The Design of Blockchain Based Apps | Blockchain Onramp Series | San Francisco, CA

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1. 0:00

   you so for today basically we're talking about design and this is really designed to be an overview of the design of applications I'll try not to overuse the word and so basically what what a users actually care about they don't care about blockchain at all we were talking about this a little bit beforehand users don't care other businesses don't care nobody actually cares and so if there's

2. 0:31

   one thing that that you'd walk away with it's probably it should be the knowledge that that's that that's the truth the fundamental truth is that you know remember everything is about the user it doesn't actually matter what platform we're talking about it doesn't matter what app we're talking about they don't care if they have a problem they want to get it solved fast and cheap so why is

3. 0:48

   it worth actually talking about this because where we are in the industry right now is we're still very very early we're still in the innovators face you know we're still in the phase where people are willing to go through all kinds of difficulty they they all kind of understand the jargon and it's a it's a time where the only way that we can cross the little mini gap over to early adopters is to begin actually speaking like human beings again to begin

4. 1:11

   courting people who are actually able to able to you know to who don't necessarily have to have that level of technical savvy that we've been operating on so basically I think you need to you need to really focus on design thinking to begin moving across that gap certainly to get to the big be quote big scary chasm that gets you into the into the early majority but we aren't even close to that I mean that's yours that's years away the other reason

5. 1:35

   on the human side so Sarah Baker Mills is the design lead at consensus which is the etherium product studio and venture studio and one of the things that that she's talked about is that Trust is very important and I'll talk about that a little bit later but you know basically what you're saying is that this is also important because blockchain in particular is a platform that actually affects some of the most important

6. 1:57

   things about people one of the reasons why it's so valuable is it's not just a commodity compute for them but it's a it's a it's a compute platform that actually provides access via primitives two very very important things to users right their money their identity their data and their their health information and you know there's a lot of stuff that you can put on the blockchain that that we need to be stewards of and and this is even more so unboxing than

7. 2:22

   most other other industries or most other areas and so that's why this is also really important so as far as today goes there's a lot of actually a lot of different scopes that we could talk about when we say design so I kind of want to kick off just just just get everyone on the same page so user facing design is sort of what's maybe considered traditional design right it's its users using your apps we also

8. 2:45

   obviously design is use in a technical context too because you have technical systems design and then you know in both of these contexts you have design we talked about design patterns and things like that today is much more about the user facing side than the technical side and but they're not actually they're not she completely separate especially in something as technical as blockchain where your user facing design should actually be informing your technical design and your technical design should

9. 3:10

   be informing your user facing design I mean it's it's a feedback cycle in the end of the day what's going to win is what the user wants but obviously we have to operate within constrained environments that are governed by the technology along the way and we need the designers to carry the carry the standard and and push forward with what the users actually wanted to be the voice of those users so just kind of a note of this is specifically addressing

10. 3:33

    maybe lower-level platforms so less on the DAP side more on the platform side but you know there really are two constituencies for platforms as well you have the the app builders and then you have the app users so we talked about you know basically there's a difference between developer experience and user experience and it's great to design for end-users everyone loves that designing for developers is much more challenging

11. 3:56

    there's a lot more text involved but it's equally important there is a there's a talk that I gave a number of weeks ago about developer experience which is maybe worth checking out if you're interested in that but for today I will stick with the sexy stuff uh-huh and specifically again talking about end-user design with with a lot of sort of using kind of in the same way user experience as well again that there is a

12. 4:19

    difference but that's you know kind of the way that I'm gonna be framing things so what is actually user experience in the end of the day it's actually the entire experience of the person who's using the applique and some of the metrics that we tend to use are is it easy and is it pleasing is it is it is it fun is it is it enjoyable to use there's a difference between the interface and the experience so they

13. 4:42

    often get conflated UI versus UX user interface is actually generally just the page or or the screen or the thing that you're interacting with in the moment whereas the experience again is an entire journey so one of the typical examples is that you know you have a user interface you have the old Heinz ketchup bottles are optimized for user interface they're beautiful they don't work you tip them upside down nothing happens unless you know the trick where you hit the number and then that now

14. 5:09

    they have the the new squeeze bottles which don't look like anything in particular but you know they in theory work unless you've tried to squeeze them really hard and then it all shoots out the bottom and then it doesn't matter anyways there's also we talked about a lot about usability and usability is a little bit more let's call it the science of the science of UX maybe again these terms I'm gonna be kind of using

15. 5:32

    them fast and loose here purists will take me to task but in the end of the day you can kind of think usability is this is the science it's it's what we put metrics on we track it in the end of the day we want to have we want to let the user achieve their goal you know with with measurable effectiveness efficiency and satisfaction and user experience again there's this element of joy this is you just a qua that that often comes with it that that we also want to pay attention to because you

16. 5:56

    know if you're only focusing on the the type metrics sometimes you miss what actually makes apps truly enjoyable to use so again UX is in fact the full journey so as far as the industry today it's not great so this this tweet was from middle of the year and you know it's the user experience is just it's hard and it's not necessarily some of it is a technologically constrained and some of it is designer constraint you know there

