UX Awards (Devcon5)

thank you everybody for coming and one this year was really interesting we had so many so many amazing submissions and we're really excited the judges deliberated till maybe 2 a.m. yesterday so it was really really tight this year one of the criteria is that we're going to discuss in the panel the sessions a little different from last year we're gonna have a panel with the judges to discuss kind of the state of UX and design as well as and we'll kind of touch upon all these points of the criteria and our judges I'm really excited to introduce we have Bennie from Krypto kitties and dapper laughs and then we have Alex from coinbase joining us from product design and then Graeme you and and we're actually really excited to bring back RJ RJ was the winner of one of the winners of last year and so they're coming back as a judge and it's really great to see how far everyone has come and ramie uh the UX design director is not here today but we have Jillian who is one of the cofounders of Arjun so we're gonna start this panel of just kind of talking about where are we in the same Buicks I know you've been talking a lot about relaxed and design but coming from such product-oriented and you guys have quite a suite of products you offer you have a pro you have you guys have a new blockchain to Alice so tell us when you start with a little bit of where do you think they are the designs to be specifically in one three yeah it's a it's very interesting coming from the game space we have almost more than 50% of the company is focusing on the game studio side so designing UX and UI for games is much more different from defy fortunately we spend a lot of time with our top players of crypto P DS and cheese wizards or new game and we get to learn a lot about the different pain points that they have and the pain points that gamers have we're watching gamers have is very different from somebody who wants to make a compound load or use point base they have a higher expectation of the flow being extremely smooth and so that's kind of fact at least from the game side what we think about a lot yeah and what are some of the things and maybe that you guys can kind of come in the things that we're doing right and what things were doing wrong maybe argent question I think we are starting to do a lot of thing right I think maybe to complement your first question I think this is a very exciting career because the blockchain material is still a young technology and I think we are rightly reaching outside of small crypto bubble and I think a lot of that capability is done through improving the user experience I think especially if imagine it comes from the technology and I think we try to solve problems by the technology first thing but I think this is really exciting and because we we get to show this amazing technology to the outside world while still it's called principle and I think this is something that is that it's very important is to to being able to reach to people and maybe less tech-savvy but still maintain a core principle about decentralization I mean all year you're kind of the design product design representative here what are some of the design opportunities that we we've had and what's going on in the space I echo what you said having sex through your ex audit I think we came a really long way from you know early big decentralized products that were very much focused on exploring the technology to building more and more user-friendly user focus things we are as complex you guys as companies we start to focus more on basically solving user needs finding the good company creating good mental models I think we still have some challenges to overcome we're still sort of I seen projects designing for just a fan of technology but I think we're going in a good direction of putting the user first and having the user introduce like being able to introduce the user to the crypto I mean so going going towards that in your company you guys have kind of one of the most well adoption kind of products with well adoption adopted features so how do what this design look like in your process there's a lot of kind of as we saw from the UX audits a lot of teams that come in and really we don't have a designer we don't know what to do so how did that start from you guys and and how does that throat currently in the current state I think first design start by thinking about the user so in everything we do we first really focus on the user and to give an example when we started our gen we're thinking about you know to manage or your account or your keys and we will just try to think what's a user experience that people actually understand people outside of our bubble and we we realize that the user of of the experience of banks for example we may not like banks traditional banks with the idea that if you lose your credit card you lose your wallet you can actually call your bank to give a new one we cannot feel that this was a mental model that users would understand it so we try to replicate that first is using the technology that's why we build a smart contract this wallet and then adding a layer of UX and design on top of it so for us we need the starting point is the user trying to solve the problem for a user then we use the technology and then we use shiny button good design you know flows and stuff like that I think the starting point is really to start from the user well traditional I think you know in an ecosystem where people are very tech savvy we tend to start from the technology we build a cool technology and then we think okay you know how will the user use my technology I think you wish departing you need to be shaped you should be organized solve a problem for users and then find the right technology to solve that you're kind of going touching upon the next question here about users and you're having this really interesting conversation around