Jaguar. Tinybox. Strawberry. by Nicholas Salloum (CryptoKitties) (Devcon4)

[Music] good morning everybody thanks for coming out this morning first of all a special thank you to Def Con and all the organizers for having me here the hospitality so far has been great I'd also like to make a public statement here that it's great to see some minority groups strongly represented here I've noticed the increase in woman and non-white guys here at Def Con which is very positive and I think diversity is a is an important thing for us to progress so keep it up and let's go together strong in this one so crypto kitties launched the alpha just over a year ago and it was really wild we had tons of fun doing it and for many people it was actually the first time that they ever interacted with the blockchain in general and for us we felt that we were onto something new a lot has happened since then you know we've had we've had many lessons that we learned and I'm here today to talk to you about some of them our community and our ecosystem has also grown significantly we've had third party apps like kitty hats come and expose his idea of extensibility of non-functional tokens we've had crypto girls who came along and did this whole physical representation of NFC's which was pretty cool we've had tons of fine arts we've even had people who have gone out and gotten Kitty tattoos which was crazy and our team has also grown since then so I want to give a special shout outs our team over there we hail from 20 different countries eight 18 plus different countries 20 different a plus different languages and over 60 employees so big shout out to the team all ranging from a variety of different backgrounds different experiences and whatnot so like I said I'm here today to talk to you about user experience and blockchain and instead of rattling off a bunch of bullet points I'm gonna have a little bit of a philosophical discussion I'm gonna break this down into three overarching lessons and these lessons are going to be very kind of human-to-human relatable because I believe that if we can think and build our products for humans then they're gonna be much stronger so lesson one is titled talk and I'll begin this lesson by telling you a little bit about myself so my name is Nick I'm one of the founding members of crypto kitties and I'm the lead front-end engineer over the kitty then I was born and raised in the Caribbean on a small island called Trinidad and I spent 19 warm years in the tropics I had a very strong interest in arts and sciences and at the age of 19 I left Trinidad and I went to Montreal to study mechanical engineering when I came back to Trinidad I decided to go to the other side of my brain and start a fashion brown so I was designing apparel producing it selling it and through apparel design I decided to learn how to do web development cuz I wanted to sell my clothes online eventually I got a job as a web developer at an advertising agency on a year and a half later I quit that job and I went traveling around the world during that time I built up a technical blog that had I think about half a million readers per month in in its peak and that was a time for me to really discover what did I want in this industry I came back to Trinidad at some points and then once the Bay Area for a few months and in November of 2019 I joined axioms and as a front-end engineer initially I'd worked out of the Chilean office and then I work in sure enough for six months as well and in January 2017 I move of I moved to Vancouver and I sacrifice all the Sun and warmth for a little bit of snow and cold but it was a really good choice for me because several months later we were scheming crypto kitties and in December of last year we launched we released the cats into the wild so why am I telling you this what relevance is my life story have to use your experience well the way I think is that now that you know a little bit about me we've established a little bit of a human connection and the more that you get to know me anymore that I get to know you the easier it's going to be for us a bill or a relationship so I'll tell you a little bit about crypto kitties yes it was an app yes it was a product that we developed yes we just put cats on the blockchain but for us you know we did a lot more we gave these cats names we gave them a story and people felt really strong connection so Katie said they owned because they had a story and the interesting thing in this space so we use a lot of technical words like interoperability and extensibility and whatnot but outside of this room outside of DEFCON nobody understands that but by crafting narratives and crafting stories for the cats of the ecosystem we bring meaning on we bring the life and we establish this really good human connection so lesson one concludes with give whatever you're building a personality give it a voice let it tell stories because storytelling is important for establishing a human connection on a human connection it's really important for building a long term relationship lesson two will be about listening you know we are we just went over talking how do you talk to establish a connection but you have to return a favor you have to listen to the people that you talk to so in the summer of 2017 cryptokeys which released her masses I'm just going to get a little water excuse me sorry can I get a sip thank you apologies sir in December of 2017 cryptokeys was launched to the masses and by December of twenty by December 8th three days later we were literally on fire I had been working for about six weeks straight with my team pulling like 16-hour days you know we were pretty exhausted by then and I remember it was a Saturday or she's trying to have a normal day I was out buying little groceries getting a little bottle of wine you know I wanted to relax and then I got a few text messages from some of my co-workers saying that Genesis which was cat number one of crypto kitties I just sold for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and I knew at that point that any sign of a relaxation was like officially out the window and it showed you know I mean in that first month we had one point six million in web traffic we had over 200 thousand wallets created and we had 52 thousand new kitty owners you know I mean things really skyrocketed it was high time for us and for crypto kitties and you know we had to deal with that I mean at that point it was immediately exposed that you know the network couldn't handle the traffic different gas knows were just completely failing because of man pools getting clogged our API which was listening to events on Sabbath nodes was just not picking up the events anymore our front end was just not showing the correct data as a result of that and it was a nightmare you know users were so new to this thing that they were just burning money on gas