Gustavo Esquinca ~ UX & Usability Panel

foreign [Music] hey guys thank you all for coming um yeah so today we're talking about what it takes to go mainstream we're gonna be talking about usability about design about security about um all the issues that are facing our community right now and how we can make the blockchain a better space i'm gonna have all the panelists introduced themselves so here we go hello hello i am taylor monahan i am the founder and ceo of my crypto my crypto is a uh wallet it's a user interface it allows you to directly interact with the blockchain to hold your ether or maybe send it or swap it for some tokens or do some other fun things like that we're non-custodial meaning that you are holding your own funds you are interacting with the blockchain you are sending your money and it does present some very interesting design and user experience issues that we've been uh working really hard to overcome hey everyone i'm matt cutler i'm co-founder and ceo of block native we're just introducing our platform here at east denver it's called assist and it's a series of developer tools to help you onboard users into successful transactions on the blockchain so in about 10 minutes of integrating javascript you can significantly improve the usability of your dap you can give your users more confidence as they transact you get measurement analytics out of the back end this is my seventh startup depending on how you count so i've been around this merry-go-round more than once and it's just super interesting and super exciting to be here and i just really am happy that usability is coming to the fore of the conversation because it's high time for all of us hey everyone my name is tom thiemann i'm the co-founder and ceo of portis with portas we're trying to make friction as minimal as possible with onboarding users so instead of asking them to install some sort of extension or browser we give developers an sdk and with just two lines of code you get a web3 provider that's bundled inside the application so your users don't have they have they get a you know an email and password flow which is familiar but we're non-custodial we use end-to-end encryption which means that once they encrypt the wallet on their device we only store the encrypted wallet so that way they can access it from each one of their devices easily while still maintaining absolute control over their device over their wallet and yeah as matt said it's great that suddenly usability is getting the attention that it deserves and we're constantly dealing with and like taylor said they own the private keys but that's the challenge of making that simple hi my name is sean lee i'm the co-founder ceo of fortmatic what we have built is a way for developers to write web3d apps without browser extensions or mobile wallets and we are custodial and the way we secure it is very similar to how some of the big exchanges secure it using hardware security modules and a way for our users to sign up is a serial phone number and we'll send them a security code to create a wallet what we want to focus on is giving users the simplest possible way to start and then provide more optionality later uh how once the users know more about their own needs and uh before starting formatic i was the product and design lead at a company called docker you know one of things we made is to make you know really complex technologies uh more accessible to people and um kind of using that experience uh contributing to how we can make a blockchain a more mainstream as well i'm like not as impressive anymore my name is jeffrey veer i'm ceo at a blockchain technology agency based here in denver we're not a startup we actually work alongside a lot of these companies to help evolve their user experience and actually launch their product in a product market fit type of way awesome well i have one question that i want to ask all you guys and i'm going to give you about two minutes to answer and that'll kind of set the stage and we'll get the conversation started from there um so taylor what is the biggest thing stopping dapps from going mainstream in our current environment everything i mean it's such a hard question because there are there's there's so many hurdles for a user coming off the street to be able to successfully interact with the dap um and i think that so fiat onboarding is the biggest one i have fiat in my actual physical wallet in my back pocket how do i get that into crypto and so i'm to just say the the the on-ramp in general is the hardest thing because uh if you're developing a dap with an actual use case where uh a user you're trying to sell this user on whatever your application does whatever value it provides to sell them on this idea and then backtrack and be like oh but by the way you need to first go register on an exchange and use your fiat and give them your passport and then get your ether and then transfer it into this token and then put it in this other wallet called metamask and then hook the metamask into rdap and then we can finally allow you to uh i don't know browse a decentralized version of airbnb to get that hotel that you wanted like it's just not going to work so the whole onboarding process we have to figure out how to streamline it agreed um my background is in enterprise design transformations and one of the things we teach large organizations is technology changes but core human needs don't and so what's happening right now is users need to understand what the hell is going on users need to have a sense of confidence a sense of security and they don't and the reason is actually pretty straightforward