ETHLondonUK: Designing Ethereum UX for Humans, with Jason Goldberg & Simona Pop

so my name is Jason and I run a company called Peppo and I run a company called OST which stands for open simple token Pipo is built on OST technology and I can walk through kind of who we are why we built this and then what you can learn from it so in the back of the room we have simona pop come to the front Simona some of you might know Simona she's world-famous she is our chief engagement officer she runs a lot of programs around blockchain for good causes for onboarding new people to the crypto community she's what else are you doing this weekend and so also hear from our team we have so if you want to find me on Twitter on beta shop Simona is simp up we have Kevin Kevin and Paul will be here all weekend and they're going to be judging the UX Awards so they'll be kind of evaluating different projects but so the UX Awards so as I mentioned technology agnostic there's 4,000 die in prizes available in the UX Awards the the top team will win two thousand died two runner-ups will win one thousand died and so what I want to go through is what is great UX and how do you win a UX award and why are we making this technology agnostic so as I mentioned we are the makers of an app called Pipo Pipo is built on ethereum we spent four years building technology that enables apps like people to be possible we have an SDK that enables apps to basically integrate a theory and smart contract wallet seamlessly into any application now unfortunately it's not something that you can do in a weekend all right because you need to have an iOS or Android app and they also have certain things they need to do and we get those apps approved by the app stores but we are working on enabling white-label apps for future hackathons and other things stable people to hack on those aspects of our technology and we're also seeking to open up other aspects the SDK open-source will to happen other things hackers can do at these hackathons but we want to show everyone what's possible when you think through kind of the user experience driving the technology and the two things come together in tandem I encourage everyone though to download the app on the App Store the app is basically it's bringing together the crypto community we launched it at DEFCON a few months ago a third of all Def Con participants and Osaka tried the app they gave us tons of feedback we then iterated on it during San Francisco blockchain week during Singapore blockchain week last year then in Waterloo eath water last year and then we had a whole new relaunch of the app based on the user feedback based on basically having an active conversation with hundreds of users thousands of points of feedback we did have relaunched eight down for two weeks ago and the users just skyrocketed from there and what we learned through the thread the feedback was what you see here is communities we said that people app features 30 second videos by people with integrated tokens appreciation so every like actually transfers value and when we found was people were using the app in the Theorem community very differently from tick-tock-tick talks like fun entertainment people in aetherium and crypto we're using it like more like professional and business and work and things that are that are their passions and they drove us disabled could we organize this into different communities and so we launched communities last week communities kryptos killer app I think we all know this but we launched communities last week if communities for eat Denver for eat London here this week for each see see you next week for one million developers people creating communities now things like foodies others type topics but starting from the cryptid community building out but I encourage you to download it not just really just to try it as like an app because obviously there's lots of video apps out there but to experience the onboarding experience the what it what it wait and what it's like to download an app sign up and within 60 seconds have a smart contract to pull it on your behalf to be able to secure that smart contract well it's just a six digit PIN that you can recover from the spark contract to be able to have multiple devices you can connect into the into the smart concert actually passes your funds I'm gonna walk you through some of these features but I think it's really valuable if you're developing on aetherium to see what possible if you think through the user experience from smart contract wallet perspective and so our technology that we built and I don't to make this a sales pitch just want to give you kind of what's behind this is basically what we've built is this aetherium application layer on the sdk table you'd embed a smart contract wallets into any app and the key thing here is basically we're deploying a serious smart contracts for every single user inside the application and so that enables the user experience that that that people provides and so I wanted to kind of spell this notion that UX is designed you know thinks often people hear about user experience thinking here but you actually I think oh that's the graphic design team or that's the the pixels UX is not about design design it's a part of it but the reality is that UX is about problem solving it's about really understanding what does the user need what is their pain point and how do we build a right product for them similar myth is that UX is all about the interface that UX is all about like you know black people talk about UX they say it's just about the onboarding or just about how fast people to get through the app the reality is that UX is about that unique combination of the story the architecture and implementation and really if you think about how do you merge these worlds okay this is the user story that's what the user is trying to accomplish and this is the technology and how do we bend the technology or mold technology to get the experience that we want so the key to all of this is starting with the problem instead of with the solution and I think all too often in crypto we sometimes start with the you know crypto is a very elegant solution