Block Zero Stage | Let's Talk About Our Feelings: A Non-Therapeutic Talk on How to Win With NEAR UX

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1. 0:01

   so for this um I think we we will be starting off with you know a talk from Sarah um on user experience on near and with that I would like to you know ask you to welcome Sarah Mills to the stage good morning my name is Sarah Mills and I lead design and research at pagota and although I joined this glorious ecosystem about 6 months ago um

2. 1:03

   I've been doing product design in blockchain web3 since about 2016 and in that time I've noticed something I consider a bit of a misconception in web 3 not just near um and that's the perception that there is a great crypto ux failure of usability people think that the biggest issues are onboarding or nonhuman readable addresses or friction in general users aren't flocking to an app or a platform and it's because the ux is

3. 1:38

   bad and people say that the lack of usability is what is hindering adoption so what I want to explain today is first ux does not equal usability it is much much more more than that um and the second while sure usability can always be improved it's not the block Locker that the real Great crypto ux failure is actually a failure to address two things specifically user motivation and user awareness so I want to back up for a

4. 2:16

   second because in order to clearly make this argument and justify the title of my talk um I need to make sure that we are on the same page um about some words the first being user experience so I've titled this talk let's talk about our feelings not because I want to be as off- footing as possible um but because feelings are literally what we're talking about when we talk about user

5. 2:40

   experience feelings are how brains interpret the world around them and I think now that with all the studies that have been done with social media you're probably aware of that little dopamine hit you get when you click on a notification or um You probably notice the adrenaline when you go check to see how the Market's doing um but maybe you also notice the subtler feelings when

6. 3:03

   you see a progress bar um or the little ding noise when you complete a task right do you notice what makes you feel that something is trustworthy or scammy so my first point is that an experience is not defined in the amount of boxes and pixels on a screen and I think before a person can really talk in terms of how somebody else might experience something they have to have an awareness of how they themselves are experiencing it so step one is to notice

7. 3:34

   your own feelings what motivates you what incentives are there in your daily life when do you find yourself avoiding using something what gives you feelings of confidence so the next point I want to make is that people make decisions based on feelings it's groundbreaking um users of apps and products and tools have a choice of What feelings what experience they prefer or want to have they have a choice to try a product

8. 4:06

   a choice to use it and a choice to keep using it is this going to be easier than what I'm doing now am I going to find what I'm looking for is this going to solve my problem is this going to make me feel stupid so then the next point I have is that users and developers will choose desirable things they will pick a good experience or what they perceive will be a good experience and um all right that makes sense right that's not you

9. 4:39

   know um so all we have to do to get to a billion users is just be desirable piece of cake um I also want to point out that there are um obviously other ways of winning the market uh if you Google it you'll probably see the four Ps of marketing product price place and promotion um and basically just being cheaper being first whatever we're focused on the product P of winning a market today so you might be familiar with this Vin diagram um but this is basically the forces that play for a

10. 5:13

    product is it viable is this business model sustainable it feasibility would be how realistically can we make it happen do we have the resources the skills the time um and then the one I'm talking about today desirability do people want it do does it resolve their problems does the intended audience see the value so now let's talk about the harder part how in the hell do we ensure something is desirable I'm so glad you asked because that's what I want to tell you about I

11. 5:46

    want to empower all of you no matter what you building to see the adoption that you want that we all want um because you've made something desirable so now that we've established that feelings Drive choice and are a path to winning in the market the rest of what I want to say to you today users have a choice we've got that check if we're going to win when when users make that choice first we need to talk about usability and then why usability alone does not make something

12. 6:19

    desirable and then what will make something desirable enough to win with some practical approaches sprinkled in because I can't help myself so I'm probably going to go really quickly but just know that I'm super happy to talk about it later so let's talk about what's working on our path to to desirability when I started working on this talk I asked Bowen Wang about the early days of near and from what he shared and Other Stories that I'd heard I could understand how the ux considerations of

13. 6:50

    both developers and end users were baked in from the very start they specifically made hard trade-off decisions in favor of users and developers and there was always a desire to make things easy and the word easy comes up a lot historically with near um so this is roughly four years ago Alex gave a talk where he had a slide about how near wins um and it's by competing on current web 2 developer and end user experiences and near has certainly delivered on a lot of

14. 7:22

    that the other part is that Alex is establishing a benchmark for the experience needed to fulfill n's Mission it needs to have parity with the current web 2 level of easiness and I want to call this out because this is the addressable Market I'm speaking about a lot of us including myself here make things for people that are already in the web 3 ecosystem but to get to a billion users uh we have to look outside this community and we have to compete with web 2 user

15. 7:55

    experience so let's just quickly go over usability so far n is doing a pretty good job um I have included neon's 10 usability charistics for user interfaces they have not changed since 1994 and they are usually a sa safe bet when you're evaluating the usability of something and usability is usually just error prevention learnability indicating to the user what is happening being consistent years ago back in like 2017