how many of you have read either the bitcoin white paper or the ethereum white paper how many times does the word user appear in either of those white papers and the thing is it's like why would you even ask that question and it's because the user is in a core consideration to these documents so the answer by the way is two for the bitcoin white paper and 21 for the ethereum white paper but there's zero mention in any of them of the word on board of the word usability or of the word experience they just assume the user magically appears okay and we all know that doesn't happen right and so the opportunity and the need to go mainstream is to help the users overcome this difficult transition from the traditional world the fiat world to the crypto world and the truth is the crypto world is pretty hard and so uh we all as an industry have a responsibility to our users to be empathetic and that's what i think we're here to talk about so i think when we're talking about blockchain there are some inherent problems which are making things difficult for users and one of them is the whole concept of key management of being responsible for your entity for your funds and you know like if you forgot your password in the case supporters or if you're in the case of metamask lost your device then everything is gone and that's something which is very difficult and i think that also ties into the second problem which is the education like where do we find the line between what we want to educate the user about and explain to them that this is decentralized or we want to kind of hide that away from him and try to solve that problem for him and the dapps themselves they also kind of have to understand that users don't really care about blockchain and decentralization and that's not a value for them they care about what they can do with your dap and we need to see as developers of dapps how we don't talk about that we need to talk about the value they get while still making sure that they enjoy the benefits of decentralization what i think that's preventing the adoption is um two things one is progressive disclosure i feel like a lot of experience out there kind of throws everything at the user right away which is like really overwhelming for end users and i think the right way through progressive disclosure by offering this a very familiar experience to what the users are used to in the web 2 world and then gradually guide them through the process of understanding the blockchain and its advantages and eventually build solutions as catered to these users um you know just from their feedback right and and the second thing is about trust um the reason we trust banks to some extent is that when someone transfers money out uh the bank guarantees you that you know you get it back maybe after a while and it's in fact that property that makes a lot of users feel very safe dealing with it or like chargebacks when there's something wrong with the credit card and the immutability of the blockchain really makes user very scared when the transaction is final but that also is important for a specific kind of applications like let's say twitter donations right you don't want people to donate and then they'll take it back so um we have to really find the use cases that's really specific and tackle those problems in a way that is the user is very familiar with and i think once we resolve these two problems it will be a really good start to get mainstream adoption i shouldn't have said at the end um that was like all of my education is huge but that's an obvious one i think right education is not good uh are not good enough uh i'll step like a a degree higher than everyone else i don't think that people see the value in it very well um and i think that makes total sense i don't think it's i don't think it is valuable yet to enough people so that's like the biggest barrier for dabs i don't think that it's valuable enough to enough people but the one i think that i'll piggyback on and really resonates with me is not we don't have variable on-ramps meaning people should be able to come in and choose the degree to which they want to interact with blockchains to which they want to interact with their own data and security around it so we should be creating an on-ramp solution that starts with custodianship and leads to you know seeds in your fire safe in your closet and and all the education that comes along with that and the education ramps up um you know along the vector with that uh more heavily heavy use of the value proposition of blockchains which is ownership of all your things so i think there's a combination of all those things but i think we need more variable on-ramps people are making decisions they're sticking to them and they're segregating a large portion of the market which is already really tiny and uh i'll start with you jeff since uh we'll just mix it up a little bit so what are some of the actionable things we can do right now to tackle some of these some of these problems or fix them uh yeah so i guess i'll just elaborate on that last notion maybe so um and i was i was actually having a really awesome conversation this past week i did a vacation with someone who works with large institutional money and i think the conclusion we came to at the end of the week was i think the solution is like tons of institutional money and just like insurance for custodianship which is like breaks the heart of every block chainer in the world right um but if you think about it if you really want to have on-ramps if you want to on-ramp the on the next 80 percent of people let's just treat it like a bank but after