Improving Polkadot UX and Developer Experience: The Horizon Initiative

[Cyr06130]

Horizon is a collaborative effort between Distractive, Papermoon, Parity’s Product Engineering team, and the Web3 Foundation.

In December 2024, we launched Horizon - a program dedicated to improving both the user (UX) and the Polkadot developer experience (DevX).

Our initial focus was on user onboarding for Polkadot and Kusama, starting with the most visited websites. This involved clarifying the overall information architecture, consolidating content onto the top platforms, refreshing Wiki and support sites, and retiring outdated legacy pages.

In parallel, we worked to enhance the Polkadot developer experience by reviewing and updating technical documentation, ensuring it stays aligned with our roadmap, including initiatives like our Ethereum-compatible deployment stack.

Achievements in H1 2025

Deliverable Item	Capture	Benefits or Impact
Discover, gather, and analyze User Journeys (link)		Findings are shared openly, inviting contributions to build consensus and shape future marketing campaigns.
Implement performance tracking (dashboards) on polkadot.com		We now track audience trends and further metrics to measure the impact of changes.
Polkadot Hub - release a new product page		As a first touchpoint, we introduce the Hub to visitors and potential users.
Release an updated version of the docs website (link)		Developers get updated documentation, fresh use cases and tutorials, and a clear path to start building on Polkadot, supported by a simplified structure ready for future features like Ethereum-compatible smart contracts.
Release a new version of the Wiki website		The Wiki is directly hosted under the polkadot.com domain, with content reviewed alongside technical documentation for a clearer, more centralized user experience.
Rationalize legacy content and clean up legacy sites (mainly sidecar websites)		To bring a clear and more centralized user experience while browsing polkadot.com.
Support Hackathons during Q2 and implement a feedback collection and follow-up process		Gathered feedback from 80+ developers into a report (summary below), forming the foundations of Polkadot’s Developer Experience and Developer Relations teams.
Release a new version of the Kusama website		We reviewed and updated the content to provide builders with a more straightforward path for building on Kusama.

Hackathon Insights Point to Strong Builder Interest in Polkadot

The hackathons we monitored drew a highly skilled audience, 60% with 3+ years of coding experience and over a quarter in decision-making roles. Nearly half of them have already built on Polkadot, while many others came from Ethereum or Layer 2 ecosystems, showing cross-chain curiosity.

Participants praised interoperability, ease of use, multi-language support, and low fees, highlighting scalability, parachain infrastructure, and cross-chain composability as clear differentiators.

There was a palpable demand for templates covering DAOs, NFTs, DeFi, staking, governance, bridges, and crowdfunding. The top roadmap interest was in JavaScript support, XCMP, and staking, underlining the importance of these areas.

While overall feedback was positive, participants identified specific areas for improvement. These included the need for enhanced tooling, clearer onboarding processes, and more comprehensive role-specific documentation.

Additionally, participants expressed a desire for more real-world examples and video tutorials to aid their understanding. The value of support via Discord and in-person events was also highlighted, with requests for extended office hours to cater to different time zones.

Market expectations, from unified dashboards to seamless cross-chain deployment, align closely with Polkadot’s strengths. These insights give us a clear, community-backed blueprint to double down on what we do best while rapidly addressing the gaps and working toward putting Polkadot in an even stronger position for developer adoption.

Goals for Q3 2025

Building on this feedback, in the coming months, we will focus on simplifying tooling, enhancing documentation and onboarding, and delivering the most-requested features to ensure builders see their input reflected in the next wave of improvements.

Deliverable Item	Expected Benefits or Impact
Build a new homepage for polkadot.com, providing devs/companies with easy answers to their needs	Reboot the user experience on polkadot.com.
Implement a bi-weekly website release process, allowing more contributions across the Polkadot ecosystem	We roll out new content (text, page, tool, subdomain) faster on polkadot.com.
Collect a sentiment score from polkadot.com key pages, and add more performance tracking to our dashboards	Continuously enhance website performance tracking, measuring how updates to key pages improve the Polkadot user experience.
Merge smart contracts documentation repos into a single source of truth for teams to contribute	Centralizing technical documentation improves both Polkadot developers’ and writers’ experience.
Release of the Support website under the polkadot.com domain	The Support site now lives on polkadot.com, with content aligned to the technical docs and wiki for a clearer, unified experience.

polkadot.com sneak peek

An invitation to collaborate

Horizon is a long-term program because improving user experience and Polkadot developer experience is an ongoing process of iteration and refinement.

We began by identifying the most critical priorities, then incorporated insights from Conferences and Hackathons, including feedback gathered at events like ETH Belgrade and ETHCC 2025.

Now, we want to hear from you - the Voices of the Polkadot Community. Your thoughts and feedback will help guide what we improve in future iterations. Inspired by the ideas shared in Fixing the Online Presence for Polkadot, One Post at a Time, we can work together to show the world that Polkadot is vibrant, growing, and here to stay.