17. 6:28

    are a lot of technical projects that haven't been prioritizing design we were talking about the prioritization of design before this and you know there's there's a lot of room to move forward so for me in particular especially for today everything that I'm describing I didn't make up any of this this is really relying on a lot of the information that some of the real the visionaries in the industry have put forward we have we have a number of

18. 6:51

    these folks theorem has been big consensus has been begging coin lists have been big and Sarah Gregory actually from coinbase was with us and maybe a couple months ago giving a fantastic talk on user experience so I want to I want to acknowledge that there there are some diagrams and things like that as well that I'm gonna show that that are actually from these folks as well so just want to give them upfront credit for what they've done and in the end

19. 7:15

    I'll be encouraging you guys to follow them as well but in the end of the day what's kind of cool about this is there's so much white space right now that everybody's trying to figure it out nobody has this nobody's nailed this there are so many new patterns that we have to walk through that we have to figure out that we have to test the technology is changing so fast that it isn't like this is you know all the medium posts have been written all the guides have been written everything's been figured out it's

20. 7:37

    totally the opposite and what's cool about that is that everybody's really open to collaboration so if you're interested in participating in design or if you're just interested in learning about design it's actually it's a two-sided conversation it's not people you know on the stage talking down it's very much a collaborative thing a lot of it takes place on Twitter and and on medium and on the podcasts and at conferences but it's it's definitely an open conversation so just quick bit

21. 8:01

    about myself so I run operations at near protocol so near is a scalable developer friendly blockchain so we're basically kind of doing what a theory m2 is is attempting to do as well with a fully sharded system from day one and we're really focusing as we are here on usability as an incredibly important thing to target to to begin to cross that that little micro chasm into the

22. 8:22

    early adoption phase so what I wanted to cover today is basically just kind of the high level of what what is this decentralized app space talk about some general principles of design I won't I won't belabor everything that most of you might be familiar with talk about designing on blockchain in particular as I mentioned a little bit about designing for trust and then kind of wrap things

23. 8:45

    up and then at the end actually what I'd like to do is you know if we with the folks who are here is sit down and have a bit of a chat and you know you guys are welcome to stick around for sure so just just again quick benchmarking what is a regular app we've all used them it's an interface it's a front-end that gets served from a server that's usually probably cloud hosted on Amazon or Microsoft or Google cloud and it's it

24. 9:09

    sits on top of the database where the data gets stored these are all things that we're hopefully well familiar with and then the question is what's the difference when you begin to decentralize something what does it mean to put it on the blockchain and ultimately the the blockchain still gets accessed typically through the browser because this is where the users are but it takes the typical interactions with the blockchain requires some sort of user permission about a little bit

25. 9:33

    through the wallet and in it basically if it wants to interact with the blockchain it tends to go it has to go through the smart contract which actually lives on the blockchain so the blockchain is kind of both acting as almost a server and almost a database at the same time so the other thing I want to note give a talk about on this one last week which is basically that decentralization is not pure or it can be pure but it doesn't have to be pure it is a spectrum and we talked about it very binary but it's not it's it's

26. 10:03

    definitely a spectrum on one end of the spectrum you have the the adapts the true decentralized you know decentralize all the things apps and on the other side you have this centralized but there's this big middle ground in the middle where really it's just businesses want to use things that work and they might actually the best solution might actually be on a blockchain it might not

27. 10:21

    be on the blockchain half the solution might be on the blockchain half the solution might not remember in the end of the day users only care about getting their problem solved they're far less motivated by high lofty goals of trust lessness and decentralization and things like that unless it means you know momentary value so what what actually do you get when you're on a blockchain based app so in the end of the day users they own their data that's one of the key fundamental

28. 10:44

    things it's not in your database it's on the blockchain and the blockchain is everybody's database in order to access that information we have to ask their permission and this is this is one of the biggest bedeviled factors which we'll talk about the the other one is that actions have costs so we're not really used to operating in this world where everything actually has a cost to it where you have to pay for every step that you want to do right

29. 11:08

    we're kind of used to the like you know build me $7 a month and and you know I'll think about that later if you've interacted with Amazon you know with the Amazon Cloud you're probably used to getting a metered bill that's much more much more fine-tuned but still it's not as fine-tuned as this this is this is you're actually paying for every single little thing that you do and then of course and and often times and somebody has to pay that and so often times we end up pushing that up to our users at

30. 11:31

    least in today's world but the ideal world is probably that we do something very similar to what we what we do on web 2 which is more hide that as much as possible and then of course there are some new interactions and things like that that are being experimented with you have token curated registries you have sticking mechanisms that basically you know people put their money where their mouth is the bet on something or to claim something or whatever it is

31. 11:53

    these in governance voting as a part of the protocol these are all things that users aren't really used to paying attention to and we're kind of as an industry I think trying to push them into some of these new patterns and we'll and we'll see what actually becomes successful but it is a lot of a lot of these new patterns are important but in the end of the day it's just design and you know again it's first principles or first principles and they

