Uniswap It Just Works | Callil Capuozzo - Uniswap Labs

hello first row Lindsay okay I'm G to give it one more minute and then we're going to get started here I don't really have a good stage presence but I I uh went rogue and I'm not wearing any pink which is kind of like a big deal for UNIS Swap and I'm doing that because I'm the designer so I have to wear black but luckily I have this very cool limited edition Unis swap gray hat uh that nobody else in the world really has so I'm still representing all right shall we okay so uh this talk is going to be about Unis swap about designing Unis swap um so just a little bit of context if uh you don't know what uniswap is and you don't know who I am um so I'm khil um I'm Kil also. k.i. um I'm the VP of design at uniswap Labs which is the company that makes the Unis swap web app um makes the mobile apps and all the things that we do these days I've been working on the project since the beginning um I was the first person to work on it after Hayden did all the prototyping really early days kind of stuff um you might know us from this interface right the swap box um this is you know these days a very uh common interface that you see everywhere in dii uh but I want to talk about why it just worked when we did it in the first place and what we're doing today to keep Unis swap just working so a little bit of context of like why this is important um so some numbers that uh we this is these are rough by the way but 75% of new wallets visit Unis swap on their first day in crypto or web 3 or on evm chains and uh we see about 30,000 new wallets every day on the new swap interface um these are pretty big numbers you know we think we want to get them bigger but it means that we're often the first stop for people um when they're you know experiencing Defi and self- custody for the first time another really kind of cool set of stats from that little swap box is that unisoft protocol which is not only the interface but other um ways of accessing it uh since we designed it has done some pretty crazy numbers right so that little box has afforded like a lot of trading a lot of innovation and a lot of access to new um tokens and new markets our goal at Unis swap Labs our mission is to unlock Universal ownership and exchange it's kind of a lofty Mission um and but we really believe in it uh we're really trying hard to do it and one of the big hurdles that you probably hear as you speak to people in this you know uh conference and on the internet and things like that is like if we want to get to this end goal right why is it so hard to make crypto experiences that just work it's really hard um I know it firsthand and I think it's when when I think about this problem um from a design point of view um I have a theory it's kind of like loose but I'm going to try to explain it to you and then I'm going to show you how we apply that theory and try to make products that are really cool okay so this is the first Unis swof interface um V1 and it looks a lot like it does today and that's actually we we're really proud of that um we think that's a great thing this was a little bit of an aha moment for a lot of people when they were using it for the first time because it gave them momental model for trading that they hadn't really seen before but the only way that that worked is because the app itself was super super basic right I mean this is really reductive but basically this is what the app dealt with right the rc20 standard the logic of x x yal k to make swapping work e send transaction and metamask okay so the app itself had a kind of like picture of the world that was very very simple okay and because it a picture of the world it was very simple it meant that people who used it didn't have to hold very much context in their head right it made it it made it so that the context that the app had to deal with also was very simple and as we go forward into today this is what the app looks like today a lot of things have changed and really what has changed is the context that the app lives within right if we rewind six years there were no l2s there were no you know ens wasn't really a big thing um there wasn't wallet connect um a whole bunch of things didn't exist yet so over that period of time what has happened is that the our apps that were building all of a sudden they start to model the world a lot more closely than they did back then right and what I mean by that is they have to start to bring into their boundaries things that are in the real world so we're starting to like cross over the edges of the like closed loop logic that existed back in those early days and this is really important right because this is the kind of stuff that's going to make it accessible for people um you know across the whole entire world and so when we design at Unis swap Labs we really think about what it means to sort of cross over those edges I want to kind of uh give you guys a reference point if you're interested in this kind of stuff design Theory design thinking there's a really cool book called notes on the synthesis synthesis of form by this guy named Christopher Alexander Christopher Alexander is an architect um he's written a lot of books one called a pattern language and in these books he proposes that design is basically about synthesizing context and using patterns that people recognize together to make new things and so basically I'm my theory about like why it's so hard to make things in crypto that just work is because often times we are given as designers systems that have logic that are uh closed that are lot like that um are self-referential and don't really often think about things outside of them and that's on purpose right that's what makes these systems safe but at the same time humans are not really like that when I step in front of a computer and I bring my context my fear of money my you know uh fast paced life on the train I don't really care I want it to understand my context and to basically like deal with the complexity of everyday life so good design understands the Conex context outside of the scope of the technical system and an understanding of people's mental models if you do this well People Come Away with the impression that it just works so okay this is kind of this is how I feel sometimes talking about this stuff right so I will kind of rewind we'll get to the fun stuff now um but I just wanted to kind of leave you with like that's how I think about things that's how the the team at Unis swop Labs the design team thinks about things um and we try to practice that in our everyday work okay so how do we as a team make it make work we like eat complexity we follow our principles which I'll show you in a second and we repeat and iterate so what are our principles um it's really important to have principles If You're Building Products because it's hard to have conversations about what's right to do what the right thing to do is if you don't so have product principles so um these are some of them uh there are more but uh we want to build things that are secure want to build things that are fast and affordable and also we want to give people options I missed that one and then design principles we want to make people feel connected we want to make things that feel useful and that are approachable so these are like two sides of the same coin right okay so now I'm just going to show you cool things we've built using these principles so recently um we just put out uh unisoft usernames um I'm going to play the trailer and then talk about it for a second okay so what are unisoft usernames basically they're a system built on top of ens um I'm going to go really fast through this just because there's a lot to get to but um there system bill on top of ens that allow people to claim uh human reable name when they onboard via the unisoft wallet um uh for free and where this came from was the design team observing um people doing onboarding onto our apps um and Talking them about their experience and one of the things that we noticed when people when people were doing it in real life especially when you were getting onboarded by a friend is that people would download the app go through onboarding they would get to the screen and often the first thing that the person who was helping them onboard would say is like send me your address because I want to