for decentralizing finance or for banking the unbanked and therefore we're going to build this but we that's not solving a problem that's kind of saying well do we have a solution in mind solving a problem is really thinking through all right there are these people and they had this pain point and we've identified it and so we're gonna build this to help them do something easier better faster cheaper more convenient and so this will give you a little perspective on this backing up four years ago and when we started this project the AHA that we had we had like well everyone is because is increasingly a content creator imagine this is sixteen right not even tick-tock doesn't exist yet we're looking out the world and saying everyone is a content creator and every single day we're contributing our content to the platforms and they get all of our content for free and they monetize their platforms we build these huge businesses you know Facebook Instagram snapchat Twitter etc and the problem is if you're an Instagram influencer how do you earn more than just likes if you're you know if you're you know a top influencer but you want to see when the Kardashians yes you can but how to you know how do any of us just you know we're giving away so much content every day how do we earn more than just likes and yeah-ha we had was well what if every like could actually transfer value what did you actually could inject the Internet of money into applications and have peer-to-peer value transfers with every like and doesn't be the like it could be the for five star review it could be the up foot whatever it might be what if what if that would be possible so imagine we're thinking about this in 2016 well we then went right to think about what would that user experience have to be and you know we're like well it can't be this if you can't read this in the back basically what this is you go to let's say like someone's Instagram photo and it says you know please you know write down twelve words let's set up your wallet before proceeding you know Instagram users are not going to write down twelve words all right we as early adopters of a theory of encrypt oh we will because we're willing to suffer through some pain to try to build something right but that's not what mainstream users are gonna do is we say are how do we solve the problem that the user doesn't have to go through this clumsy experience or you know let's say using an external wallet right or let's say oh yeah because like let's say you know to proceed let's say connect meta Master I don't know me pick on meta mess is a great product and great team but you know it's like users are not gonna say I'm gonna take a lesser experience that I know of today an Instagram just to earn a few cents before I even know what this is so you can't expect users like you know exit this happen go into another app in order to proceed but let's just imagine for a second that our users we're willing to do that and I successfully click the like button and magically let's say that we figured out a way to have money transferring from one user the other user well users are I'm gonna put they're not gonna put up with this where it's like okay well please you know open up some other app to confirm the transaction or sign the transaction but make sure you have some eath in your wallet in order to do so what's eath all right that's not gonna fly and you know obviously instagram users used to you know amazingly super fast responsive application they're not going to put up with you know please wait for the block confirmations in order for this to transaction to to be on you know to be approved and then especially this couldn't be possible it couldn't be the experience so basically you can't read this what it says is you know please spend two point eight two point nine cents to send your one cent to been alright and so you think about what if the aryan layer one gas costs right you know it can be more than this it can be someone less but this is a pretty typical right and so back in 2016 i hooked up with my good friend Ben who was really early early in etherium he was lead developer of hyper ledger perot he worked at mana ax made safe and was thinking about these problems for a long time before i was i was coming from the web to oh we're all thinking about user experience how do we enable you know instagram users to earn more than likes and I started talking to Ben about well how would we go about solving this and that's like that marriage of like what do you want the experience to be and what technology do you need to build in or make that happen and I just you know fell right down the rabbit hole as you know yes we think we as we all do when you think about okay the elegance of the possibilities of this technology and what could you know what could we what how might we solve this and think okay yeah so one person could have you know we let's say we had let's say the Internet of information that we have the internet people you're the Internet of money and with any transaction that can be transferring value a personal person without going through the platforms and everyone's controlling their own funds and like like wow how could make this happen so UX driven thinking is you then turn that into thinking like a solution and so what we thought through back in 2017 was what if we could deploy the app tokens let's say the Instagram tokens or in our case the people tokens and the app that we've built here what have you deploy the app tokens on layer two aetherium so it's faster and cheaper so that solves some of the problems in terms of speed in terms of cost but do so with a full EVM running on layer two so that gives us as Marc contract capabilities and then use the smart contract capabilities to do things such as enabling user-friendly recovery so as you know as you'll see in the people app you can recover a wallet with a six digit PIN and yet it's safe and secure because it's way it's designed through the smart contracts it's enabled something called session keys so session keys really awesome stuff basically for every user in the People app we deploy a multi-sig they have a private key on their