32. 12:16

    are what they are so what I want to talk about is is specifically some of those things walking through what the users experience looks like in a blockchain based app and basically what the walls are that those put in front of users that maybe they didn't have in traditional apps so one of the key ones is is is knowledge it's I mean almost every decentralized app that whatever it is that that you use that you'll run

33. 12:42

    into out there they have to they have some sort of education problem users have some kind of knowledge problem because users go in expecting nothing different they go to a website they expect a website they expected the you know e-commerce sites to operate on the same principles they expect games to operate on these same freemium principles that they're used to and we have to actually figure out how do we how do we educate them how do we on ramp them to the changes that are about to happen in their experience when we have to actually ask them for permission or

34. 13:06

    or do things like that and what does it mean and in some of the value propositions of the apps themselves like the I like using the crypto kiddies example because it's everybody's kind of heard of it you know how do you educate people on what it means to own one of these silly cats you know like what's different what does that intrinsically valuable about this thing that they have which is the core value proposition of the entire app so no matter what there's always an education component that's associated with this and education is really difficult for

35. 13:31

    users because unless they are literally going in asking to be educated what they really want to do is is the thing that they wanted to do not like they want to learn as little as possible to get to that thing and so a lot of apps will provide way too much education lots of big walls of text and and trying to inform the user of all the things that are about to happen all the time and a and then on the other side you have apps that that don't really do a good job of

36. 13:54

    that or are optimizing for power users at the expense of new users so and it's a really hard ground to straddle I mean it's very easy to say you know do choose the right amount of Education but obviously in practice that's much more difficult so the other wall the next wall that they typically run into is the wallet and that's that's a pretty big one you know it's it's almost every blockchain based app is going to eventually ask the user for their wallet

37. 14:18

    and and you know typically what they'll do is they'll detect that there's a wallet or well the app will usually need a wallet for one of the activities that they want that they want to create usually that involves like creating a user's account or signing a transaction of some sort and so users need wallets and this is totally new this is not something that users are used to and and

38. 14:43

    so the very first thing that you do they I took the screen cap here from one of the popular games I don't remember what it was called but you know it's again the very first thing that a lot of these apps require you to do is to go and download meta box or which is it which is a wallet app and and this is a huge wall for for lots of these users the other one is ok great you have a wallet now what's inside of it usually to interact with one of these apps you need to have tokens how the hell do you go out and find tokens

39. 15:07

    what's a token this is this is a huge pain for for users if you've convinced them that they want to use your app enough to download this other apps you know sometimes this is a reasonably familiar pattern it's a you know sometimes you need to download your the zoom app to use it you have to use video conferencing or something like that right we're kind of used to this this this modality of like ok well maybe we have to maybe we have to download something new but then it's wait what do

40. 15:31

    you mean and we have to I have to like pay money first to go buy a bunch of tokens right this is a huge wall for users and then managing keys what does it mean to be a wall well what's inside my wallet I I have keys what does it mean what is a key and you can kind of you know there's a little nugget of something familiar and and keep your your password secret but what is it key what is the difference between a private key and a public key I mean I didn't know what it was for for a long time it just didn't seem to make any sense I had

41. 15:55

    no I had no no way of figuring out what the actual difference was and of course what happens if you lose your keys what happens if you have your keys on your iPhone versus your your your your Mac you know it's it's it's a hugely complicated barrier and then what the fifth wall is permission its transactions right because okay so now you let's say you have the wallet you have the the tokens and now the app wants to do something well the app is gonna ask you for permission to do it

42. 16:19

    and a lot of times actually the first thing that the app will ask you is is can I can I access not even not even your wallet like your balances but can I access your information can I even can I ask like who you are which is totally foreign because you know we go to the website now and you just expect that there's a you know maybe it's been saved in a cookie what your login status is or something or whatever it is and so maybe you've logged in with Google before or

43. 16:43

    something like that and and so again the all of this permissioning all this constant asking and and and then of course when you have transactions when you actually need to do one of these things whether it's creating an account or or again having a transaction happen on the blockchain you you end up having to ask permission for that so these are all hurdles for users who they don't know what the heck is going on like why do I have to give you permission to do these things and then gas is a specific

44. 17:07

    subset of these transactions right so great you're asking me for permission what are all these things that you're throwing at me what is the kid what is gas what is the gas price and the gas limit and what does it mean to be faster or fast or fastest this doesn't make any sense so again these ideas of gas and speed which this by the way is a very aetherium focused lens but again I do

45. 17:33

    that just because it's a very common paradigm that people are pretty aware of newer blockchains are generally starting to try and figure out how can we reduce users ability how can we reduce these deeper you know how can you make even developers not think too much about these kind things but this is the world we live in right now and then of course the seventh wall you've gone through all this stuff you finally done a thing and now you have to wait you have to wait for it to

46. 17:58

    happen what and how long do you even wait I don't know why I selected fastest but why am I sitting there with with this spinner on the screen just going and going and going what does it even mean to submit a transaction does that mean the thing happened or does it mean that it's going to happen again this is not a patent users are not used to waiting so let's let's figure out how to let's figure out how to how to address these problems and scale the walls these