send you eth okay all right so now if you don't know that person you know individually you may not have their number to text them how do you get them to send them your thing right you can pull out the QR code blah blah blah but if you're doing it in a remote setting where you're not in person with them it's kind of hard to then have to explain what an address is have to explain all these complex things instead it would be a lot nicer if you could just say hey what is your unisoft username right and then send the money that way and so these are like small things small things that we built to make it like easier to get involved with with um crypto EAS get easier to get started with Unis swap that are like derived from these real world contexts and insights that we had when we were devel uh designing these things it's really really cool because it also is extensible so it it kind of Builds on top of some of the principles that um you know ethereum is built on and ens is built on and we're sort of like kind of just extending that a little further to make things easier to use and you get and out of it you get this really cool world now of all these different names that people can claim and ways that people can represent themselves um without having to spend gas to do so okay the next slide I'm going to go to is I'll go back is a uh kind of a longer video of or longer promo video of the stuff we've just released and I'm G to play it it's about a minute long and then I'll just go back and walk through a few of the things and then try to do a little demo really fast all right so in that uh video you saw a few things I want to talk about extension specifically because I think this is another case that represents this uh approach to design so something that we uh noticed as we were looking at wallets out there first of all they weren't really optimized for swapping second of all when we watch people use them there was a bunch of context that um we felt like uh developers who had made extensions that were popups were missing namely the feeling of having many tabs open the switching back and forth between um browser windows and losing your place basically and so we developed the unop extension as a sidebar um to bring the wallet to you help it go with you wherever you go but also to kind of like solve this problem of this lost context that people often complained about using traditional browser extensions as we know them um we also of course are trying to do better and improve this situation like I love metamask I have a lot of respect for them but we got to move on from that to this um all right I think I have time I'm going to try to do a demo um of one last really cool feature that I don't think we've showed ever about the extension um and it has to do with uh what we're trying to do in the future with this Suite of products and also a representation of what it means to try to bring more context to the experience of using crypto in your everyday life okay let's see if the demo time will work so all right well here is the onboarding screen of the Unis swap extension some of you might have seen this from um the booth but I want to show you a really cool experience that we've built that we think is one of the first times that like Unis swap has really made something magical with this new sued of products so on my phone I have the usop wallet here um it's a wallet that I use to swap very simple right um and let's say I'm a I'm a user who just downloaded the extension and I already have this app what I can do is Click down here and I have the ability now to sync my wallets for my phone without having to copy and paste the seed phrase insecurely um kind of like deal with the complexity of all those things and so on my phone here all I have to do is scan this hold on let's get it to focus um and I'm being asked basically to authenticate um into the system I get a onetime code to enter so don't do this publicly by the way um when you download this this app and then I have to make a a um a password to secure my wallet on the extension right ignore the but demo bugs but basically in about you know under 1 minute I've now got my wallet in my Unis swop extension fully imported fully working um with one scan and one OTP and I can all already go through and start to swap so these types of experiences where once you start to have this Suite of Suite of products and more context you start to be able to do things between them and think a little bit more about like what is the context that your user is in when they might want to put uh you know set up an extension for the first time and so one last thing just to show off about this extension and why we think it's really cool is that it does travel with you so if I'm you know browsing farcaster for instance and want to buy dgen um I can do that really easily just from within the in the sidebar um and it's really cool because it kind of becomes your like you know companion a little bit more and we think that um oh I don't have enough e to swap sorry demo fail um but anyway it would work if I did and it really becomes your companion um to go with you as you sort of start to poke into these different you know apps uh adaps other experiences new sources that might be the context in which you then choose to swap all right back to the slides okay so um a few more thoughts on context we've been really working hard to understand better how the Unis swap apps are used in the world um this is something that we're really proud of that I think we don't talk about enough but all of the apps that we put out in the world are fully translated with fairly high quality translations but in uh a lot of languages and a lot of currencies as well and we learned from looking at our data that Unis swap is a really Global product um we do primarily have us users but you'd be surprised the distribution as you look across like the different types of users that come to this the uh to our products so this is something that we've really been focusing on and we actually want to push way harder on it um because we know that the context that people use their products in may not be you know Denver Colorado and the last thing is um we've been really working hard to bring a lot more chains to Unis swap as well to the apps um and more are coming soon so this is a little taste of like the latest things we've been working on using those principles to drive dve our decision- Mak um what we're working towards just you know so everybody to kind of conclude is this unified experience across web Android iOS browser extensions and more um that uses the same design system the same set of principles a better understanding and a deeper um set of insights about context and the way that people use these products in their everyday life um and we really think that this is sort of setting us up for a world where users Maybe able to kind of come and choose Unis swap um and bypass all of the uh the sort of centralized exchanges that people often come through first to get to D5 um we're not quite there yet we have a few more hurdles to get over um but we're working really hard to solve these in the next year um one thing that I think is really cool is that everything here of course is powered by um the new swap protocol um it's getting stronger and more powerful every day um recently we kind of released we released a version something called Unis swap X which enables zero gas sorry swapping with no gas um which is really powerful and it's something that we're actually going to accelerate on so there's very soon there's going to be a version of Unis swap that probably abstracts gas entirely we're also releasing um the ability to pay gas with any token very soon as well so we're trying to like tear down these barriers um as we build out this platform coming soon V4 is going to come Mountain Q3 that's a really big deal um go read about on the internet go talk with the unisoft foundation about it a lot is happening there's also some sneaky hidden new features that are going to come to the extension and the wallets and the web app um but in general you know our goal here is really to build out this platform to build out this platform that understands people understands the context that they swap that they trade within um and we believe that uh that's going to result in a smarter way as well thank you very much