device a user has supposed self custody their private key and the device interacts with the multi-sig to basically to access the funds in their token holder address and that multi-sig altar also also authorizes session keys and the session key is basically allowed to execute small transactions on the user's behalf so let's say within a one week period up to ten bucks every like that I do I don't need to sign the transaction and meta transactions are employees of users doesn't need to worry about gas all right and so that's how you kind of think through it so how do you how do you enable these experiences but also think about UX is also about how do you pull all the technology together so I just want to show you real quick the result of this I wasn't sure if I was gonna be able to do a live demo but I think I can let's see and the live demo I want to show you is less again about people being a really cool social app but more about how do you enable the Internet of money to be integrated into any application so this is pepo here at London you'll see there's people who creating videos that's me cool sim thank you so now the cool stuff when it comes to us you know technology geeks here is every time I tap the like button here think about it's like medium clap success I'm actually sending the other person money every one of these claps that I'm doing here or these likes is worth one cent and so if I go out to the blockchain here you'll see that I sent a few seconds ago 24p pose to that person and the cost of that transaction was point zero zero zero zero zero 1 1 cents on our layer to chain because it's not a competitive environment like people for work it's a collaborative environment on layer 2 and then the chains we've set up and so what you have is superfast transactions you have users having a full aetherium wallet inside the application so this is the smart contract so the token holder address or where my funds are held so I can set a multiple devices to access the funds I have a recovery address so you basically initiate recovery from the smart contract with a delayed recovery now again we don't expect anyone here to build this in a weekend right but we have an SDK for this and if you're interested after the hackathon if you want to build an app on this we're happy to help you do this to help you think it through but we're on the show this has an example of how do you Mary kind of design thinking and technology thinking into creating great user experiences so back to the presentation here this time I have a question I thought I saw someone okay all right so I can so basically we had to build all this and continue building it in order to enable an app like that and then we want to make this not just one app but making any app to be able to do it we can talk through some of the components later if you want to come by and find me but you know also is important we you know we deploy a most notices multi-sig for every single user and you know if you're doing that layer one I'd be super expensive and layer two it's a lot cheaper and you know we had to build a ABC a relayer and also ability to kind of have tokens on layer one etherium are with all value tokens that has a basically connection to layer two which are the utility tokens or the app tokens and then to be able to anchor this all back in layer one in order to make it actually fully on blockchain so a lot of hard problems to solve to make these user experience as possible so I'm gonna go past this that showed this on the live demo so as you think through how do you curate you know kind of you know great user experiences in crypto what I wanted to share is what we call the five UX essentials and kind of you know think about them as like you know kind of starters kind of guidelines to think about you know how do you marry the worlds of UX and technology towards building things that people actually need so the first principle I say is like you really need to have a use case you know don't just build technology for technology's sake think about why are you building what you're building and who you're building it for as I said before the framework that I like to use I call it yes but so and how and to give you kind of how this works it's like you kind of just write this down a sentence and you say you know yes there are these people let's say yes there's these developers who need something they need to be able to code something in a weekend that it normally takes them two weeks to do all right well there's this problem that stops them from doing it the technology is too hard for them to work with or this thing they can't they can't get their heads around so that's so they're stuck alright and a lot of what we do is we build things to help people who are stuck get unstuck and so we built this in order to help them get unstuck or help them solve what they problem they want to solve and here's how it works so you can apply this yes but so framework to pretty much any problem that you might build a product around so they go back to the example that I showed you with pipo it was like yes everyone is a creator but the large platforms are making all the money and with everyone being a creator it's harder and harder for creators to stand out get notice and to connect with people that share their passions and so we built pipo which is an authentic community driven social platform to solve this problem and how do we do it well we combine 30-second videos every like or any money tokens using to help the signal noise problems now you notice I didn't mention the word blockchain crypto aetherium once here because even though this is this is the how like it's part of this every like earns a token and tokens are used to kind of help solve the signal noise problem the fact that it's built on a theory and we're building crypto blockchain is unable or an abler of that right and it's not you know it's like you think it's the it's the ingredients then maybe these experiences possible but that's not what solves like the fact that we build on theorem doesn't solve the users problem to the user what solves users problem is that they want to get something done you know faster or