Desinging for Blockchain

Welcome to Web 3.0 where Blockchain technology changing the internet of information to internet of trust. Speculation that it will be disrupting everything. To have that kind of impact on the everyday lives of people, blockchain needs to overcome its usability problem. The products built using blockchain technology have so far failed because of the bad UX for wider target audience.

User experience (UX) design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and personally relevant experiences. It focuses on the design of both a product’s usability and the pleasure users feel when using it. Aside from usability and desirability, it is also concerned with the entire process of acquiring and interacting with the product including aspects of branding, visual design and function.

Why UX designer need to know about Blockchain?

Complete transparency is one of critical feature of Blockchain and hence UX designer can represent this added element of transparency to the user.

As a user wouldn’t you accept the idea of digital identities being completely secure? Or wouldn’t you be happier if there is more transparency in government and voting process?

Designers would be able to answer these questions in context of Blockchain only when they speak the same language as the developers and know what is going behind the scene but at granular level which will help to create the layer of abstraction required for the average user.

The average user would not understand the underlying blockchain protocol any more than they understand the HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) when on the web.

The aim is to not make people understand the underlying technology. Instead, to get people to trust a technology that is not dependent on trust. The user needs to be able to understand the ways in which blockchain based apps differ from the apps they are so habitual to using.

What designers need to keep in mind while designing for Blockchain?

• To make user feel comfortable and trust the system, designers need to apply some of the best practices include consistency and constant feedback when a user takes any action.
• Clear iconography that leverages past experience standards, jargon-free terminology that does not obfuscate the message and simply and directly communicates with the user.
• Motion animations help give the user a sense of context and helps them understand what is happening relative to their inputs.
• Educating users about the elements/functions present on the product because user expects and demands to always know what is happening now, what just happened and what will happen next.
• The transaction on a decentralised blockchain takes a substantially longer time than it does on a centralised network. The user needs feedback on the status of their transaction and progress during this time. To go from loading times of a few milliseconds to a few seconds or even minutes is not something that seems like a step forward. There is an opportunity to come up with more robust and engaging feedback loops that leverage the transparency of the Blockchain to show users what is going on, with the right level of abstraction to keep it relevant and interesting
• Another very critical nature of Blockchain is irreversibility of any transaction something users need to get used to, we are habitual to the Undo button being a standard feature. The blockchain does not allow for reversal of a transaction. Designers need to create friction at points where the user is going to take an action that cannot be reversed.
• In Blockchain system instead of username and password there is public key and private key using which a user can sign in and use the system. These keys somewhat look like 0xE1816D523c39C5258c428c8cB1D6f7189DD9c29b which needs to stored and hard to remember. If a user forgets or misplaces his/her private key there is no option to generate a new private key to access the account. This a UX pattern breaker in that users are accustomed to hitting the ‘Forgot Password?’ button to recover forgotten or lost passwords and almost bank on this feature. User needs to be presented with educational on-boarding flows that run the user through this new UX pattern.

Here is also an opportunity to forge trust with the user in making sure the directions are clear and the recommendation helpful to ensure the user takes appropriate action to make sure he/she can always access the account.

The apps that welcome people to the world of blockchain need to be functional but they also need to be user friendly so with minimal effort user can use those apps.

Design isn’t magically going to solve all of these problems. It takes collaboration between designers and engineers. The solution isn’t 100% driven by design or engineering. The best products exist because design, engineering, and business work together.

Because I’m obsessed with the intersection of design and blockchain, I’m going to try and contribute to the blockchain community the best way I know how - through design.

I’m embarking on a journey to create some principles for designing blockchain applications. I’m going to use design thinking methods and an iterative research/synthesize/learn process to throw some data behind the principles and see if they are effective.

If you’d like to help or chat about it Connect with me