EthCC 2: Aqeel Mohammad

this hey guys welcome to the talk so today we're gonna be talking about bridging the divide and the issues that we have around us and the web 3 ecosystem so just to start off a little over a year ago you'd be very hard-pressed to come across individuals who were either very educated or interested in speaking about UX issues that persist in the web 3 ecosystem but over the past year we've made some great inroads as far as understanding the usability concerns and how that impacts the interactions that we have with the technology so it's no secret that the digital divide is a harsh reality and that we have to be very mindful of the consequences of the decisions that we make today as far as you actually is concerned so the concept of the digital divide is basically the discrepancies between developing and developed economies and the impact that information technology such as Internet has based on the opportunities that are presented to these individuals so over the past year we've had this opportunity to really solidify our voice as UX and design in the space and we have to do a better job of really taking a pragmatic approach to what UX means what has been done so far and how what role do we need to play moving forward so to describe user experience it kind of includes all the users emotions beliefs preferences perceptions physical and psychological responses according to in the interactions they have during and after use of a product of our service so three factors that influence user experience are that I want to highlight to this presentation are the system the user and the context of the use of this technology so in order to really understand where we stand with the technology and where we lie as the ecosystem as a whole it's interesting to kind of map Moore's chasm of early technology adoption as far as what nation technologies go as far as timelines for a market adoption and then kind of overlay that with Gartner hype cycle to understand where we stood a year ago with peak of inflated expectations and where we were headed for the next field a little while so I don't think we're in a position to kind of cross that chasm but we can definitely do a lot to bridge the gap between early adopters and the early majority for this ecology moving forward one resource that kind of really helps you understand the technology and the intricacies of how everything flows together is the web tree tech stack developed by the web tree Foundation which can be found on their github page at the web 3 wiki so as you can see there's a lot of moving parts and layers in order for DAP to actually present usable interface to the the users at the end of the day and there's a lot of complex interactions and collaboration and interoperability that needs to happen here and for most of the part of the past year a lot of the solutions that have been happening have been happening around this area as far as the browsers and the DAP layers as far as let's say meta transactions Universal logins and burner wallets which are all solutions to problems that actually exist on the bottom layers so as advocates for better UX and better usability in the ecosystem we need to do a better job of getting engaged at the layer 1 layer 2 and the protocol there is to actually advocate for better usable interactions and user flows moving forward so once we understand the system that we operate and it's important to understand who are the intended users and who are the users that actually stand to benefit most from the technology that we're working on so as this year we've now passed or four billion users for the Internet of which a quarter of the billion new users were just added last year so I believe that's a great opportunity for people to be on board it to peer to peer and decentralize networks that rely on trustless interactions because they do not really have past mental models to rely on when they do get onto the Internet and as you start looking at the world population in the past century and the century moving forward you get to see how the demographics starts shape up differently to the world we that we have in the Western economy and society so if you're developing technologies for people to use and benefit from in the future you get to easily see where the market segments and user use cases are going to be coming from and unfortunately a lot of our focus and energy is focused on North America and Europe and user bases that were kind of comfortable with yeah and another thing we need to be very mindful of that is that the world kind of runs on mobile now there's nearly 5 billion unique mobile users of which about 78% are on the Internet and interestingly enough about 53% of all Internet traffic is mobile these days having interface with a lot of projects in the ecosystem it's sad to say that they're all creating solutions for desktop because a lot of their crypto user base is desktop base at this point so in order for you to really benefit and engage communities you need to be mindful of what platforms is to and what kind of limitations are presenting when you do not have all different platforms involved so once you understand the different user segments that you should be targeting it's important to understand the user behaviors and that people are not looking to use the technology for the technology's sake they have a certain use case that they're trying to fulfill and they're going to take the path of least resistance to get to their intended target so you can try to tell them to secure their key phrases or use better security processes but at the end of the day they're going to use the technology as they see best fit and it's not really gonna you can't really change their behaviors based on how you have a world view of your technology so having interviewed some of the largest projects in the space it becomes very clear that no one's really investing or putting resources behind actually user research and really getting to the bottom of what are the use cases that we should be focusing on and how do you create solutions to get to those solution create solutions to get to something that's usable for the user at the end of the day so one thing that we have to really focus on is the product market fit and in order for us to do that we have to go back to the web 3 tech stack and look at opportunities to experiment iterate and create user feedback loops so instead of putting your resources into creating investor communities you should really be investing your resources in creating user feedback loops that help you develop the technology share these insights with the rest of the community so we can actually create something that's more cohesive and has better mental models for users to adopt when they do come into the ecosystem and most importantly we need continuous iterations so you can't just lessen our rest on our laurels after we've put out a solution is it important that we do put some sort of metrics in place to get ad there that data information and create solutions that will continue to improve over time so as designers and developers in the space I like to draw the analogy of us being like let's say infrastructure developers or city planners and one good analogy or an anecdote to draw from that is of Robert Moses who was a city planner and I believe the 90s for New York City and he was responsible for creating a great divide as far as economics and racial access for individuals in New York because of the bridges that he created on highways so he created very low clearance bridges that cross over entrances for highways in New York which limited people of low income and of certain minorities to really access those resources such as parks and playgrounds which were placed very far away so when we're creating these bridges of interoperability and connection between these technologies we have to be very mindful of like what consequence is unintended consequences we have the dis technology and who are we marginalizing moving forward so some of the problems that we've kind of highlighted or the research that we've done over the past little while as a community effort is that people don't really understand the technology and intricacies of watch-chain resources that need to be comprehended so one of the key problems revolves there on p management this is because it disrupts the onboarding flow people don't really know how to backup keys or why or how they should do it there's confusion between passwords and what he is and then clearly there's a lack of recoverability so some emerging patterns around this is such things that's progressive tiered security models disposable keys that users don't have to backup or multiple private keys for local wallets so you're seeing solutions like burning wallets ways of managing keys on some centralized servers and other solutions coming into play another huge problem is the concept of gas because it's a novel experience people don't really understand what gas is and how that all ties together the concepts and terminology around gas are quite in counterintuitive as well because we see gas as distance when we're dealing with transportation and that's not quite the case in blockchain terminology and also variations in grass prices for identical actions is not really conducive to mass adoption use cases so emerging patterns in this space are around abstract gas interactions for new users through different methods a tree layers actually paying for the gases yourself there's also options to give modular options for advanced users so they can actually decide how to interface with gas in your applications in addition we need better solutions around gas stations to kind of standardize gas around the ecosystem and finally transactions and the concept of transactions is quite complicated as well people don't really understand the relationship between transactions what that means for wallets how that ties into the blockchain and the blocks and explorers so people make mistakes of sending multiple transactions don't know how many times they have to approve transactions and kind of are confused by this assigning transactions because it's a new interaction pattern by itself somewhere emerging patterns in this space are around giving human readability and transparent apparentiy to transactions such as Nats back or right spec or providing better in-app history and transaction context indicators whenever possible some other solutions include transaction queue managers for multiple transactions so the key point that I wanted to highlight with this presentation was that we play a very integral role in developing these technologies and the consequences that we have moving forward so it's time that we kind of take ownership and accountability for what we're creating and start having larger conversations and collaborate together to come to better solutions so if you're interested in UX we have large communities online based on telegram and we also have a community that has a forum online for everyone to kind of get involved voice their concerns and if you guys want to get involved on the telegram community just hit me up on Twitter and reach me after the talk we'll discuss ways for you guys to get involved and kind of highlight the issues that you guys see and how we can move forward thank you very much any questions Thanks