47. 18:23

    are this is from a book on medieval siege warfare methods of attack on the castles of England if you're curious so I want to back up a little bit and just just kind of start from the top again on on design principles before moving back into the blockchain specific stuff I think you know again just the benchmark people tend to tend to say design thinking and design process or a kind of synonymous design thinking has become this very buzzword II sort of enterprise-e consultancy thing but I like to think of

48. 18:52

    it a lot more about just what's your state of mind when you're approaching these problems are you actually approaching them in a very deliberate user focused manner or not and then of course you have a process which is what are you doing to address those problems in a much more tangible way and finally you have the toolkit of tactics and patterns and things like that that you can that you can access while you're trying to solve these problems and process matters so process is actually one of the Design Thinking is a really

49. 19:17

    value have to start with the mindset but once you get through the mindset the process does matter and I wanna I want to mention that I mean I'm I'm a process focused person but process also really matters in the sense that if you have a good process it doesn't let you slack on the things that are actually important but maybe a little bit less sexy because it's hard it's hard to go out and talk to people it's hard to go out and find people like how do you how do you find the users that you think are maybe the

50. 19:41

    user personas for the app that you're going to build finding them as hard scheduling them as hard sitting down in front of them is hard and awkward and and so all of this is super easy especially for a technical team to just go out and execute right so your job as a designer is to is to try and maintain the integrity of the process and make sure that your that you're doing a lot of testing that you're actually doing Fidelity hi iteration stuff while the cost of that is low because we all know what the carrying or hope you know we

51. 20:06

    all have a sense of what the carrying cost of a team of of half a dozen or a dozen engineers is relative to the amount of time it takes to fire up a bunch of paper mock-ups and get a bunch of people in there for two hours to poke through them and process matters then again this is a slide from Sarah's deck actually but design testing testing testing get in front of users every single step of the way you need you need to present these things to users you

52. 20:30

    need to present your conclusions your concepts your strategies all the way up through the low fidelity mock-ups all the way up to the high mock-ups and then build it's a very different process than what typically happens and especially in this in this industry where we've we've had both the benefit and the downside of most of the early technology is by developers for developers but again the next wave is trying to bridge the gap into consumers or businesses and things like that and you just can't get away

53. 20:53

    with that anymore because developers might you know they're just not the consumer so who are our users this is one of my favorite slides from Alex mandus and he gave it a give it a talk I think it was in Toronto but users do not care about ether they don't care about backing up private keys seed phrases why they can't use standard two-factor authentication huge hex strings non simple user names why they can't use

54. 21:18

    their credit card why they can't use the App Store and blue etc etc etc right again it's just another flavor of users don't care and and there are multiple different types of users as well that we're kind of thinking about that we have to serve there's there's the newbie on one side then there's the hardcore technologists and there are the the decentralize everything folks and each one of them is is going to come in with a very very different frame of mind and so you know generally it's a good

55. 21:43

    practice to be designing for the newbie first and then providing some sort of swimlanes where where the more advanced users can actually siphon themselves off maybe turn off certain certain flows certain you know onboarding type stuff and and begin it's you know a fairly common practice and product right where you have your power users you begin to you sort of allow them to opt into that process but you know the newbies don't care if they don't they don't care but they also don't know and that's one of

56. 22:07

    the hardest things to balance so general design principles I would expect that everyone's heard about these types of things on the right we have dieter Rams as ten principles but in the end of the day you know follow expectations make sure that the users expectations are met and if you can't meet them make sure that you're setting them as much as possible in the right direction minimize cognitive load don't make me

57. 22:30

    think there's a really good book and I think a series of talks around don't make me think that's one of the fundamental things about users don't make them think don't make them do anything that requires the brain to turn on or they will do everything in their power to avoid it and then they'll act like drunk toddlers be consistent obviously across across your interfaces and also be consistent with the patterns that they're used to so you know again

58. 22:53

    web 2 we still operate in a web 2 world we can't build this thing from scratch users are coming in with their own frames and you have to kind of operate within those frames and guide them gently don't let them make mistakes is another one do whatever you can and again we're we're dealing with sensitive stuff and it's very easy for users to make mistakes do everything in your power to make sure that they can't make those 2 mistakes and of course being unobtrusive is one of the hallmarks of

59. 23:18

    design light touch light touch is worth a lot so a few things I wanted to actually specifically call out one of them is the the idea of affordances which was from the design of everyday thing I don't know that I don't believe he actually originated the I don't actually remember what the name of the author of the book was he didn't originate the concept but it kind of I think because that book was so popular it kind of took off from him and then

60. 23:42

    the the HCI crew actually extended it beyond what he what he originally intended it to be but anyways in human human computer interaction an affordance is really considered to be kind of like when you look at something what do you expect to be able to do with it so one of the examples that they give is if you walk into a room with a chair and a softball how do you know which one to do what I want to throw and which one to sit on you know what that kind of extends to in

