Continuing yesterday’s work on “outside contributors,” some new perspectives:
Now, there are three “person” concepts in Write.as: User, Team Member, and Author. The first two, User and Member, are private structures that primarily hold permission data and contextual settings (User: password + email for the platform; Member: role + email for the team).
An Author, however, is a public structure meant to hold publicly-known information, like a bio and post authorship. Most blogging platforms don’t make the distinction between an Author and a User like this. But this allows us to minimize data collection and eliminate unnecessary work for writers (a single-user blog doesn’t really need an author bio, because the blog is the bio).
I often think of our UX like various gentle slopes of increasing friction and weight — from simplicity to complexity, or zero to full data collection. With this new user structure, we can maintain a gentle slope from writing alone to writing with others. The experience for a single blog author doesn’t change at all — the added work only shows up at the precise moment someone decides they want to write with others, and specifically, that they want some kind of public authorship known to readers (that is, we’ll still enable you to have a multi-author blog that conceals the identity of individual writers).
Thoughts? Discuss...