16. 8:27

    2018 the ux of like literally everything in crypto was still pretty awful um these are actually screenshots I Ed from my first presentations about fixing usability and the issues were systemic even though I have the screenshot at the bottom um with some comments made during user research it really wasn't just matam mask at by a long shot and people would put up with it at least really motivated people fast forward to today fast forward puns um

17. 8:59

    you have a lot more product maturity in the space there things are a lot more usable and um I think Fasto is a great example of competing on usability for new to web 3 users that are trying to onboard um it's a way for them to quickly create accounts for any website or app that integrates with the blockchain operating system uh it lets them get started right away without crypto uh just uses Biometrics phone prompts and an email address and it's

18. 9:31

    especially usable because there's a reduction in cognitive load it uses familiar patterns um it keeps only to what is immediately relevant using Progressive onboarding um it lets people get in the F front door and see what's going on before they have to give up more things and engage further um roughly the same number of steps and requests as a competitor like sign in with Google uh clear system status it's interoperable and lastly because fast off uses the Dig

19. 10:02

    design system it's got accessibility baked in and here's just some tactics um for improving usability or measuring to make sure something is usable um but I think this is probably the most well understood aspect of desirability and you've already probably know about this kind of stuff um it's just generally watching a few people complete a task without helping them which is hard um and seeing how long it takes do they

20. 10:33

    understand the words um and you'd I mention that because you'd be surprised at the outsized impact that words have on usability um and also you can look at your analytics where are the most errors and drop offs all right let's talk about desirability how are you going to know if what you're making is desirable to your users well first we need to define it um so to help with this concept of desirability at pagota I used an exercise called best product ever with

21. 11:07

    our product team and it combines an awareness of why you personally use things that I mentioned earlier um but ultimately gives you a way to quantify aspects of an experience and make them more concrete so the directions are just think of the best product you have ever used in your entire life and then describe why it's your favorite in just four words and while it's meant to be an

22. 11:34

    informative exercise I think it's a good start to showing that there are more Dimensions to what leads a customer to find a product or service valuable so when you do the exercise you'll see people use words like timesaver versatile fast high quality simple people love that word to describe their favorite products what we find is a lot of these words though can be grouped or Affinity maaps into broader perspectives and that's how we learn about what our

23. 12:05

    personal desirability objectives are this is also a really good starting point to empathize with the users of your app or product and these groups or like themes give us the beginning of a way to evaluate an experience something like to be considered desirable by our users our products experience must be detectable usable impactful credible or whatever you know your particular users need so we can see that there's a lot more to being desirable than just being

24. 12:37

    usable usability is table Stakes just because you can use a hammer doesn't mean you will have a good experience trying to open a can of beans or brush your hair or transact on near so to get to a billion users what parts of desirability are we missing like like I mentioned before usability is not the blocker so I want to explain my thinking using something called the fog behavior model this behavior model shows that

25. 13:11

    three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur motivation ability and a prompt when a be user Behavior does not occur or any behavior um at least one of those three elements is missing so uh I think the biggest takeaway is that just because people can do something does not mean they will do something an example would be um you want people to show up to your meeting um and you know

26. 13:41

    they are in the office that day and they are capable of walking to the meeting room and it's an important meeting about yearend bonuses so you know that people are motivated to come to this meeting right they're they have the ability and they are motivated but the time comes and they don't show up it turns out you forgot the prompt right you never sent a meeting calendar invite um so what if we look at this from desirability perspective

27. 14:13

    standpoint some of the perspectives from the exercise before I think line up quite nicely here if we say the intended behavior is using our product or the near platform and that should happen if users have the motivation ability and a prom at roughly the same time so we can say the motivator for our users is that they believe that using our product or platform is going to solve a want or a need or a

28. 14:39

    problem if the product is usable we can say that they have the ability to use the product uh and we could say the prompt is like detectability or awareness like if was created by a marketing effort um or coming up in a search so the part I feel we need to work on as the near ecosystem on the whole is that if we want the desired Behavior the adoption of our platform and use of our products it's not the ability or

29. 15:09

    usability part that we're missing but it's the motivation or the impactfulness how well we're solving the problem and then prompts the awareness or detectability all right that's a lot I know so the first step of any experience is finding it to begin with right the main question that you answer with this desirability perspective is what do users need to know about using our product or app and this can be marketing

30. 15:43

    how is your potential user exposed to your app does it appear when they search do they hear about it in a community that they're a part of but this is also within the product as well if you have a new feature how does your user know about it where is it is it in the hierarchy of the screen is it more prominent does it show up when they might be looking for it how are they using

31. 16:07

    navigation um a first example I want to point out of being detectable or ensuring that your customers are aware um is one you probably heard of because you're aware according to sweat economy's Twitter they have 130 million users on sweatcoin getting that volume of users is not an accident sweat goes where their potential users already are to build awareness one of the most obvious places is when the app within the Apple App

