Here's a proposal to influx some excitement in the publication flow and, in general, to open a debate on whether it could make sense to sprinkle the UI with other human touches.

This first proposal aims to congratulate users in certain situations, for example, when they publish their first post. However, we could also extend this idea to include specific milestones (like publishing 10, 50, or 100 posts, for example).

To be clear, I'm not proposing that we add gamification mechanics. I'm just suggesting connecting with users through small details that we could implement using text, illustrations, and (optionally) animations.

Here are a couple of ideas for how this particular feature could be displayed:

Static

We could add a simple celebratory image on top of the sidebar and include an encouraging message after the user publishes their first post:

Congratulations on your first post!
[Title of the post] is now live.
Publishing a post is no small feat. We hope this is the first one of many to come!

Animated

Another possibility could be to animate the confetti, and in that case, we could have a couple of options: on top of the right sidebar or on top of the document window.

Since this variation is more striking, we should honor the user's reduced motion settings and offer a static version as an alternative. Also, in case we'd like to show this message more than once (for example, after a new post is published), we should include a mechanism to opt-out.

There are other ideas on this Figma file that also include illustrations and some prototypes to see the feature in action.