Consolidated Links and Tools for Handy Content Posting in Dolphin 7.1

Perhaps the most important usability improvement in Dolphin 7.1 comes in a form of a unified " + " (Add New...) drop-menu in floating member panel and an improved media upload system that now allows uploads without going into desired album, or without creating an album in advance. 

Oh, and if the above sentence has too much lingo for you, here's a human-friendly explanation...

Importance of Easy Reach

You want your site members to post and share a lot of useful, unique content on your site, as regularly as possible. Very often such activity is based on impulse - people want to post now, and the next minute they don't care about it. So, it is our goal to capture the moment and provide the tools on our sites to let them post easily, be it a blog post, bunch of image, video or whatever else. 

Many social networks realised importance of keeping posting tools handy and now we see those "plus" buttons or direct posting forms everywhere - Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, FB, etc. 

Interestingly, the process of posting doesn't necessarily need to be very concise - it can take a few steps, if required, but it is indeed very important to bring user to the task of posting as quickly and easy as possible. 

Add New...

Dolphin 7.1 now has a handy new thingy in member menu, which looks like this...

Obviously, clicking any of the options brings user to the content posting form - no need to go into the module, create albums, or dig into the destination category. All that can be done during the posting process, when user is already "invested" and won't drop out easily.

... Photo, Video, Forum Topic

While the process of posting some content has always been relatively simple, photos and videos were a bit crippled by requirement to create an album first. This had even our own testers confused sometimes. In Dolphin 7.1 we've added the (already mentioned - #8) direct topic creation, and now we are also including a smarter upload interface, which will let users create or select destination albums during upload process. It looks like this...

And if they choose an option to "Create New Album" it would look like this...

As you may see it will suggest the album name by taking the upload date and will let you choose privacy setting before proceeding to files upload.

All in all, these subtle improvements should greatly improve success rate of content posting, especially among member that are new to the site and are yet to "muddle through" to their preferred ways of making sense of the site user-interface.  We've run a few quick tests with our lab rats friends and families and can confidently tell that along with the improved social interaction features these changes will surely boost the most significant site performance metric of them all - user engagement. Stay tuned!