they had no idea what they were doing at that point I think in the first two or three months or so users had spent over two million dollars in gas some people were spending up to ten times more in gas without even realizing it like 10 times more than they should have I'm tons of it was wasted on failed transactions you know this is such a new environment for users they just didn't know and we were kind of freaking out you know we're dealing with people's money we're dealing with completely new technology here what do we do so we have three options number one is just have him burn gas you know let it be but that was a big note from our part because we are we were dealing with people's money and we have to protect people a lot better when when it's when things are new and especially when we're dealing with money option number two was to go for like a more preventative measure entirely we try to control the you are a little bit and prevent users from conducting transactions that we knew or that we assumed it might be guaranteed to fail but this also backfired because you know because of these multiple layers of our information travel from the blockchain all the way up to your applications info just gets lost along the way and especially when guest instances fail over and then API goes down she's a heavy traffic and the front end is just assuming the wrong information so we were we ended up in a situation where we were literally blocking people from you know buying and breathing their cats and that was also that that was also a bad thing so option three can assist somewhere in the middle or not really in the middle but it's more like let's let's take the lessons of option one and two and apply it and let's give some user education and guidance here you know let's let's let's teach users like what is it that they're into in this new space and during the alpha of cryptokeys we made we made a couple wrong assumptions you know we thought that our users would just kind of get it yeah we were testing whether they would like the pictures of the cats and whether they would get down with this ol cat breeding thing and and they did but we we did make a couple of sumption they would kind of get the whole blockchain thing and we were wrong they were actually confused you know there was a lot of newness and a lot of unfamiliarity around that technology but as soon as we give people a little bit of guidance they felt a lot more comfortable they started to fall in love the messages that we were getting through our various social channels at that point were hilarious you know people were just fascinated by the sole ownership of NFC's on the blockchain you know oh I own this it's got this piece of digital arts you know and that user guidance really paid off big time for us we took that as a lesson to introduce more and more guidance throughout the app during it throughout the web app during its lifecycle development lifecycle we started to talk about gas and we had these birthing fees for cats as well we continuously educated people about that you know we got them educated through the onboarding and that's everything and people started to have this growing familiarity with the ecosystem and one of the most important things for us that was missing early on was what was happening after I interact what was happening after I transact in a normal typical like client-server application you know you you do something and you immediately have feedback you know if you buying some kind of eBook on online you know you immediately get this email with your PDF of your book if you are buying something on Amazon you know you get this shipping receipt and you you you have this comfort that it's a that it's gonna be in the mail in a couple days or so but with blockchain and with with buying and FTS on the web you are you go out there you do this transaction you send it off to the mysterious blockchain and then like that's it you know the everyday use is just oh what the hell just happened you know so we started to introduce this thing about what happens after I transact you know we started to give them this Activity Feed where they say listen you have attempted to do something you can go track it on scan and you can see the progress of it and I'll give a little bit of tangibility to the whole purchase thing for users and they felt a lot more comfortable we follow that up with giving them emails about when the transactions were successful and that gave them a second degree of comfort so I'll conclude lesson 2 by saying users need guidance when they're in unknown territory they need lots of guidance and education when they uncomfortable this is concepts that I like to refer to as the failure path and in engineering and design the failure path is a is a path that the user takes where they make continuously wrong steps it could be things like entering an invalid email followed by entering a weak password following by clicking the wrong button you know it if you if your users continuously take wrong steps your UI and like the user experience could become pretty daunting and terrifying very quickly and if we can guide users through that failure path you know if we could make each step of the way Pleasant for them and educate them as to why they ended up in this situation as opposed to presenting them with random error messages that bear no meaning then they would feel a lot more comfortable they were started gain familiarity with the surroundings so lesson 3 is about connecting I talk to you and then I listen to you our relationship is becoming established how do we build a deeper connection on how do we grow that connection and strengthen it so in an ideal world you know we tell our story through our products we gain the users interest and we guide them through the early stages you know we get them through some simple onboarding flows and then off they go you know through onboarding and guidance they're able to start interacting with the most important parts of your apps immediately they are able to start engaging and I'm having fun and getting integrated into whatever it is you're building but in blockchain it's not straightforward at all it's it is really a hazy maze before they can actually start engaging with anything after we get visitors and after we get them to do whatever signup flow exists at all we have to introduce them to wallets because in blockchain you can't do anything with all the wallets you know you have to have a wallet to store your NF TS or to store whatever token it is your apisa is is running and in order to engage with with any token at all you need cryptocurrency so this new user who was just immediate was first of all just interested in cats now they are learning about wallets and Krypton cryptocurrency so we get them to sign up for our app a wallet and coinbase to buy some bison crypto you know they finally get through