how how are you how do you find your users and and and how do you define who your user group is so you know as you know coinbase because a portfolio of different products and I both custodial and noncustodial and I think what we're doing really well is kind of understanding that not about not an entire group of our users is the same so we kind of funnel them into their friends in two different places and with having that in mind we actually do talk to our users very early as well we I mean we just had this discussion of like it is a lot of to say that it is very difficult to find a user group without breaking their privacy and I claim the opposite it's just you basically need to hassle a little bit and reach out to your community reach out use different platforms ask people to come to your office or just set up hangouts and just talk to your user understand what their pain points are understand what they kind of expect you will learn that maybe your initial assumptions are completely in a different place than what your users and I think in our case it's one of the things that make that builds that biggest advantage and then I am excited to get your answer because I've talked to your design team and you guys have just started unraveling their research and reaching out with cheese wizards what does that look like for you guys so cheese wizards stemmed from us being in the room and thinking about what is the next weirdest thing with you built both from a technical standpoint of building a battle royale blockchain game and the sense of mixing cheese with wizards so we have that luxury of thinking creatively of you know what we'll take a loss and how can we kind of emanate that as a project then we kind of go to the step of building really fast prototypes that are off chain and we like to test it we've done probably by now more than 10 play tests of cheese wizards internally and each iteration we kind of improve the way it looks the way the flow goes recently about three weeks ago we had the last final plate ask for cheese wizards on the rinkeby Network it was pretty much it had most of the features that we are we have set the launch for next week and you know what we did was I got a battle cage inside of the office and curated duels between different people in the company and not only that we had the use of the user research team that was sitting there and kind of asking questions and mapping out the user journey and their emotions through the entire process of going through the flow and from that males winds will send the daily surveys to capture all the information from the team members we usually start with internal then we invite a core group of maybe a small sample size of external players to come and play and we do the same thing where we measure every day and see where we can improve and then that gets funneled to engineering and design then now we're at this point where we've been we have an open beta this entire week so we welcome the entire space here at Def Con and our community to play the game and we have a website like any any bugs or issues feel free to fill out the form and that's how we usually capture a lot of the information and funnel it off the design and engineering and then build all those features inside of the game now I want to pull from that like that user research component of it that that's been a big narrative this year at Def Con last year it was kind of like mass adoption mass adoption and and before that it was like how do we understand it to know her users better and so pulling from that we were just talking about market research versus design research and the team from Sela said it really well which is with different Oh with market research you might get a hundred people and get ten insights but with design research you get ten people and get a hundred insights so you're going super deep and taking that time to ask them how we not just questions about your product but questions around what how do you go about your your flow like your goal how do you get a person to finish that goal maybe it's like going to the bank okay what happens if you lost your money where do you go and that doesn't have to be directly correlated to your product because you're not trying to tell them like this is a product that's going to solve your need if you don't know what those needs are yet so so kind of back to that let's go back to use like a usability and what I call the responsibility of the creator and so you guys have one of the biggest products you literally propyl cerium but but what do you guys find that for your users what do you guys try to do to protect them or give an end of the space what's different in the way that you're creating product that you think about or do you want to start go ahead so is it in comparison to how other clock changes building built games and the way that they build process or in comparison to defy or other lives yeah it's hard to kids you guys all have so many so I would say I mean I think generally a lot of people are thinking about how they build the product so when you're building the product there's fundamental kind of decide decisions in that you cream while you're creating the product and that has to do with kind of the underlying these are needs I think for me it's about of course you make choice when you design a product can you make sure it's not yeah from the user but I think something that's very important is to inform the user about these choices and making sure you're not hiding anything so I think users have to make conscious choices and know maybe the compromise they are making some user eyes are fine using a custodial service some users may not need so I think it's important that actually we educate we inform the user about the choice that he's making in the trade-off that you may may get from the choice that he's making I think this is something for us that's very important