NOW YOUR TALKING! This line of inquiry is sorely lacking in the dev community in general. What this post does is conduct a very important series of "experiments", albeit fairly rudimentary, but designed to gather information about what users find important.

What a breath of fresh air to see such ideas discussed let along trending here on steemit. I truly hope the UI devs of steemit (and other projects) will internalize the ideas you have presented here and act on them by doing similar and more in depth characterization of their UI designs. To get an optimum UI / UX such testing and experimentation is necessary, and the wider the audience the better quality the information gathered will be.

In our rush to complete the tasks that provide features, this aspect of design has largely been lost. It's old school UI design. Also the pressure to "get on with it" so profits can roll in is also a factor. Good design takes time. Good marketing takes research on who you intend to market to.

Thank you good-karma for such an important article. Also glad to see the huge payout I see here. Great job!