to that they managed to get some ether you know maybe it takes them a couple of days because you have to validate that credit card and then you know they have to UM pile the ether itself and then after they buy it they are like okay what's this I have to wait you know I have just given money and I have to wait to get something in return and that's that's very unusual for people and at this point you know that they are wrapping the hair around this thing and and they already kind of lost the plots they are wondering well which one is the wallets and which one is a app I don't really remember you know and then finally after that maybe like three or four days later they can they can interact you know they can they can get involved they can play the game and that's just that is so unusual for you so it feels like we've we've literally gone backwards you know at cryptic it is for us we've we've spent days onboarding people through conversations and messages you know and say hey well this is what this thing does and this is what this thing does you know and it's shocking that that people stick it through you know I mean it's good news that people stick it through it's a positive sign it's a reassurance for us that uh that it could catch on but but look at the step say you know and at every one of these steps there are huge drop-offs and at some steps you can't even control the drop-off right because a third party applications this is it's totally out of your control at this point it's starting to become like cognitive overload you know in lesson two we spoke about guidance but now there's too much guidance there's too much education you know people came to this app because really they just wanted to buy some cute cats and now they have a PhD and cryptocurrency on wallets unlike blockchain you know and they didn't want that like the majority of users just don't want that on the numbers show the current state of the ecosystem reflects that a year ago we had 52,000 new kitty owners within the first month but today the DEA use of the top 100 apps combined are less than 10,000 on the number of cryptokey these players are a small portion of that but you know we're in this together you know we're a tight community here and I believe that together we can address these problems but the big question is obviously how so has anybody app use a gameboy oh very nice so my experience with Game Boy in the 90s growing up was I got it I put a game inside I switched it on and I started to play and it was a very kind of a natural feeling you know I I didn't have to go and read the Gameboy manual I probably threw it out I didn't have to go and read the game manual either I threw that out as well the technology which was a gameboy if we want to map the Gameboy itself to the blockchain and the and the game itself to say like crypto kitties for example both of these were very self-guided pieces of technology and the relationship felt very natural and I actually went down the rabbit hole before this presentation of looking at Gameboy commercials from the 90s and there are some really really weird ones that I encourage every to check out but one thing that was a prominent theme was uh was the messaging game boy didn't try to sell me on what their cpu specs were or what the LCD screen specs were their messaging across the majority their ads was simple was it you can have all the power of Nintendo right in the palm of your hands and that was enough that was all I needed as a user I didn't care about the hard way I just wanted to play and with the games it was the same as well you know with with Zelda the messaging and one of these super weird commercials was you travel through many worlds with endless characters and their eternal adventures and it's it's lovely it's simple you know you you put that game in and you you get you start playing and you are guided through by the game itself you know you you're not banking on this insane intense onboarding experiences the blockchain is different right blockchain is new blockchain is there's no familiarity in this space at all but it is our job to build that familiarity and to take these underlying concepts and to abstract them entirely you know because the day-to-day user they don't care about the things that we care about as developers they don't care about securing their private keys they don't care about gas they don't care about like different clients for different wallets you know they they want this feeling of familiarity they want this feeling of comfort and we need to start thinking like them and talking to them like humans we need to speak their language through our products and we're not doing that right now you know stuff to do that right now because there is so much cognitive overhead so lesson 3 is really about make making friends easy and what I mean by that is make growing the connection that I use a house with your product easy make strengthening that relationship easier what we've seen that cryptic ities is that block chain and non functional tokens and crypto assets and digital art are a great way for users the self express to create and to collaborate and to grow this technology together and we need to we need to provide that you know if we want to appeal to the masses if we want to grow the market together we need to we need to start giving these delightful experiences for users we need to start making all of those abstractions for people and we need to start getting them together and letting them engage with each other you know and experience joy through the apps that we build and that's that needs to be our mission like the UX is everybody's problem it is not just for the designer it is not just for the product manager or the UX expert it is all of our problems when you start thinking like that so but cryptokeys you know we have this bold statements like let's bring the next billion users to the blockchain and it's wildly ambitious you know so my call here for you today is the let's do something a bit more realistic for now let's take those metrics on 10x them you know let's get our users from 10,000 to 100,000 by next year let's let's take these steps together let's build the tools that's Billy ecosystem that we need let's let's think about our users you know think about the people outside of this conference that's what's going to drive the technology forward and DAPA labs which is the parent company of crypto kiddies that is what we're doing we are building the ecosystem for the next wave of users so I encourage you to check out dapper what is that XYZ for some more information about what we're doing and the tools that we're building and ecosystem that we're creating to create these abstractions for people and so on make onboarding to the blockchain much better thank you very much everybody I do have four minutes and 45 seconds for questions if anybody has any a