61. 24:08

    in practical terms it's a very it's a really really valuable concept because right it's how do you design things and how do you design experiences in a way that that you're only showing the user things that that they kind of know what to do with or or you do your best to show them things in a way that they feel like they know how it works already because the more you have to explain to them the harder it's going to be to get them to actually do something so one of them is made sure that there's an obvious choice with

62. 24:31

    intuitive results this is harder than it actually sounds and then the other is don't let them do something bad so so I guess I can think of a developer example the top of my head but did you know there are things like api's that have that have really problematic interfaces where they'll bill sort of expose methods to developers that actually have no business being exposed and it's like well you shouldn't expose them in the

63. 24:56

    first place and and I think that applies in some of these experiences like don't let users do something stupid it's kind of what it comes down to don't let them do things that they shouldn't be able to do another one is controlling guidance users always want people want to feel like they're in control and the way they feel like they're in control is that they know where they are they know where they can go and they have a sense of where you want them to go right that's those are kind of the three components and that applies to navigation that

64. 25:20

    applies to you know the progress of things that are going on like I said you know the waiting that'll come up is you know you you will always want to know what status like what's the status where am i right now relative to where I could go and where you want me to go it's really important and that actually is one of the concepts that I don't see a lot in in a lot of apps right now is I think people tend to get a little bit lazy around that because it it it's it's

65. 25:44

    you said in sort of the agile approach people tend not to put them in stories because they don't really make very sexy stories to have a little progress status bar or or a little pop-up notification with with with network status and things like that but it's super important because if people feel lost then then they get very unhappy and they leave don't make me think we were talking about that again worth it worth it it's worth like painting on the wall in front

66. 26:09

    of you so so you know it's great if and I actually want to emphasize it's good to be opinionated too you can be opinionated providing users with with options to dig deeper is great but it's okay to pare back the interface it's okay not to explain every little thing to them it's okay not to give them all the choices it's okay to bury some of those choices sometimes simplicity is ultimately going to be a better option

67. 26:33

    for you in general then then try and explain everything which again is it's pretty contrary to what we see a lot now because I think people are trying as hard as they can to to explain things so let's move into actually the high-level general principles of design are wonderful but but well how does that apply to blockchain so again we have the wall winter is coming and in April and

68. 26:56

    yeah so knowledge while it's acquiring the crypto managing the keys asking people for permission talking about gas and speed and then of course waiting around so the first wall is educational content again our ways that we can get beyond that so one of the one of the easiest ones is to educate slowly instead of fast so it's it's sort of avoiding the wall of text up in front of people it's giving them the minimum viable education

69. 27:20

    to get where they need to go without doing anything beyond that and and that helps them that because they're gonna click through anything that you put out there anyways unobtrusive education is the idea that you're using much smaller snippets instead of explanation people don't read explanation they'll read one sentence max usually it's just a phrase and so if you can limit your education to those snippets it's gonna be much more effective and then optional

70. 27:45

    education is is is basically the idea that you you hide the education as much as possible again if it's not necessary but something that somebody could feasibly want to know you bury it in one of these little one of those little little eye circles right so in the picture there it's basically you you kind of have one of those little circles and you hover over it and then it pops up a little bit more information so so again it's allowing people to opt into the education as much as possible

71. 28:08

    well-well-well hiding them hiding it from them in the critical flow of the application and then of course educating plainly is is obvious to say but hard to do in practice how can we how can we change these concepts into language that's familiar to them and there's a we're all trying as hard as we can it's great to say really hard to do so of course the second wall is wallets and if you're a wall developer you're gonna be paying a lot of attention to this if your ad app developer you just have to

72. 28:39

    be very aware of what does it look like when your user is moving into and out of a wallet flow so what just a few quick things up front are allow multiple wallets if you can write your users aren't all gonna be using that a mask your users aren't all gonna be using the default wallet for your right the you want to have options that are going to support the proportion of users that are gonna make you successful engineering resources versus users

73. 29:03

    always a challenge but you know you want to give people options priming is something that's actually gonna come up a lot and so this is this is the idea that when you move into a new flow that the user hasn't seen before or or or or if you're leaving the garden of your user experience right you have control within your app you don't have control outside the app for the most part today's web experiences are all within

74. 29:25

    the app so you have full control crypto experiences are almost inverted in the sense that you have to send the user all over the place before they the before they circle back the wallet is one of the biggest examples of that so if your wallet is a web extension and a Chrome extension for instance for instance like meta mask do you how do you prime them for what's about to happen because if they if the window just pops up and it

75. 29:47

    says you know does the app have permission for that leh mean that that's basically a pop-up people are trained to avoid pop-ups people are trained to hate pop-ups and so what you can do basically and in the example that that that's here is something that's in an iOS app which is basically first it's asking the user do you want would you like to receive notifications from the app and this is sort of within the flow of the app and it provides the context on that and when you click OK

76. 30:10

    then the system dialog pops up which says you know would you like to enable iOS notifications and so instead of just dropping you on a page and having the system dialog pop up you know you're kind of unwrapping them and you're giving you're getting them to say yes early so wait is super important so a lot of apps seem to actually be very aggressive about getting in front of you with the wallet and saying hey you need to have a wallet hey you need to have an account what can you do to actually push

