I’m not a UX developer or programer however in my last two professional roles I’ve been tasked with providing user experience reports, feedback, suggestions and instructions to web Dev teams and I have done the same in my own personal life.
I’d be more than happy to assist wherever is required.
Please let me know, I have a good eye for detail and have a unique way of being able to assimilate the user. Toot toot, my own horn.
Resistence is futile… 
I’m sure @JimCollinson will jump in here, but the plan is very much on ensuring community feedback along the development journey - so your skills and time will definitely come in handy as we progress forward.
How long before you issue the implants?
Looks like how I feel first thing in the morning pre-coffee 
This SAFE Ecosystem/OS idea is incredible, really starting to make everything click.
I always felt it was important to make people feel they are in that SAFE/safe space, but I couldn’t quite picture how that would work at the same time as being flexible and modular and powerful.
At first I imagined it within the browser, a bit like the Google ecosystem, but despite having lots of clever people they seem to have really made a hash of the UX on that, and in general being within the browser seems to throw up a lot of problems such as how to include native apps.
I guess the mobile OS is becoming almost a default UX, but that has a lot of limitations as well, for example it’s not even that easy to store files unless you really try to look for a file browser app that’s not full of adverts.
After thinking about it for a while it looks like you’ve really nailed the approach, and it’s easy to imagine so many more possibilities, and see SAFE in a position to beat the current industry standards even on their own terms, which is remarkable for such a small company, and surely a testament to good engineering, and collectively good decision making at every stage.
Great write up and the UX looks great.
I’ve just added this to r/cryptocurrency
Thanks for the encouragement! Yeah, this is exactly as intended. We’re taking steady steps toward the Ecosystem. There are a lot of moving parts here, so we want to get the core right, and then add bells and whistles later on. Even things like the look and feel we’re not considering too much at the moment, just the foundations of the user journey and interaction, leveraging existing design systems to make this fast and less onerous to develop, then we start layering up the UI design in stages to add the polish, and the cake icing, as it were.
Yeah we thought about this a lot, and ended up concluding that we had to break it a part to allow for the flexibility of native and sovereign applications to run in a coherent way, but still have that trusted gatekeeper in the background.
If we get the permissions system right (and that’ll take some honing!) hopefully you’ll barely notice it is there
You know, the designers there are exceptionally good, and I do think they’ve made a valiant effort, and produced a lot of game changing experiences over the years. A lot of the UX issues I think stem from an organisational/structural issue. Lots of smaller teams working independently on experimental and interesting products, that break out of beta and become part of the Google suite, but they don’t quite fit together. I think they are gradually making strides to unpick this problem, and realign it all, but it take a lot of effort to turn a big tanker like that. A big evil tanker. 
Thanks for the vote of confidence! This is all very very difficult I have to say, but we’re taking small, but deliberate steps. And we’ve got a hell of a crew, so I think a few of those big ol’ vessels are about to get outmanoeuvred. All aboard the Good Ship SAFE!
Yeah, well be doing regular testing with end users at a regular frequency, typically at the end of each major sprint. This is always best done when the designers can actually observe people using the system, preferably in person. Perhaps we can community source some of this at some point, if we can figure out a solid strategy for that.
But certainly there is a place for expert review @goindeep . assimilating the user is a valuable skill, and you only get one shot at a ‘first impressions view’. Will let you know when we’ve got prototypes in a place where this is doable.
We could certainly do demos and hands on stuff at meet-ups, for sure.
For actual UX testing itself, typically you need participants that are unaware of the project, and don’t know what they might be about to test.
Yeah, that makes sense, I suppose.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate Jim.
Yeah, to be fair, Google does have a lot of good stuff from a UX point of view, but those structural difficulties really do come through even to a casual user.
As I say, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about these things cos I’ve been working on a little app that touches on them too, and it took a minute for the screenshot you posted to sink in (maybe because as you mention it’s still in very early stages,) but when it did, it was one of those sudden realisations of “oh, of course that’s how it should be” (and always should have been.)
Bear in mind by the way that this is coming from someone who’s still struggling to assimilate the knowledge that ‘the internet’ isn’t just what I see in my browser, despite having known that for a good number of years!
Always felt that whatever the gateway is (now safebrowser) we should allow that gateway to be wrapped by a third party installer. So for example, if a DropBox integrated with Safe…a user could install the new DropBox installer and be on the SafeNetwork by default.
The whole idea being that users enter Safe via a service they already trust.
It’s an unknown as to adoption rates given a ‘cold call’ to utilise safe via the Safebrowser.
Not sure if SafeCLI is that oppurtunity to integrate or maybe the API…lost track of how it all fits together these days 
Yeah, you could do that with the SAFE CLI, devs could roll their own.
Whether it’s desirable or not it another question. A user will have a relationship with the network and won’t, of course, be logging in “with DropBox”, rather just using DropBox to manipulate their data on the network. So at some point, to some degree, they have to get to grips with this paradigm. There certainly could be a flow that starts with the DropBox UI, and is wrapped up in their onboarding. They could even roll their own authenticator if they wanted. But a user can, and should, always be able to choose to which gateway UI to trust, and not have to involve DropBox in any of that if they don’t want too.
Plus, it get’s easier for app devs if they don’t have to get involved in any of that either. The authentication process is pointed to, and the user’s preferred method of handling that comes into view.
FYI, as I mention in the post, the plans are to remove the authentication process from the Browser, and have a lightweight transient/background app handle it instead.
Maidsafe Decentralized Operating System (MS DOS)
Edit: I prefer (S DOS)
Why not safe DOS 20 char 20char
When you say mock network, does that include testnets with home vaults?
It’s been so long since we had the real home vault testnet.
It performed like a pig, but Maidsafe were stoked with the data.
A lot of developments since then… like UDP only, but unless there’s been some real world testing in the background…there’s an awful lot of assumptions regarding performance.
A mock network is like a functioning network, but just running locally on your machine. It’s great for developing on, as you can test all the functionality without all the put costs, or to have a complete network up.
That will be Fleming, which we are on the cusp of as we speak.
I’ll let the backend guys comment on this one, they’d be better placed to answer your question, if there is a question in there.