It's not you, it's crypto with Steph Bell

hey everyone that's loud it's pretty late on a Saturday I appreciate you all hanging around I've had a lot of caffeine so just a warning in advance um the title of this talk comes from my response to everybody outside of my work that brings up crypto generally they talk about it with me they're like it's over my head I don't understand it it's not for me I'm not smart enough and so every time I have to say it's not you it's crypto so we're gonna get into that a little bit uh building crypto is obviously complex there are brilliant people in this facility right now that have created incredible things but using it I don't think has to be for the most part maybe some things you know are four Advanced crypto native people but in general I think the real potential of the technology shouldn't be hard to use and so I feel like this talk could be for a newcomer who doesn't have a lot of knowledge about crypto I'm going to make you feel a little bit better maybe about the things that have confused you but if you're a builder hopefully you'll take some of these insights and perspectives and maybe integrate it into the work that you do obviously the original intention of crypto is to shift some traditional power structures um in order to be more frictionless but we've got to reduce the most obvious barriers uh that are prolific today and they are out there everywhere even at uniswap um and so I'm going to go through some examples um I'm not trying to shame any platforms or brands or anything like that it's just examples of how complex these things can be and how challenging they are if we are trying to bring um you know Mass adoption to the industry some background about me just in case you're like why does this lady have the authority to speak on any of this my career and my background has been in digital and financial inclusion some anecdotes from my past have been uh I taught the Amish community how to use iPads in order to do business transactions which was a very challenging task but they were able to shorten their supply chain fewer of their dairy products would spoil I've worked with senior citizens and brought a 94 four-year-old women to use Uber I've worked with a lot of underserved populations in order to help them adopt new technologies and bring them up to speed with modern day so like most people here I got the uh inspiration to learn about crypto but started with white papers and books right not the typical consumer path that people are going to take in order to learn about a new technology or some new economy um and quite frankly I had an absolute meltdown the first time I tried to Mint an nft um it was it felt very urgent because I had this opportunity and I probably created three or four wallets before I even understood what I was doing I had no idea um I think somebody was asking for my public address and I kept seeing the word public key and I didn't think they were the same thing when I realized I'm not dumb and that these things are just confusing I had a second meltdown and that meltdown was my concern that if people didn't start paying attention to these nuances and the Lexicon and the acronyms and the abbreviations uh that nobody's gonna realize the potential of this incredible technology so a phrase on that previous slide was Financial inclusion this is something I think a lot about at uniswap Labs it's when individuals and businesses have access to useful and affordable Financial products so if you think about traditional Authority um Central authorities like Banks they have the power to tell you if you can buy a house if you can get it alone and if you can't so one of the beautiful things about defy and or decentralized Finance is that nobody can tell you what you can use but if it's really hard it's still going to be a huge barrier to most people and most populations so that's where I wanna cut away and just show some examples of this throughout the decentralized landscape again no shame on these things uniswap does it we're all sort I'm personally guilty of doing it but it's just to prove a point and we'll get into the solutions that we can take in order to move through this um one of the biggest things is decentralized support uh doesn't it means it doesn't really exist right um pancake swap at one point last year just said we don't have support best of luck ethereum doesn't have an official support Channel these things are obvious I think to the builders on why there's a lot of Discord Bots that will say go read the documentation um and so Discord and Twitter they're being used as customer feedback tools support tools and that's not what they're designed to do and they're very bad at it um and the reasons why are there's a lot but to ask somebody and if you think of the consumer landscape to ask somebody to go download a piece of software create a login and then go navigate your entire uh Discord just to go get an answer to a question you're you're not going to do it it's not going to scale um there's a huge drop off and there's no data collected from the questions people are asking so you may have anecdotal evidence but certainly as your community grows and that Discord you know gets bigger and bigger there's not going to be a way that you're going to know what the real themes are of what your users are asking for what they need what the issues are and of course in public channels and forums like that everybody gets exposed so you're putting them at risk for being you know getting DMS for scams and things like that outdated info doesn't get archived so you might have somebody searching for a question and they could find something that's really