you've treated them like a bank you're gonna give them all of the ways to step away from the bank and with large projects and products like coinbase and and i think they're they're great because they've onboarded people but you have to take them through the value proposition of the blockchain and we haven't done that yet so i think that that's the biggest next two steps is if someone to fund the on-ramp of users and it's probably going to be institutional money sorry again um but then having the commitment of who's getting the institutional money to use it towards the betterment of educating users away from custodian solutions and honestly they have to be able to make the decision that's best for them some people are going to say the value for me is to never touch this stuff i don't want it other people they're going to want to disappear and they're going to want to have that control and i think we need to offer all those solutions at the same time i think for me is first offering variety and second break monopoly so what i mean is because the space is so early we need to offer different a variety of solutions to test the market to see what catches on what kind of experience the users really resonate with and then therefore to find a direction that we need and in my experience something if it's as easy as possible it's easier to figure out right um if it's not good enough then it's a easier change rather than kind of starting really complicated and then going towards easy because there's a lot of noise and distraction in your product and the other thing like regarding custodianship and you know becoming a bank the key here with decentralization is actually breaking monopolies um like say if there's suddenly much many many more custodians or crypto banks um that operates better than actual banks then it's really good for you know the world to break these kind of monopolies or credit card companies um and and then i think that's the whole goal of the movement is not you know centralized versus decentralized it's more like how can we provide a better infrastructure to break monopolies so i agree with the whole concept of variety and we're going to see a lot of solutions but one of the things which i think is also great and we're going to see rise is the interoperability between all those different solutions you see a lot of interesting ways to tackle different problems and i feel that we're we're seeing more and more integrations between all those different solutions and my hope is that we're going to see while this perfect storm of different solution is brewing we're going to see that killer dap which may have already tried to exist but there was just not the right you know the right tool set out there for user experience and solutions that will allow it to actually you know take hold out there so i'm really hoping that in the i don't want to give any timelines but i really hoping that very soon we're going to see all those solutions come together and that killer dab can finally grow and we're gonna see this crypto kitty but for not just for you know people who love ethereum people who love crypto but for the average person like the uber of uh of crypto of blockchain and something that everybody is like oh i gotta i gotta use that and oh it's pretty simple i just like go here two clicks and it works so i'm really hoping we're gonna be seeing something like that this bundling together of things so i mentioned i have done seven startups my first startup was an internet company in 1994. so i've earned every one of these gray hairs um and does anyone remember what the internet was like in 1994. many of you may not have been alive um some there's some gray hairs like me back there but there was a lot of new to it which was like get online and figure this out but it was basically hyper text and images links that was sort of it there was it was so small you didn't even need a search engine yahoo was like a manually curated index of links that were categorized right so the whole industry fit into the palm of your hand and you could sort of navigate it right it was weird and different but in many ways simple now compare that to the state of the blockchain today like the whole industry fits into the palm of your hand awesome but we talk about hey with this technology you can get into a credit default position into a index stable coin using uh a dow and you can do that on atomic swap basis like wait what and so for the typical new user it's just super overwhelming right and what we need to to everyone's point is a variety of experiences but a variety of experiences that enable new users to get on board gradually to interact with confidence to do things like maybe on test net so there's not real currency involved they can play with some monopoly money for a while and get it get a hang of it and they can begin to wrap their minds around some of the basic ideas of blockchain when i explain you know i'm a chains planner at parties if you know someone gets cornered in a party and i start ranting about this as i say look in the real world regular world if i want to give you 20 bucks i take 20 out of my wallet and then i give it to you and then it goes into your wallet right not one word i said is possible on the blockchain the blockchain my wallet will never contain 20 bucks it will never be in transit to you and it will never be inside your wallet and they go wait what and i go yeah let's talk right so these sorts of things were really empathetic to users is what we need in order to get across to the other side so some of these more sophisticated experiences that we're all hyped about uh are