77. 30:35

    that back what can you do to do as much as possible for the user before they actually have to have a wallet because the more value you can provide them ahead of time obviously the more impetus that there the more momentum they're going to have which is going to keep them going through the pain of going out and finding a wallet and then of course just just wanted to note that that there are limitations around wallets as well so again as part of this idea that you're handing off the user experience

78. 30:59

    to someone else there are things that you just you kind of want to do with a wallet like you you would love to have the wallet pop up and say something nice about your and from your app that says hey don't worry like we're just we're just here to help and like you know that this transaction is gonna do XYZ but there are some security reasons why they don't allow that so again it's just the sort of like you know it this kind of relatively cold meta mask style pop-up which is which is in front of them and

79. 31:24

    again so your users you just have to be aware that your users are gonna have that jarring experience so as far as acquiring crypto this this one's tricky because this is probably the furthest that your users are going to go away from you and the least likely that they're going to find their way through it and come back and we don't really have very good solutions for this again what one thing that you can do certainly is is you can at least allow multiple multiple currencies if this is super app

80. 31:48

    dependent but obviously users will have multiple currencies in their wallet they might have Bitcoin and ether they might have like coin and dogecoin they you know who knows and the more that you can do to support them and this is something that would come up in user testing and user research how many coins do you have do you have coins things like that allow multiple again priming comes up which is just pretty clear as much as you can like like give them that on-ramp let

81. 32:12

    them know that you're about to slingshot them through the through through it's kind of a weird difficult experience which might actually take them a long time and you have to figure out how do you hook them and snag them and bring them back and give them value and I don't mean snag them in like a negative way I mean snag them with with something that they want because you're adding

82. 32:28

    them value and then again in the bottom is is stepping back and saying do you do you need this do you need crypto how long can you wait how can how much can you push off how much can you foot the bill for instance if you're able to if you know you're able to monetize a user later through some other means you know the freemium model loads right you you can afford to pay for certain user interactions as long as you believe that that users a lot long term you know lifetime value is going to exceed that

83. 32:53

    right so it's so right now we're still in this phase where everybody's trying to kind of push all the costs on to the users and and the more that we can get into a phase where we're comfortable taking on costs for the users knowing that there is going to be a business reason for it later the more successful that you're going to be in building an experience that users are going to get

84. 33:09

    more value out of along the way before they have to get again jardín to this end of this wallet flow and so sometimes that means footing the bill and that's not easy because there are security implications too - you footing the bill on any of this stuff because if you if you aren't careful about you know that the the development side you can have people just you know boss your server and basically run down all your balances and then you have no money left so so

85. 33:32

    they're real things you have to keep track of but again they welcome to the world right this is we're all world we're all grown-ups that's how it works you have to be careful but I mean what matters most is your users experience oh and then there was a there was a service that I found out about the other day called wire wood which is basically I think basically what they're trying to do is is provide as much of an aggregation of the going out and getting crypto experience as possible it seemed

86. 33:57

    pretty interesting so there are people who are converging in on this problem space of trying of trying to create as good of an experience as possible you know if you want you can you can look them up I'm not I only had a brief brief bit of time to check them out but so people are people are starting to figure that out but it's still a hard problem I mean it'll be wonderful if you just had a pop-up that was just enter your credit card information at the very least enter

87. 34:19

    your credit card information and and you know like by some crypto right now right obviously and so I think we're trying to get as close as possible but we're just not there yet key management is another difficult one hopefully you guys aren't building key management solutions if you are I'm sorry and and but in general your trade-off is between design and security in a lot of these cases which is you know your users are gonna have to deal with keys and you want to try and abstract as much as you can away from

88. 34:45

    them and how do you do that in a way that also make sure that they're secure that they're aware of what they're doing and this is going to be just a fundamental struggle that you're going to have so you know analogies are useful there's there's an interesting post from IDEO where they're talking about different analogies for the wallet that's what some of those some of those little icons are you know is a wall in a trophy case does it provide kind of a backstop is it

89. 35:08

    is it a spellchecker wear kind of it would be sort of spell checking people's hashes and things like that again it's just a design pattern preventing stupidity though is your job like your users will do dumb things they will try to do every dumb thing that's in that's possible they'll they'll do deliberately dumb things they'll do drunk toddler things and they'll lose their keys and so everything possible that you can do

90. 35:32

    to make sure that it's just not actually an option for them that the more successful they're going to be because as we all know if one user out of a thousand has a rotten experience they're gonna torpedo your app with with you know bad reviews and things like that and it's just gonna take you down so you know you're yeah you want to optimize for providing great experiences but you also want optimize for minimizing bad experiences and right now there's a lotta bad experiences that are that are land mining out there in

91. 35:57

    crypto showing consequences is another one where it's it's a lot of users come in not knowing what these things are right so what does it mean if they have a non-functional token on their wallet and you know I leave it up to you guys to figure out how do you educate them with the idea that you should try to minimally educate people but you know they're gonna wonder when they log in on their computer why they don't have the