outdated and think that's the source of Truth and move on with their day and that could really you know damage your Brand's reputation and then of course inconsistent expertise when you're relying on a community only there are some people that have deep expertise others may not so you get some inconsistent and there's not really a standardized way to provide information to people the other thing is that new words are being used to describe new Concepts which is profoundly confusing in my opinion these are all words we say all the time they're all over this room they're not in the dictionary so in order to get people excited about new products I think we should use some of the language they're using we love acronyms in crypto we love them what what is this even there's so many I don't even know some in here that I don't know um and I think we take these really complex technical terms and we forget that it's not consumer language um the one that kills me the most lately is the ens address when it's just a wallet name um I just I've seen so much confusion around this uh even seed phrase right I would assume that a lot of the reasons why people have you know compromised wallets over the years is because maybe they didn't understand the term seed phrase which is a technical term I understand why it makes sense internally to builders but we have consumer language like passphrase recovery phrase password um and then Fiat on-ramp is another one that I hear all the time and I ask my friends in finance even sometimes and they're not quite sure what that means which cracks me up um the other thing is that the initial user touch points all have are in postgraduate reading level and so I understand if we're going really deep and Technical with documentation you know like I said in the beginning crypto is really complex to build that's reasonable but the first sentences on our websites or on our help docs should not be postgraduate level and most of them are if you go through and you put them through um you know a editor like this you'll see that even like the intro sentence is going to be postgraduate level which I assume for people in this room probably great maybe some of you have doctorates but generally speaking it's not going to get people excited and like that initial spark that you want for them to pay attention and understanding what they're doing so now that I've gone through all that's wrong there can do and a lot of these are examples of things that we've implemented at uniswap labs and seen some really positive results um and maybe the first question is like why do we need to do any of this like all of that's fine we're all smart enough to figure this out but like I said in the beginning if our mission is to create a more Equitable economy and open these things up to more populations than we have to build user aligned products um these are a few of the buckets that we think about at uniswap um the first one's pretty obvious these are all really kind of obvious I don't feel like I'm bringing any profound knowledge to any of you but they're essentially web 2 optimizations that I think need to be integrated into web3 and that's a hot take I know a lot of people don't love to hear that but um you know doing some standard automating to make things easier educating I think avoiding these uh acronyms the crypto lexicon is really important creating accessible content certainly for the getting started documents we think about things in like a Middle School reading level again this doesn't have to be everything but I think the getting started the things for beginners the introductory sentences on your websites uh should really be brought down a few notches empowering people obviously with blockchain technology there's a lot of times there's a transaction that doesn't go the way people want and that's it right there's not a lot we can do but I think there's a way to handle that with newcomers that has to be kind of like delicate it's personal finance it could be really emotional but there's a lot of dead ends out there and so I think providing resources to help people in the future is really important and of course using those Data Insights that you get when you're not using Discord and Twitter to hear from your users you can use that to inform UI improvements and then when it comes to support I think private verified channels are super critical to keeping people safe and utilizing obviously very intentional communication strategy and this is another one that's kind of a hot take which is hiring customer experience expertise over crypto expertise um to me it's way more valuable to find people have experience and a ton of skills in dealing with customer situations escalations and things like that you can teach anybody crypto really but I think there's a special personality and skill set that comes with somebody who's in customer experience that is way more valuable than somebody who has a lot of crypto experience this is just a generic high level thing but we put a lot of this in place over the past year at uniswap labs and the incident rate was brought down significantly um and we see also that a lot of those issues were deflected by the increase in help center views and our documentation which hopefully it's not you know the most obvious thing but hopefully this tells us we're on the right track to helping bringing people in and making it a little bit more accessible and easy for newcomers um that's about it but thank you all for coming and check out the uniswap wallet at our booth and Josh the bucket hat gentleman in the back has some uniswap swag it's the last of it so go see him if you want to snag that [Music] thank you