2 posts tagged with "frontend"

Your Genie finishes a long edit while you're staring at a different tab. Three things should happen at once: a toast slides in, a new item lands in your inbox so the news survives a reload, and — if you asked for it — your phone buzzes. None of the code that produced that message knows any of this. It raised one notification, passed a player and a string, and moved on.

That gap — between "something happened" and "the user finds out, in four different places" — is the small piece of the system that taught us the most about keeping a Rails app real-time.

Fibe has a vocabulary problem, and we knew it the day we shipped. A new player signs up and within thirty seconds must hold a half-dozen made-up nouns in their head: Marquees, Props, Playspecs, Playgrounds, Tricks, Crumbs, the Bridge. None mean what they mean anywhere else — you cannot Google "what is a Marquee" and get our answer. The first time someone lands in the app, the dashboard is empty and every label is a word they have never seen, on a concept they do not have.

You can solve that with documentation. We tried. Nobody reads it. So we built an onboarding wizard that walks a brand-new player from a blank account to one real, running environment — teaching the nouns by doing, not reading, and never sending them to a manual.