also a thousand but we believe that there is a boulder or not to cross so there's some core as I mentioned some core principle that we don't want to compromise on and then after that all that goes on top of that is really a question of of informing the and helping in making a wise choice because it's easy to too badly inform or to add something and make decision I think it's it's actually the UX is really responsible of that is letting the user be informed about the choices that is making yeah I want to pull that Apple from that and although we'll get to you because it's there's some ideas around the abstraction of information to avoid complexity for the user and so I know coinbase it has Pro you guys have conservative so real non-custodial you guys have different kinds of users as well how this how's that structured for you guys and what have you kind of seen I think the as long as coming from the crypto community I would want to say that let's do I would want to believe that we should make users think it's not exactly how the product works and I think certain features are in the final existing financial system there for a reason so for example I can't recovery is there because you know we tend to forget our passwords we tend to do stuff that kind of work against us almost so you know thinking about these things as like features not necessarily the sort of old system but rather how can we help users sort of enter the crypto community through or crypto technology through maybe more evolution rather than revolution so we can in wallet for example we have we allow users to back their that their security their secret peace through their Google Docs and there are there are solutions that are more decentralized and solutions that are more centralized the most important element for us is like knowing who our audience are and like making sure that we're going to protect them and at the same time give them the opportunity to do like to choose to work which direction they want to go to I really like that idea that evolution if we permit legit I think these last year kind of ice we already see that evolution in terms of last year it was like let's put out all the really big problems and the questions and we want to solve her really really big important things around banks and the system the centralization but the adoption that we see there and where that bridge we're almost there but we're trying to design for a user that's users that are not quite there yet they're not quite knowledgeable I think that's the difficulty of the moment we are in is that this kind of tension because you want to build for the next wave of users coming but we still want to be relevant today and so what people understand today is not what people would understand the future to give you a good example about that I have a good friend that I managed to convince to use our journey it was really excited to put his money to come home and so he don't know the audience and he used actually because we didn't have but if you had to cryptogram at that point you use conveys to buy some dye then he wants to send this guy to Archer and then is his colleague names like dude I cannot say my dad to Arjun and I said yes look at that screen it says we can send here c20 it's like what's annuity 20 so actually on country is it controller this guy to eater so he could say eater and then arjun converted eater back to die by the time you had done that it was like six or seven percent it was like your product makes no sense and i think we're saying about under stinger users i think there's also a lot of feedback and we need to be able to listen to feedback so for example for us customer support is very important because we do you the research ramiro users but actually listening to the feedback of the users is all you know the most because we make a lot of ass when people understand what people know that example prose was like of course nobody knows what's in here see tiny so you know we need to make that explicit I think it's a it's a silly example that thing it shows that as you answer your first question we are getting there but we are cleaning up there yes for the next way what about her you guys are working on a nevis of launched after as well and trading the seamless experience for the types of users you have which are gamers and they're they're expecting service or in type of flow when you launch script affinities at F Waterloo we recently had we did a lot of onboarding form enemas people came up to us and was like what is this can i download this what is gas and we sat down with tons of people helping them set it all up and a script achilles grew really big we I think at one point drove nearly 200,000 downloads to mandamus and a lot of these people would come to this court and we are disparate basically between madame a support for a lot of these players who wanted to buy some kitties and breed some kitties and you could imagine the hundreds of thousands of questions that we have received from doing that amount of support in our discord and that helped us kind of understand in a very full picture of all the issues that has arrived with private keys and with like the continual controls of gas and looking at the gas station and making the right selection and so dapper wallet we've been working on it for about nearly nine months at the smart contract wallet and it's built from the ground up in terms of rethinking how key recovery works and actually the dapper team the dapper wallet team is embedded in the NBA team now the NBA team as you know we're building a basketball game for 2020 and we have access to you know with access to a lot of fans and getting a deeper understanding of are these fans of NBA even thinking about digital collectibles or true item ownership and as with anything that we do we always start off of the users as Julian said and we have thousands of conversations on a