better or more convenient or whatever the problem may be solving so how do you go about doing that so the key from our perspective is really understanding user motivations and I don't think about it as no the pain point all right you need to really understand what is the hot button that's gonna get users to switch to your product and the way I like to put it is that no matter what you're building your target user switching from something and it could be they're switching from not knowing to even have a problem or not knowing that or vada is switching from complacency or it could be switching from the web to world to the web 3 world but everyone switches from something they're they're doing something today that occupies their time and they need a little bit of their time to you or the thing about like say in the App Store there's a billion apps and most people use only 7 to 10 apps on their phone if you want to become one of those 7 to 10 likely something else drops out of some that someone's day all right and see the thing there had you had you occupied the space in someone's life that was occupied by something else before so if you're building a developer tool for instance there's lots of tools that developers can use these lots of things and they have to think ok I'm going to use this one I'm getting to it and stop using something else most likely because most people don't just keep layering layering layering adding tools at some point something falls out and so you think about let's say if you use github today you use something else before if you use JIRA today or an ocean use something else before there's always something that drops and something else is kind of adopted so the way to kind of figure this out and I know you don't have time to do this necessarily in a hackathon weekend although you have you know a couple hundred other hackers you can talk to and kind of is really to talk to people and talk to people means listen to them and find out what their needs are and try to find some that people actually need and this I really implore you to try to try to build something whether it's here this weekend or just in general when you go back home working on your products or your jobs trying to build stuff that people need and the way you know people need it is they tell you they need it it's not just our hunch or hypothesis that they need it it's actually hearing from them that they need it they have it that they have a pain point and it's a a real quick you know as someone who's been an old guys been working in building products as a product manager for you know 25 years now there was a time I think about 15 years ago where I think if you were just really smart you could build something without talking to users I felt like it was basically before the app store before you know billion apps and if anyone could build it you know build an app and you know a week that you basically just put up a website and if you were a first mover you could build something and find a niche I mean I had a company social medium that we had six million users within three months you couldn't can't do that anymore just doesn't happen anywhere there's too much competition but you know but now you have to punches alone or not enough today now you have to talk to users have to talk to who might be the customers your app before you build something if you want to go deep and kind of learn a little bit about this we we have basically these three principles for kind of how you talk to users how you do conduct user interviews and make the information usable we call them basically you build a foundation you have participation from everyone on your team and then you go through a prioritization exercise and just really quickly the foundation is basically understanding like the difference between discovery and kind of hypothesis experimenting or hypothesis testing and then turning that into something you actually is actionable so discovery is basically we're just talking to people in hearing what they say and then you then build hypotheses around that and put experiments in front of people and then you do hypotheses and test and have any kind of a framework to kind of go step by step to test this is super important participation is just you know a lot of people as I said at the beginning to think you accidentally more that's the product team at our company I implore you in your project as well everyone does interviews everyone listens participates and interviews we kind of say that understanding and hearing the needs of the customer is everyone's job and especially because you know what I've found in my career is that depending on your background and what your job function is everyone hears differently an engineer an engineer will hear the same conversation as a product manager as UX designer as a CFO as you know some business developer s'en they'll hear the same exact conversation differently and they'll all bring it very important input into it so having the whole team participate in user research is really really important and then ultimately obviously you got to turn them to prioritization which is in some ways one of the hardest parts because you gotta take this till all this information I'm learning that you have from doing user research and interviews and kind of Sara what are the themes and which are the ones that we think are actually actionable and turn that into a roadmap and one way we do that is we we tag things and so we use tools like dovetail for instance to tag things and then we kind of go into kind of diving into what are the most common themes that we heard so you wanna do it smarter yeah up to you there's no microphone no I know I know I know so empowerment does the solution expand the market further overall adoption and onboard new users as you guys know if some of you have seen this morning in the beginner workshop it is all about how do you get more people in to that application how do you essentially solve a problem for more people not just the people who are literally with you here now because this has been one of the issues for instance the we've seen at hackathons people develop either for themselves or to you