ready to be embraced and that's why we're building what we're building yeah these have been really fantastic it is hard to go last so i think that in terms of like really truly actionable items i think that we need to uh dream big right which is in this industry very easy to do i think everyone has this big grand vision and the reasons that they got into the blockchain and they got interested in this so i don't think that there's any uh lacking and dreaming big i think that what is maybe lacking a little bit is uh really focused actionable like tasks like bite-sized pieces bite-sized problems that we can solve and so i could list about a bazillion of them or i could say look around at the apps that you are using and the the points of interaction that um you're interacting with or that you're building and try to figure out one little tiny improvement that will have a just a tiny positive effect and if everyone building and everyone uses using these products does this everything will gradually be better and easier whether that's the education becoming clearer whether that's the product like you know eliminating a step or combining two steps into one and over time with these very little increments we will make actually huge strides um and that's what uh my team hates me for this but um i literally like i'll be using our product and i'll just be like this error message sucks like someone go fix it and and those little things you think that they don't have a huge difference but if every single week you fix one of your error messages and make it a little bit clearer or you edit that support article or you improve that icon or whatever it is over time it gets remarkably better and you even sort of forget what the new user is experiencing and i have people come up to me and go oh it's so easy it's so clear i got this concept where originally like that was the number one issue so that's my two cents on the matter well and in talking with uh like progressive disclosures and variable on-ramps um how do you guys feel what do we think about can you have usability without having comprehension do you need to understand how the blockchain works to be able to use it who wants to start okay so um so if i'm taking that for porters for instance from our experience so one of the hardest things that we have is the fact that because we do end-to-end encryption and the wallet is encrypted with the user's password kind of like lastpass or one password we're trying to make the user understand that if they lose their password everything is gone and that's a barrier most people are not used to that even if with products like class or one password those are still kind of you know tech savvy products mo the average user doesn't really use those kind of things so and and this whole thing this whole this whole concept that your password is everything it hides something much bigger which is the whole key management thing that that you're the owner of it so it's it's a hard line to find between like i want to explain this to you i don't want to explain why if you lose it you lose everything because that's just diving into a rabbit hole which doesn't really you know you don't really care about so i'm trying we're trying to keep it to a level which they can understand which is look if you lose this you're the only one who knows this password and we can't help you recover it now that's not a nice thing to say to a user and we're trying to see additional ways of recovery which are nicer but we don't want to dive into why this is i'm not going to explain end-to-end encryption to you and i'm just trying to keep it on a level which is need to know basis sort of way so we're not for instance gas fees we're not letting you even deal with gases we're choosing the optimal gas fee we're not really sure if that's the right way to go and we're experimenting but it's it's a fine line to find but it's it's somewhere in the middle that's what i think cool um so i think in my opinion uh it's very it's very difficult to know whether we need to do that now because i feel like the real world needs to connect more with the blockchain first for hiding it away to happen i think most users these days that are brought into the ecosystem is already exposed to it and there are pains and friction that they experience so we try to accommodate to the users that are already in the ecosystem and as we explore our boundaries and how we can get the real world connected in like a physical way with the blockchain then you can have more use cases of to optimize for and make it easier for um you know like real mainstream users so i think it's a step-by-step process um like an exploration process that needs to start somewhere um yeah so it's definitely a balance and there's certain things that you can absolutely hide away and obstruct away and if the user never really has to see it um then they don't need to understand if they don't even know that it needs to exist and that's definitely a positive with a lot of these concepts um however like the password thing that you were talking about is such a perfect example of this we deal with the exact same thing i have found that having the user understand the why behind it actually really really really increases um their overall understanding and so um you know with my crypto i'm sure most of you are familiar with our 10-page onboarding model that you couldn't close out of and the buttons hopped all around and it was very specifically designed to like try to bash the users over the head about their private keys um and it was a quick fix when everything was on fire um and it was not ideal but we did find