[flez]

Thank you for putting your plans out publicly. Giving the community space to weigh in is exactly the kind of openness we need more of. It is encouraging to see movement on HUB, and before things get too locked in, I’d like to share some thoughts on direction that could help sharpen its role.

HUB as the Social Layer

IMO, the future HUB is much more than the static landing page it is today. It should represent the entire .com experience and evolve into a true social layer for Polkadot. A place where token utility is front and center, where activity across the network is surfaced in a simple feed, and where people come not just to read about Polkadot, but to actually participate in it.

Imagine a front page alive with proposals, collective updates, tutorials, memes, events, and discussions. This shifts HUB from a static portal into something dynamic that users return to daily.

First Impressions Matter, Let’s Not Waste It

The proposed header (see sneak peak below) and associated copy “Built for the billions,” feels too vague to inspire a user to keep exploring imho. The header is prime real estate and serves as a first impression for new users stumbling on Polkadot for the first time. It should not be wasted on a message like this:

Instead, a live activity feed in this space would do much more to capture interest and draw people into the ecosystem. It would also set the mood that the goal is for activity, not simply reading.

For further context on Polkadot’s north stars and alternative messaging for each, I recommend giving this X post a quick glance: link.

Connecting Hub and Cloud

I would like to see plans on how this ties directly into the bigger vision. The Polkadot Cloud is the elastic backbone that powers Web3 services. The Polkadot Hub is where people experience that power through governance, contracts, marketplaces, and community-driven content.

They are two parts of the same story. Cloud as the infrastructure layer, Hub as the human layer. Together they create a product stack that is technically scalable and socially engaging. For more info on Hub vs Cloud 10-year visions, see Shawn T’s original forum post here.

A Shared Effort

HUB is being advanced by a handful of teams working in tandem, but for it to reach its full potential it needs to feel open to contributions from the wider ecosystem. It should bring together work from many groups. Modular in how it’s built, but cohesive in how it’s presented.

How can other teams best contribute going forward? For example, if helpful, I’d be happy to assist on the design or vision side. I can mock up a more social-network-style concept to help drive adoption on the HUB side. Just LMK.

Closing Thought

If Cloud is our AWS-like moment, Hub is our 𝕏 + App Store moment. Both are essential. The sooner we shape HUB with this level of ambition, the sooner Polkadot will feel like more than infrastructure. It will feel like a living/thriving ecosystem.

[NickD]

Thank you. This is a great initiative. My ask from a business development perspective is to make it easy for a user be that an individual, team, SMB, Enterprise to understand where they should navigate on the website and docs. We need to make it easy for the user to understand which user journey to choose.

This is just a small example, but i think Avalanche does a great job with their website and their docs, to help the user understand what they want, and then what user journey to take. One example which i found compelling recently is this graph which helps an enterprise understand which type of chain they may want.

[junglanml]

Thank you for the update on this important work,@cyr06130.

In onboarding myself to Polkadot, I have noticed the fragmented nature of the various information sites. Despite your good work, I often find content that is out of date, duplicating (or forking) other content, or somewhat haphazardly organised. Even though I am fairly new here, I have been gaining confidence that it’s not just me . I’ve made a couple of small contributions danrandow (junglanml) · GitHub , but somewhat blindly, as I have been wondering where the strategic approach to this is.

So it’s great to hear about Horizon, and see these examples of exactly that strategic approach! Is there some way I could participate?

Wider thoughts…

Websites are easier to fix than the UX of Polkadot itself, which like anything in web3, is a hard problem. Web content can smooth onboarding too, of course, for users and developers. And it is crucial to people’s first impressions, including in search results and increasingly, in LLM responses.

Improving content requires some clarity about the purpose that each site has to fulfil, and some patterns and standards for how to do that. Without these, any evaluation of a specific content improvement will swerve off into what we are trying to achieve and how.

And that, and other initiatives like biz dev, slogan, governance even, requires a decently clear product (hub, cloud, …) strategy, which in turn requires an overall Polkadot strategy. @flez, your comments and the context you link to are super-interesting to me, thank you . @alice_und_bob has contributed lots of strategy thinking too (eg Polkadot Growth Strategy ). And yet (maybe it’s just me?) none of this seems to coalesce. Though I don’t want to drag this thread away from its UX and DevX focus, I am also curious to know where Polkadot’s strategy and product schelling point is?

[Juba.K]

Hey @Cyr06130 - great writeup and glad to see a contribution (fixing online presence) made it so far as to be referenced in the next stages of feedback and iterations.

I won’t step into the developer portion of the website - as there are some extremely intelligent 4D thinkers in the room who i’m sure will take care of this portion.

For the other-side though, marketing & sales - I can resonate with what @NickD has posted above - and would like to see a very hard, similar push of product, backed up via case studies, easy to digest information and strategic placement of competitive, existing (and possibly future) services.

It was very refreshing to see Gavin today with Jay discussing a more product focused approach, amongst a few other things - website & public channels being one of them.

A switch over from selling a ‘worlds largest community DAO’ (existing layout) into a product & service approach could be just the thing needed to re-energize the brand & name.

Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds and thanks for listening.