know do a fun weekend project or show off to their peers let's start getting into this mindset of building for a problem to solve something for actual people and I think that's a big big takeaway that I'm hoping I'm gonna see throughout 2020 across all the hackathons across all of the UX Awards that we're gonna do at these global hackathons is how do we get all of these towards frictionless onboarding let's think about new ways rather than getting people to you know download web 3 wallet then move here then do this like Jason showed you earlier thank you we call you back in a second so you know one of the cool things actually yeah being in this space for several years is actually seeing how this is evolved with every every year and every heavy progressive hackathon and I think as someone was saying that 2020 is the year where we you know think about two years ago the experience was very very limited and very very dead focused and then you know especially in the last 12 months we've seen a big acceleration and things like onboarding experience and things like interactions things like smart contact wallets 20/20 be a big year if we're kind of we pulled this together and so when it comes to evaluating hackathon projects in 2020 you know there's certain expectations now that we're not gonna have users go through super clumsy onboarding experiences super clumsy interaction experiences that some of this stuff just is gonna get progressively better and better and better and then there's this notion of the bottom are surprising the light and I would say that you know one of the best things and I know this it seems very hard is from where as as developing projects is but one of the one of the best things that you use someone can tell us is wait this is really crypto and when you hear that that's a go Kade now what now we've gotten to them where they're not thinking about the crypto the thing about the actual application or the or what they're trying to get done and the crypto is that enabler that we talked about so the fourth is innovation I think this goes without saying that you know great UX also introduces technology that helps us leap past kind of the current state hope exponent presents a step function that kind of something that kind of accelerates it could be makes them accelerating some making something were convenient or easier let's say you take something that used to take a developer two weeks to do and you make it you know two lines of code and you had a you know an hour all right that's a huge innovation and that's a huge impact on user experience fifth and last responsibilities so especially in the crypt of community we think responsibility is a critical part of UX three things here I'll just go through it so one is so first of all does the solution you're developing and contribute to the common good and you might think well I'm not building a you know project for charity or I'm not building something that is you know let's say directly contribute the common good where it's you know for good causes but just building something put it out there into the world has a huge impact if you do it the right way and what I mean by that is if you basically show others how they can use it so you provide developer tools for other people to have an adopt your solution and hopefully open source as much of the technology as possible so that anyone can just take your technology build on it now open source is something we're just open sourcing something FYI does not mean people going to use it so creating some developer tools on top of it it's really helpful so then developers don't have to build it all from scratch so you know one of the things that I've heard progressively had various hackathons is we still have this problem of yes there's a protocol here thing here think your thing here but I have to cobble all that together my unique way what I need is some more like just stuff I can start with the foundation and then just build from there and that's really cool people can start building more and more things like that so as I said five UX essentials that you're thinking about your product thing but your hackathon thing about kind of you know the UX Awards you know make sure you have a use case make sure you show a keen understanding user needs think about how are you empowering users with new onboarding and other ways to make the experience better how are you introducing a new technology to innovate and make things more convenient easier and then how are you showing responsibility towards the common good in what you're developing so let's wrap up we have 80 of these hoodies limited edition we made some for each Denver a couple weeks ago and they went super fast the only way to get these hoodies is to earn 2,000 people in the people app when you earn your 2,000 people coins where's Paul Paul you go to Paul and you can Spacely by using the app you can buy you can buy the the you can buy the the hoodie with your people going so now you don't need to make a million videos in order to earn 2000 people coins this weekend we have six challenges that you go to the people table Paul and Kevin will show you the challenges very simple do you like a hello world video juice a video with you kind of a social so like so introducing you know someone for the first time you meet here there's one challenge specifically around 1 million dev so what's your idea for how to be on board more developers for aetherium you do three or four of the challenges you can buy a hoodie the hoodies are cool they have this little etherium insignia on them so they're a real collector's item awesome and then just remind you you x awards 4,000 die in prizes 2004 the best UX 1000 beach of the runner-ups at eat denver two weeks ago 27 of the 75 teams applied for the ux awards so we encourage you if you are submitting for you guys to the words submit early get a hold of our team there'll be a type form you'll need to fill out it's very simple we want to make sure you get time with our team so that our team knows to spend time with you you'll have seven minutes max to present your project to our team and then finally we encourage you to join the community