
I think something like this could greatly increase voter participation. We would probably need custom cards for different kinds of proposals like:
- Runtime Upgrades
- Treasury Spends (tips, proposals, etc…)
- Fellowship / Society
- Configuration changes (staking, parachains, etc…)
- General extrinsics which do not match a category above
Beyond this, I think we need to create a “dashboard” for governance similar to the successful Staking Dashboard.
The main features I would want to see in the dashboard is individual / group profiles, and a simple to use proposal creation form. It is possible we would want to build these functionalities on top of an existing platform like Polkassembly.
For profiles, we will need a history of treasury spends in the past so that we can do the reputation and follow up / impact ideas I originally posted.
- There should be a process for organizations to easily create a multisig with the individual users
- Organization profiles should list the users of that multisig
- All profiles should have a list of previous proposals they submitted, whether they passed, and any details on the impact of those proposals.
- Any other details which allows organizations and individuals to build up a reputation which can help sway the vote of people one way or another.
Finally, the current method for people to create proposals is to fill out a word document, but I think this process can be made much more streamlined and easy with a web form to fill out.
Compare that to this: Proposal: The operating cost for the nonprofit organization Polkadot Ecology Research Institute for 2022/9-2023/2 - Google Dokumenter
In this case, the UI can do a few things:
- Give users a template expected for filling out treasury proposals.
- Detect organizations, and make suggestions based on that.
- For example, if the beneficiary has no identity, we can suggest that the user creates an on-chain identity for the account.
- If the beneficiary has little or no reputation, we can put a warning if the user is asking for too mach funds. Otherwise, we can suggest to the user an upper limit based on their history and reputation.
- We can submit the proposal into a public review draft, which is handled off-chain, and allows people to get fast feedback before officially making the submission on-chain.
- The entire proposal can be turned into a well defined format, and uploaded to the chain using the preimage pallet and on-chain metadata. See Metadata for proposal and referendum by muharem · Pull Request #12568 · paritytech/substrate · GitHub
As always, these are just ideas, probably a lot has been built already, and some people with better design tastes than me can make these things a reality.