It's really awesome to see Communities finally coming into reality after all this time and today I finally got a chance to play around with them. This is my first post into a Community!

Anyway I just wanted to share my initial thoughts and experience as well as offer a few suggestions.


![CommunitiesFeedback_01.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmT1FhvzynMsS1ssvMpYCDqPasNvsr4f3EHj9nJexHN97g/CommunitiesFeedback_01.jpg)

So the new layout has a nice minimal feel to it. I initially wondered what the red and green dots were, but generally figured it out pretty quickly. Not really sure how it relates to the number of dots or exactly how they correlate to the upvotes and downvotes, so I do wonder if a tooltip or some sort of explanation might help.

I imagine if there are icons that are meant to communicate something, it's best if they're fulfilling that purpose in as complete a way as possible. Right now I know it has something to do with upvotes and downvotes, and it looks like payout, but beyond that it's not really clear.

![CommunitiesFeedback_02.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbLiiTyNwkpzvC1Gz6fuLC1WKx7qFiMzEseqhLnvGTN4t/CommunitiesFeedback_02.jpg)

Upon landing on the Communities page, there was something I noticed that was a bit of a friction point. I wanted to be able to quickly at a glance see what posts are from what Community. At a glance I can recognize thumbnails and avatars as images are much faster to "read" than text. Neither of these give me the information I want in this same time frame. This brings me to my first suggestion. 

# Community Avatars

![CommunitiesFeedback_03.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYEDR8PpV14zFmr457M89j14hvxZLsPHVRf4KNiX8g1oU/CommunitiesFeedback_03.jpg)

So since in large part one of the major value adds of Communities has to do with ownership, I think Community owners need a few more levers of expression to express that ownership. But practically, this also allows for instant identification of Communities without having to read text. Obviously the same reason everything that needs to be quickly identifiable typically has a logo.

The other suggestion shown here is a header image on the community page. I think this solves a few issues. 

- It give a quick at a glance idea what the community is about.
- It separates the Communities pages not only from each other, but from other areas of the interface. The idea here is something like you feed, or general trending are like public open places. But your blog or your Community are yours and I think require that extra level or personalization to express that in the design.
- *Opinion: I think it is more aesthetically pleasing breaking up all the bars and text with an image of similar visual weight.

![CommunitiesFeedback_CommunitiesIcon.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmdNx7NtsbUFsxQBfUPY9y7V9pQGq3wGGXVKM8K4na6t5j/CommunitiesFeedback_CommunitiesIcon.jpg)

So the secondary use of the Community Avatars would be in the Feeds. This way when looking at the feed pages, you could quickly and at a glance identify who posted something and where they posted it. As we transition to a Steem that I think will be completely focused around Communities, I think this will improve the user experience. (They're probably too big in this mock up, but you get the idea)

Those are the areas where I have suggestions for solutions. The following are some areas that are probably on people's radars, but I think should probably be tackled sooner rather than later.

# The Explore Communities Page

As soon as this goes completely live, there will be thousands of Communities within days I think. This page needs a search bar. I thought maybe when you create your Community, along with your about and Description you can also create some keywords for your Community so people could find it. For Example my Community is about Art, so maybe my keywords are (art, artists, drawing, painting, digital, traditional, concept, 3D, photoshop, vis dev, visual development, design, graphic, etc)

Other thing that seems small to me, but might be really annoying for a new user is that notifications are a lot of clicks away from almost everywhere, and they don't "Notify" you. It might be better named "Activity" because there is a clear established behavior that users are going to expect when it comes to notifications and this is a departure from that. I'd rather it work similarly to other platforms and be something accessible from everywhere and actually notify you. Of course there needs to be controls on what you're notified about as well.

That's all I've got so far. Overall really excited by what's here so far, and really looking forward to future developments.