little bit of shyness okay toys like physical toys so so the the design direction of cryptokey this is something that we are very dead like we hold on to very strongly we've explored some physical toys some digital goods as well you know but we need to get it rights because our artists and our creative team has they spent lots of time perfecting and maintaining this our standard for the art of the cats so we're experimenting we're looking at to see what's out there but but it needs to be done right here oh that that's like a totally different products altogether though sorry yeah thank you or what sorry hi you said you had a fall in daily active users from December to now yes but you didn't really talk about what you might do to activate all the people who are non active users can you speak about that for a minute yeah definitely so so this early success of cryptic IDs has been largely about community engagements you know we had this product in the hands of the community as quickly as possible and we've been iterating based on their feedback and I think that's important for any products that you're building and for reactivation of users it's been about like keeping engaged with them as much as possible without being annoying obviously but it's tough right they're like I like I said on I showed on one of my slides there are so many so many hurdles that you have to get users to overcome and really it's about guiding them you have to pin points where did they drop off on why you know and see what can you do at that point to react to reengage them from a from a human to human perspective if if you lost interest in something and I was trying to regain your interest and I told you about 10 other different things you would you'd lose interest even more right but if you can pinpoint like where they lost interest and why usually it's just because they had a bad experience you know they they they got lost and with a little bit of guidance through that one particular step it could be super helpful so now ring down they're like the information that you give to users to reactivate them is something that's super helpful and also understanding why why it happened in the first place you know I feel very strongly about the human to human connection as you can see I think it's it's super important that especially now that there's like a ton of different pieces of software and apps out there in the world you know they're in the millions by now the ones that the ones that really engage with people in a and they make you feel like less human less human beings behind this you know and I think they have my back that's where you're gonna start to see a success yeah yeah thank you we can talk after yes you only use the mic so everybody can hear I'm sorry thanks very much and real congrats on being the first proper interactive user experience in this space what do you think about all the me twos that have come along since do you find a day is it kind of they honoring you or are you just happy to see what other people are doing with this or what are your thoughts in sorry all the me to sort of crypto Kitty like products that competition is very important and healthy if there was only one of our kinds in any space and it would just mean that that space is unsuccessful right so I would I encourage everybody to go out there and push the boundaries and see what's possible and um you know add more competition and do different things cryptokeys was an experiment for us right it we're still in the we're still in this zero of blockchain development and of that development and everybody should be going out there and being experimental as well so I encourage people to I encourage the copycats I love to see it and we've made friends with them as well you know so it's a good thing hi you have the ambition of oh yes or you stated the ambition of a hundred thousand deaf users in q3 scaling is still an issue are you looking at plasma or other layer 2 solutions for crypto kitties so for crypto keys specifically they way that we feel right now is that because it was an experiment because it's our Gen Z row projects at data labs we will we will leave it there as is future experiences or games or applications that we build we will consider like other you know as you said like plasma or sidechains or whatever yeah so that's for future but for crypto kiddies it will stay on there it'll stay on the main network for its life that looks like it or anybody else yeah okay thank you for this interesting presentation I'm a UX designer I'm really curious what would be your piece of advice for you Xers for UX in general yes and for the process that we follow and how you all would like us to collaborate with developers any any advice I can bring back to my team yeah so I'll give you some insights into the way that we work I'll talk about two different things one is how we work as a team internally so we have this concept called three in the box and three in the boxes where if you're trying to solve a specific problem you get different black people from different disciplines in the same room together um black people from the different disciplines so if we're trying to solve any problem is let's get a designer let's get an engineer let's get a product person in a room together to discuss because everybody's going to have everybody's gonna say something that's going to impact the other person's way of thinking if I as an engineer I'm like listen this is not possible but this is it can trigger some thought process in like a designer's of mine to be like oh that's cool like maybe I will design for that instead and the same goes vice-versa if the designer could encourage me to think a certain way then it will help me to develop better and I mean I have a very very high respect for UI on UX people I there are some of my favorite people to work with just because of the way that they think and they inform a lot of decisions I make during my engineering process but that's that's internally there's only so many decisions that you can make internally but as soon as you put it out there users are just going to do something totally unexpected so user testing as quickly as possible is extremely important especially in this industry where things are so new there is no written standard you know there's no article that there's no like famous ten usability heuristics design of design article you know for a blockchain like it doesn't exist we have to write those articles and the only way we're gonna write those articles is by doing the research ourself and we need to just whatever it is were testing if it's a feature or full-fledged product get it into the hands of users as early as possible and observe them observe their actions take notes and ask them tons of questions yeah that's it oh sorry one more that's it all right time is up but we'll meet outside cool thank you everybody