that before this modal and before these like tons of these warnings were in place people didn't understand why they needed to keep their private key safe or why they couldn't forget their password um we just told them over and over and over again like don't forget your password don't lose your password back up your key back up your key back up your key and we found that we actually had a lot more luck and success with people backing up their key if they understood this key is the access to all of your funds and we are not a bank we cannot recover this we cannot return this we cannot reca we cannot get it back and if they understood fundamentally why our product was different than a bank or different than their facebook account then they had a better chance of backing up and properly storing their private key now in the long term would it be more ideal to just eliminate the private key from the picture probably but uh in the short term you know like i said quick fixes uh you know in iterating uh by the way our onboarding modal is now four pages and the buttons don't hop around so we're making okay leaps and bounds here but um but seriously it's it's it's a it's definitely a balance um and if you are struggling with users not doing something that you need them to do i would definitely recommend explaining even if it takes a little bit of time explaining the why behind these decisions and behind these concepts me first man matt can tell you all about error messages you guys should talk um there's a the whole thing breaks your private keys is everyone cool with that i feel like that's kind of the short answer it all breaks to private keys if you're initiated the next set of uh initiated people who are uninitiated is going to be a long way out so we're going to have to have different solutions in the interim i think a lot of it's language so uh using the word private keys can we change that word can we change these words to be more assimilated to the other words we're using today with with passwords and things like that we can unfortunately you shroud a lot of severity when you change the language so that's the dilemma that we live in in the communication design world um i don't think those are solved to this right now sorry but i think there's other things you can do um when someone comes to me and they say jeff teach me about cryptocurrency i say download a password manager download one pass something like that download um a two-factor authentication application and i want you get really familiarized with putting one more layer of security in your life and it starts to change the way you think right it starts to put like these new vectors in front of you like which i think are really awesome and it it it lends them a little bit further down to wanting to take on little bits like those little tiny wins and ultimately you'll get them to a place where you can educate them through the process of private keys and really communicating the severity maybe like three or four confirmation modals are you sure you sure you share do you have a fire safe yeah this mnemonic is important um but i don't think they dissolve i think that the solve is actually the earlier steps of teaching them the pretty ubiquitous uh two-factor multi-factor authentication things we're doing every day and people are starting to get the hang of the very worst thing to happen to blockchain usability was what do you think i would say it's really easy it was a massive appreciation of cryptocurrency value because what that did was drive a huge wave of press and media which drove a huge wave of users who never should have shown up this early in the process right and we have this tendency as an industry to think we got to solve all the problems at once and we got to get all the way to six billion people seven billion people on boarded tomorrow right and that's not true at all we have a core nucleus of people who are generally clueful and we need to get to the next layer of the onion and they will educate the next layer so the the opportunity that we have is to um be much more deliberate as we move forward what's the best thing that happened to blockchain usability the collapse in cryptocurrency prices right hey a whole lot of folks are a lot less interested in this great right wow that's so much better for all of us up here because what's happening right now is there's a huge amount of burden on you the adapt developer figure this all out educate them train this do this test this check that make sure they don't do anything one of these get this language right internationalized localized accessibility and you're like look i'm just trying to get started here i'm doing hello world and that's why we're building what we're building at block native because there's a whole bunch of these problems you can just download and you know get for free right and i think across all of the vendors that are up here all the tools that we're doing we're all basically focused on the same set of problems usability and accessibility and we're all attacking it in different angles and what's super amazing is they're all viable they're all interesting and we have way more in common than anything else so if you're out there building right now like by all means use the tools that are at your disposal we all have whole development teams that are working on this we have expertise for it so it's a super interesting time to be building in the space and don't feel like you have to solve it all at once okay well thank you guys so much we're out of time so we'll wrap things up but thank you all for coming and thank you all guys for speaking that was amazing