monthly basis and that really helps us as a company get built this obsession of like hey this is not very good maybe we should change this right a prime example was we called some more contract wallets now or smart wallets it's it's a simpler turn back I don't know six months ago everyone's saying multi signature or multi sick and when we did user research papers like what is multi-state multi-sig wallet and what is a madam ask and we even drilled down to each individual word that we use when we invite people into our offices and we just get really blank faces all the time like oh okay they don't really understand this word and that really helps us like kind of sit in their shoes and design something from their perspective and so with Doppler one of the things that we built was the subsidizing gaps for the users so for if you play cryptic kitties or any of the dapple apps games or the devil a partnership partners the people that your players have to worry about paying coughs we've completely eliminated that and we actually even change the word gas to network fee because through research people just like it very confused about like why am I putting gas in my wallet it makes no sense so yeah that's kind of all the reference points that we have as a company and so how we start the process of designing something that people could actually use the one thing that I want to say is that design is not about design it's a building product it's sort of like this this whole whole that contains of like three parts business technology and design and when you take away one of it your product will not be you're basically going in the wrong direction your problem there's a higher chance that you're going in the wrong direction and so what I really like about what we do at coin race is that the these three functions gather together very early on in the before every future every product that we start and we actually go through the market fit the technology and what do our users want sort of trying to balance the new products having that in mind and again design is not necessarily about you know pixels that you do it's it's the user experience that your users well I want to say experience but yeah but we'll go through when interacting with your product I think we'll see a lot of that but I think going through the judging as well it's like there's so many amazing beautiful products and the judges are really good about what is actually useful what is the problem is there a problem the product is solving and if so are they clearly figuring out the depths of that problem I think Arjun for you guys started with that problem right and you want to touch upon that whatever you did you want to say we kind of be starting with a problem part of it you guys kind of formulate that you touched on it earlier or you're from the top for you guys how are you does that problem also evolve as people are getting more knowledgeable about the space or do you see that as kind of the core problem I think what we think is that you need to be a product for users and it needs to solve a problem for the users so I think also in a in the space around often excited about the technology but I think a lot of people outside of bubble do not care too much about the centralization they will not care about this these principles so we need to be able to find a problem that we solved for users I think people will come to the blockchain if it solves a problem that cannot be solved by technology and I think it needs to solve it by 10x factor at least for people to actually actually work that switch so clearly for the moment being a wallet you are solving a problem for the current ecosystem because most people don't know that but what we believe is that the blockchain with some people will start problem for all people I think that's the common vision that we are we are all sharing here so we are we trying to kind of anticipate this problem and for us it's about laying the foundation I think if you make that analogy between the blockchain in the internet example I believe on the internet people are to write common light and us understand this would be IKEA and then suddenly people with the idea of a browser and then you have a nice interface and you click on that and then it becomes much more usable by my own people and I think for the Internet the user is not the browser is not what make the internet go wrong I think it came afterwards games by the fact that there was no native payment in the browser and so people had to go to to marketing and and ads and that's what kind of corrupted the internet so I think it's it's also shows that by making the right technological choices now we are preventing a thing or technology to go in the wrong direction in the future I think with the internet we made some mistake and personally athlete because it's because of payment the lack of native family in the internet stack and I think it is kind of a responsibility now to make sure that will be the technology that doesn't reproduce thank you guys for sharing your insight in now we're gonna move on to the ceremony where we're gonna be ordinal winners so first this year we've got the most adorable crypto kayu crypto kitties and their physical trophies this time and they're actually with it NFT and they have special powers which is us in their genes so thank you for coming to Kyle for participating and working with us on this we're excited you guys will see the trophies living with you and with that many is gonna oh sorry with Jillian first thank you I'm very happy to announce that the first winner is one instant I think ramp is a company that sounds a very complicated problem which is going from Fiat to crypto and unfortunately I wasn't part of the discussion when I received the feedback but either you know as knowing the product I think what they do extremely wide what right and it's a value that we share is that the