32. 16:38

    Store it's easily found by somebody looking for what they offer they're number 17 or they were a couple weeks ago in the health and fitness category secondly while I was researching I learned that sweatcoin partnered with OK CID last year to reach new audiences and build brand awareness and has worked with other brands like headspace and Audible and I like this example especially because it shows a posture of

33. 17:04

    experimentation where do we think potential users people interested in Outdoors or interested in health might be another example of awareness is the recently shipped component detail page on n.org specifically the stats area for analytics the team added this as a possible solution to an awareness need developers in user research said that seeing a component engagement numbers or analytics was critical to how they chose

34. 17:34

    components to use because the popularity or high engagement might be an indicator of quality right it's an evaluation awareness tool so uh making sure that you've built in awareness of your product is usually a function of marketing um do people with the problem you're solving associate your brand with a solution is your product coming coming up when people search um but this can also be about using words that your intended audience is familiar with and testing whether or

35. 18:07

    not people can navigate your app and this will be specific to your product but the biggest indicator is going to be people clicking that first action or the the CTA are they aware enough to think your solution might be intended for them all right so the second perspective is arguably the hardest one and basically how well are you solving your intended customer's problem user experience fails if we've built awareness we've made it usable and then we don't deliver anything of

36. 18:38

    value are you reducing hassle are you providing entertainment are you clarifying information are you lowering risk are you promoting Wellness are you making something faster so I'm assuming a lot of you are familiar with jobs to be done um the core concept though is that people are hiring your product to do a job and it's not the only way to understand and frame your users needs um but in my experience people tend to pick up on this one the fastest and that's because when people

37. 19:10

    teach it at some point you hear people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill they want a quarter inch hole I think it's really important to understand this because it means that people are after an outcome but there are many ways to get a quarter inch hole a drill might be an efficient way to do that but it is a means to an end what do human beings need what are the metaphorical quarter inch holes what do people in your hometown

38. 19:41

    need what about people that are older or younger than you and I want to be clear I absolutely agree that owning one's data is important and so is having an open web but those things are quarter inch drills they are means to an end and exactly what end or outcome depends on who you ask and I think we focus a lot on ideology and really not enough on communicating in an inclusive way the actual benefits to humans in their daily

39. 20:15

    lives um one example of an impactful experience that I really love is the configure flow for stripe checkout this really simple nothing mind-blowing but it helps it exemp is helping people do something better right so I don't work at stripe clearly but theoretically you might construct a problem statement to say users configuring their stores checkout process are making too many

40. 20:40

    errors and are having to go back and repeat steps because they didn't realize the implications of their choices how might we help them get it right the first time and feel confident in their choices this would let them see their choices as they go and reduce errors and mistakes and build their confidence that they are configuring it correctly we've been doing some Vision work at pagota um and so this screen is just an early early visual um of some ideas that we might choose to

41. 21:13

    build but I picked it because one we know developers are not a monolith and their needs and motivations change depending on how much experience they have what project types there are their familiarity with web 3 and so our team has a lot of potential needs to comeb through and prioritize like a need to get help from peers um a need for Quality example projects but at the end of the day we have to ask why are open-source developers contributing in the first place and we know from research that a

42. 21:46

    lot of it is intrinsic motivation right or because they really believe in the platform um but people got to eat and not everyone is wealthy enough to contribute to projects for free could we grow the developer Community if we found more path to sustainability for them so how do we know we've correctly identified a problem our users have and how well they are how well we are solving it the first step is just stating who exactly you are building for

43. 22:20

    um and asking those people about their problems you can ask what's hard about what you're trying to do what have you tried before or how does that make you feel and I'm actually completely serious about that last question because you user motivation is going to be so much higher for a solution to a problem that makes them feel enraged versus a problem that is mildly annoying and actually in a talk right after this um my colleague is going to

44. 22:53

    tell you how to design with your users not at them um and it streamlines all of these things from ideating to getting feedback so check it out um some good indicators for how well you're solving the problem will be customer satisfaction scores support ticket topics um and then a lot of the conversion indicators in your analytics like how many accounts have an account sign up and the first action completion in the first day so let's

45. 23:23

    recap yes there is an ecosystem wide ux failure that is standing between us and Adoption of a billion users but it is not usability to compete with web 2 experiences and get to a billion users we have to address our users needs actual needs and motivations and their awareness that we're solving a problem they have so I want to come back to the slide from earlier when I left crypto in 2020

46. 23:55

    I told myself I was done done with the scams and the embarrassing headlines and the constant talk about price and bag holding and I'll admit I was skeptical this year when a friend reached out to me about coming to work on year but when the leaders in this community say that they want an open web I believe them I believe them because they made something that had baked in from the very start considerations for the humans who need to interact with what they out

47. 24:28

    into the world and my hope is reinforced with every person I meet in the near ecosystem people who are kind and curious people who aren't all hot air and empty promises people who care if they're building something that will make other people's lives better not just their own and if there is a group that is going to pull this off making the open web real winning the market by building things of value to human beings it will be this

48. 25:00

    group thanks