92. 36:22

    thing if they have it they're not super familiar with the fact that wallets are generally local so you're you're gonna have to figure out how do we how do we how do we show that and then also how do we show that that there's value in that too so it's consequences on one side it's the carrot in the stick but also what the value is of having these of having these individual things permissions so priming priming is one of

93. 36:45

    the most useful tools that you have again try to on ramp them when it's in your when it's in your experience before get their consent before using your words and then they're much more likely to actually step their way into the into a successful transition and then of course you know in any case where there's permissions being asked there were things like that just do the minimum it's very easy to get to go to get developer sloppy you know where you kind of permissions equal all whatever

94. 37:12

    it is that's the ultimately that's going to be a problem so as much as you can try to keep the stakes low and try to let the users know when the stakes are low and when the stakes are high gas and speed is hard and we're still trying to figure out what the right patterns are again this is a very aetherium centric view of the world but it sort of applies in a lot of different ways to different chains you know in the

95. 37:36

    end of the day usually the more gas you pay for something or the more you pay for something the faster it could get done or it's both the faster end with the highest highest likelihood it'll get done users aren't really used to that paradigm there used to well everything is free and it works I mean it's free it works and it works immediately and so one way that you can do that is actually you could just hide gas I mean you could literally just not allow them to enter

96. 37:59

    gas like imagine imagine if there was a world where it was just there was a default amount of gas and it just happened behind the scenes maybe that's less realistic for gas but more realistic for something like speed where it's like why do I care like what is this low average fast speed actually mean maybe try hiding that try try seeing if users care and making that an optional thing you know hey would you like to adjust your speed sort of thing

97. 38:24

    if it's not necessary it's not necessary and then waiting waiting icons are becoming an art in this but they're not enough one of the key key things is is any asynchronous process or semi asynchronous process don't block the UI we still do it we still block me we still make the user sit there staring at an icon with no idea how much longer it's supposed to happen so this goes right back to you know what I was talking about originally about giving your users control and making them feel like they're in control make sure that they always know what the

98. 38:55

    status is of where they are relative to where they should be relative to where you want them to be you know again 1 2 3 it should it should be every single page every single possible path the user has they should always have those three lifelines and one of those is also showing liveness that's that's something that maybe they're the users are used to maybe not you have to figure out how to how to fit that into the frame that they're expecting but the worst thing

99. 39:19

    that you can have as a user is sit there and ask yourself that question like so did it work do i refresh the page do i refresh the page is a really dangerous thing for you so the more that you can do to say hey yes we're working this is roughly how long we're expecting it to take it's taken this long networks good we're cool you know like the more that you can you can make sure the user hat is comfortable and is able to wait the

100. 39:45

     better off you're gonna be but even better is don't make them wait at all right so so if it's an asynchronous thing figure out how can you how can you get them doing something else and then circle back and one of the things crypto kiddies will do you know if you're doing a transaction they'll they'll send you an email when the transaction is ready it's like okay that's pretty good and it gives you an excuse to get an email from somebody so especially because the end of you they

101. 40:08

     you know that they're waiting for value so so there are there are there are positives to to kind of all of this which is framed a little bit negatively around like how do you avoid bad experiences but you can also create more interaction and more engagement so designing for trust and as mentioned this is something that I don't know if she originated but but I heard of it through Sara and the idea is again that

102. 40:35

     we are protectors as designers we own the experience and we own the way that that people experience this or the way that people interact with this and so we have their trust in our hands we have their their data their identity their wealth in our hands and so it's it's on us to use that responsibility and make sure that they don't make bad decisions but also that they learn through not making bad decisions that you don't encourage them to do things like copy paste private keys and stuff like that

103. 41:05

     because then you're creating bad behavior for from users for all sorts of other scenarios right as stewards there are a lot of things that you can do one of them for instance is just acknowledging the consequences of things where possible it's always a balancing act security versus ease of experience and things like that but one of the well I think I'm actually gonna talk about

104. 41:28

     that a little bit more in just a second so in terms of someone else named Beltran he he has a long document with with principles which I have linked I'm not sure if I have it linked in in the back of this or online but if anyone's curious I can send a link and and basically a few of the ones that are really useful are permanency so make sure that users know when things are reversible and when they're not again users are used to the undo button always being there they will expect the undo

105. 41:55

     button always they'll expect if they lose the thing they can yell at you and you'll give it back this is how the world works right now so they need to know again ideally you figure out how to how to mask these things the same way we have in in today's world but second best is to make sure that they're darn sure when something is going to be permanent another one of course is value again it's this idea that make sure that you

106. 42:16

     signal when things are casual and when nothing is at stake very little at stake versus when you have actual value at stake and and privacy so so one of the the core tenants one of the core issues in privacy and and this is again kind of on the designers is correlation risk is is real and so that's basically the idea that if I if I use data on one app over here and then I use the same keys on

107. 42:41

     this other app over here people can see those two transactions on the blockchain they can link it together and and they can find out who I am or even even if it's even if it's not literally the same Keys it's they can actually still use it takes very few data points to actually correlate somebody's behavior literally you can look at at you know what time of day you log in and what time of day you did certain things or you know geography