abstract the complexity of a very difficult problem without compromising of some core principle so they managed to maintain the centralization in to the way the recycled yet the crypto which is which is quite impressive hi thanks really excited to be here so that's wrong we try to solve crypto onboarding and or at least a very important part of it Crypton boarding consists of first we think that it has two very important parts first is getting your crypto and second managing your keys there are many companies that manage your keys very well and we are pretty close to getting this problem solved but krypton boarding with like actually purchasing crypto is so complicated so first it's complex think about going to a dab that you love and just want to use but actually having to go to a entire an entirely different interface in order to purchase your crypto think about the chair and with users if you are a DAB that is actually targeting a mass user and trying to get crypto to mass adoption and then getting to send them or relating them to some third-party websites in order to purchase your crypto and then imagine how much how many of your users like normal typical users who are used to one-click everything would turn and just turn away second its intimidating so why do you need my passport why do you need my ID why do you need my car license car driving license we also think that this turns away a lot of users who just want to casually try crypto for the first time and it also creates a lot of churn free it's time consuming that's self-explanatory for it is scary we hear about crypto exchanges collapsing all the time and this is a crowd level if you can really solve with smart smart contract infrastructure so what we thought is to build an a crypto all around built on smart contracts entirely peer-to-peer and custodial mess but really if you build some cool tech you need to think about the end users you need to base your development or on empathy it's not enough to build a cool tech you need to wrap it with an enjoyable user interface to create this delightful experience so first ramp instant is a widget that you can implement into your DAP today or if you run if you build a wallet we are also we are also we also think that this is a great way to onboard your new users into crypto so the ramp instant becomes part of the flow of your adapt second with it connects with your bank and this solves kyc issues most of our users can do their purchases without scanning their license or passport free we let users keep control so we do not ask them for their credit card we do it via a banking interface and every transaction needs to be confirmed by the user inside the banking device you will see that in the moments and first and foremost it is based on smart contracts and maintains an escrow for each and every transaction that you initiate so you do not need to fear about your transaction coming through and it is not as scary as using a centralized exchange so when it comes to design process we thought that it is very important to actually talk with users and to do an interrupted process when you prototype user tests and repeat prototype user tests and repeat and by the way there is a cool tip if you want to supercharge this process talk with deep work studio they structured our designing process Charlie is their big round of applause to Charlie and yet so today you can enjoy ramp instant on your phone and on your desktop it is a standalone krypton boarding app but you can also implement it into your tap or wallet it's sweet it's very simple to use I hope we can get this video to work yeah it works so in this flow you connect to your bank account and you create an instant payment this instant payment gets initiated inside the actual banking app you authorized inside the banking app and just after minutes the payment is confirmed and you can expect your crypto to reach your user within 3 minutes or less so that's romp instant you can actually use it today go to ramped-up network that's ramp that's network or scan this QR code and we can get you ready to implement it in just minutes it's 17 lines of code very simple as decay we handle all of it liquidity regulatory and parts of the interface because we provide a widget that is co-branded with your brand thank you and next we're excited for all and to introduce Reeboks servants for that for the last three days we heard a lot this comparison of the two projects - Lego blocks and three box common component Commons components is exactly that it's tiny inconspicuous blog that has a little bit of Technology in UX and UI it's probably cannot bury the weight of your construction by itself but we think that in the you will find this component in a lot of projects in the future welcome and congrats thank you very great videos run hi I'm Michael from three bucks at three bucks it's our mission to make it really easy to build better apps personally like we've been around the space for a while and just got tired of seeing gaps be limited to buy sell transfer and limited only down chain interactions and so we saw that there was a huge opportunity for making more interactive applications with real-time data that lives off chain on ipfs and in distributed networks and so at three bucks we we built a system that enables devs to make better use of these p2p technologies to manage the data for their application and what you see here is a comments component like Ola said it's the goal here was to make it as easy as possible to add discuss like functionality to your application and you can drop this anywhere like basically on any website that has web 3 and some of the cool things that we did with it we're trying to think of how we can handle authentication and how do you pass the web 3 provider to the component and so there are three options here which I think we're probably running through in the video but yeah you can log in