Two Features, One Lesson

LegacyTree has been live for a few months now. Real users, real profiles, real links being shared across the continent. That changes how you think about what to build next.

When the platform was empty, every decision was about getting something working. Now the decisions are different. They’re about removing friction for people who are already there — and making it easier for new people to join.

Two recent updates speak to that shift.

The registration form on LegacyTree has always been straightforward. Name, username, email, password. Clean, functional, does what it needs to do.

But there’s a tax on every form field. Every field is a small reason to stop. And when your target user is a creator or entrepreneur who already has a Google account and is deciding in the moment whether to sign up — that tax adds up.

Adding Google sign-in was the obvious move. One button. No password to remember. Credentials they already have.

What wasn’t obvious was the complexity underneath it.

Google OAuth through Supabase involves a chain: your app sends the user to Google, Google hands them back to Supabase, Supabase hands them back to you. Each step has configuration. Each step has a way to silently fail. Locally, it redirects to your production URL if you haven’t added localhost to the allowlist. Your database trigger — the one that creates a profile row on signup — crashes if it expects a username that Google doesn’t provide.

The bugs weren’t dramatic. They were the kind that make you stare at a URL with error=server_error in it and work backwards.

But once it was working, the experience on the other side was exactly what it needed to be. Click once, you’re in. If it’s your first time, you land on a short onboarding page — pick a username, set your specialty. Then you’re on the dashboard.

That’s the whole flow. Fast enough that it doesn’t feel like signing up at all.

Link ordering

This one came from watching how people use the dashboard.

Your links on LegacyTree are ordered. The order matters — it’s the first thing someone sees when they open your tree. Naturally, users want to control it.

The first instinct was drag and drop. It’s the expected pattern. It looks good in demos. There are libraries built for it.

But drag and drop is a desktop interaction. On mobile — where a large portion of LegacyTree’s users are — it’s unreliable at best. On older phones, on touch screens without precise pointer control, on devices that are just slightly behind: it breaks. Or it works inconsistently, which is worse, because then users don’t know if they’ve done something wrong or the app is just broken.

I wrote about this on LinkedIn when I shipped it. The response that stuck with me was from someone who said they’d been burned by drag-and-drop on a previous project and wished they’d made the same call earlier.

The alternative was simpler. Up and down buttons on each card. Tap up, the link moves up. Tap down, it moves down. Disabled when you’re at the boundary.

No library. No new dependency. No drag state to manage. Works on every device, every browser, every screen size, every hand.

It’s not as slick. It doesn’t animate the way drag-and-drop does. But it works. Every time. For everyone.

What these two things have in common

Both of these updates were about reducing friction — but they got there in opposite ways.

Google sign-in reduced friction by adding a smoother path in. Less to fill in, less to remember, lower barrier to entry.

Link ordering reduced friction by removing a complex interaction and replacing it with a simpler one. Less to think about, less to get wrong, less to break.

One was about doing more. One was about doing less. Both made the product better for the people using it.

That’s the pattern I keep coming back to at this stage. Not: what can I add? But: where is something getting in the way, and what’s the most direct way to remove it?

LegacyTree is still early. But it’s getting sharper. The users who are here are planting real trees — profiles that represent their work, their identity, their corner of the African creator economy.

The job now is to make sure nothing gets in the way of that.

LegacyTree is live at legacyafricagq.co.za. Plant your tree.