108. 43:05

     you know two or three of those points and you have an enormous lehigh likelihood that you found the same person using multiple different accounts so that's one of them actually they're really core privacy issues that we have here and so the more that you can make sure that you're not actually that but you have to kind of think through those things for the user and make sure that you know a ideally they're not possible so you're allowing them to use multiple keys on multiple apps or things like

109. 43:28

     that but again sort of third best is at the very least they should be aware of when they're stepping near these land mines and and when these things are happening and and that's again sort of that that design versus ethical security sort of angle where you just want to make sure it because if they have a bad experience they're gonna blame you whether it is or is not your fault and then zooming out a little bit so a lot

110. 43:55

     of times it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of specific interfaces specific toys toolboxes things like that and I deliberately tried to stay away from tools and tool boxes in this in this chat but also it's worth thinking again just zoom out a little bit sometimes the biggest games aren't tactical they're they're strategic and what that means is of course process process is worth it if you have the right process in the right

111. 44:18

     mindset you will you will iterate your way properly in the right direction eventually and interoperation is something where you know maybe maybe you can solve some of these issues by interoperating with different applications or contracts or chains or things like that so you don't always have to do it all yourself so that's that's something that nobody else is necessarily going to own knowing what's out there to solve a given

112. 44:42

     experience problem so knowing that there's a team in consensus working on a library that actually does the thing that you're kind of trying to do but but maybe a little bit better is it's on you so so that's important to think about and then of course do you even need a token is there really any member that might be number one always but it's it's do you need a token for your app do you

113. 45:04

     need a token do you need to interact with tokens is crypto even the right solution because in a lot of cases you know ask the hard question we've all we've we've all been done that that idea may is to some degree or another and and bounce away from it yeah so I always rethink the token so of course reduce steps and and and this is something that's not always easy but think it's

114. 45:32

     really think hard how can you reduce steps how can you delay the hard things for the users as much as possible how can you how can you make sure that they have value waiting for them so there's a carrot at the end of the tunnel for all the crap that they're gonna have to go through all the barbed wire they're gonna have to have to wriggle under to get crypto to sign up for a wallet and things like that so your job is to think how can we invert some of these paradigms where we're not throwing a bunch of stuff at the user upfront which

115. 45:57

     is funny because if you're in a web to designer you're like these are obvious but then you look at crypto apps and you realize that maybe they're not quite so obvious and then on the third one again it's think about think outside think think think outside the the box on the business side - right avoid foot the bill if you can make sure that the user doesn't have to go through this stuff and sometimes you magically solve experience problems with you get to

116. 46:21

     throw money at solving experience problems which actually in the end of the day should ultimately pay off if you have hopefully done the LTV calculation properly so as far as you guys so next week we have a workshop so it's gonna be a little bit different I'll provide some context but basically we're gonna be doing a workshop where you actually get hands-on you work in small teams and you solve a design problem so it's something that we can talk about after this but one of the easiest ways to get involved is to do something like that is to actually just

117. 46:52

     get your hands dirty and participate so come to next week's workshop that would be awesome and but more if you're if you're you know in the digital world a little bit more there are actually places that you can go with their design bounties as well so developers are used to going out and solving people's issues on github and things like that but designers actually do have options that the crypto space people are actually

118. 47:14

     putting out bounties for solving design problems and even even doing design research so I think it was consensus had and and I think status which I think it's part of consensus had a number of bounties for doing UX research for them so basically if you did app tear downs for them and and wrote it up in a really nice way they would give you money so you can do things like that you can go on the Explorer bounties Network and and

119. 47:39

     you have things like these design contests or stuff like that so you can get involved even if you don't know crypto even if you don't whatever it is right there are ways to get involved another one is build an app yourself do a tutorial like just to get your hands dirty it doesn't matter if you're technical just you struggling to figure things out and asking silly questions or what you think are silly questions have a ton of value for you understanding and

120. 48:04

     appetizing for your users another one is of course more more macro there's checking out just web to design systems are quite useful so you know you can always go in and envision has a bunch of design systems listed you know they they have like the IBM design system and things like that but then again you can also go in to get coin which is which is right back in the idea of of the last one I was talking about the Explorer

121. 48:27

     bounties network I don't actually know what it's called but you can go on this and they also have these sort of design contests type deals so there's a lot of stuff that you can do to dip your toes and get ready for it and of course follow people you know again the conversation really takes place in this space on Twitter on medium I mean really I'd say Twitter and medium are the two big ones virtually then you have meetups uh meetups and conferences and you know friends of friends emailing

122. 48:59

     things around and open Google Docs that that people are commenting on and random telegram groups that are buried six hundred groups deep that occasionally service I think we've all been there and three three organizations to really take a look at and follow definitely consensus and coinbase and then I do a collab also is doing work in in the design space so as mentioned in the

123. 49:22

     beginning but it's not over we haven't solved it we need your voices we need your help I hope you've learned something thank you and we'll we'll sit down for a quick chat here