directly to the component so the application itself on a global state doesn't need to handle the provider the component can accept the provider from the global application state and you can do that in two ways like one when the unit when the user first on boards to your site you can authenticate them to three box and what that does is it actually opens up a local IP FS and Orbitz DB node right in the browser and syncs out and collects data from the rest of the network so it's local first it can run offline and just makes it super simple to get started like there's no extensions that users have to download or plug in it just runs and so you can see that there's also profiles on here so outside of the comments component three box offers three box j/s SDK which makes it really easy to it provides a developer interface to add profiles distributed storage and messaging to your application and so this uses specifically the profiles and the messaging api's and so this actually wraps our three bucks SDK and also what's cool here are we use aetherium keys for authentication and signing but we have a did method decentralize identify our method under the hood and so in the future we can extend this to all the different aetherium keys that you have across all of your different wallets while maintaining the same profile on the same data and then taking that a step further you can also think about extending that to other chains and other shards and you know even web to authentication methods as well so the goal is always to have data follow you around the web and not be trapped in any sort of centralized silo or service and three box actually lets you do that in a real way that's simple and so I'm excited that you're excited about the Commons component we really hope that this is a useful tool and we're making other plugins so this isn't the only one we have a profile hovers plugin which if you hover over these profiles here you'll see like a little modal that pops up kind of like Twitter that shows you additional profile metadata and in a week or two we'll be releasing a chat box component plug-in and that really lets you add like a global site wide chat a control box to the corner of your site all built on p2p using our profiles and api's so super excited thank you and look forward to chatting with all of you and next we have any introducing Zairian all right who here has created a CDP raise of hands okay cool defy is the future but it's complicated because you have to create go over here for a compound loan you go over here for a CDP so we're really excited to announce the final winner which is zero on they've done great job in making it extremely easy for you to create an account and go to all these different defy services so we're really excited for them to be the winner thank you thank you Vinnie hello it's really an honor to be here and we are super excited about there and to present their into you I'm your guinea and what we believe is aaron is actually that users should own and control their assets and also we think that financial access should be universal so given that in mind we we have designs there and to be first a noncustodial bank for deep i and ii it allows you to access all different defy protocols in a single place so i'm gonna show you the demo of how zerrin looks just like a typical flow that people will see while using zarion so first you you'll need to connect your any of your wallet we support all boards like mobile wallets and meta mask and ledger then you can see all your assets on the account as and the performance over time we have integration with free box so it shows your free box profile on the top and yeah so then you'll be able to see all your unit swap pool tokens as well and that we even have a mobile app that allows you to track your portfolio like your d5 failure on the go next I'm gonna show you how you can easily swap one either let's say I like to buy a hundred die it's through Zarin and you can that happens through uni swap and and it directly goes to the unit swap contract you confirm the transaction in in the world that you have connected and you can easily see how I see like right now it's pending in the history tab we will show you all the history in history shoulders transactions in a really user-friendly form for instance like that's adding liquidity to uni swap or all the trades and like oh you receiving money from other people so once it's mined you're gonna get a push notification as well and so this interface can act as a complete replacement of your like letting my either wallet or other things like that then once you get some died you can instantly go to compound and purchase and put money into compounds to start earning interest right away that's again a super seamless flow yeah so this has mainly it about zarion come and try check it out with yourself I hope you love it and yeah thanks thanks so much again thank you thank you and we wanted to give one runner up Eragon they didn't win last year that's right last year but we you gotta check out this great video I want to say that all of the three winners and the runner-up had one thing in common they were very easy to use that the mental models were exactly how users sort of expect them to be the coffee especially like in bigger projects were so well so detailed and so well thought out that all three of them like all three of them made a really great job in and made a really big problem with arrogant example they made a really big progress in where they where a year ago so yeah I think that's maybe what the judges struggled with the most was there's so many that applied last year and the progress of they've made and so our god we definitely wanted to kind of showcase some of the new design system that they they've built so with that thank you everybody thank you to etherion foundation and thank you guys all for sitting here and coming [Applause] you