Wallet UX Teardown How wallets must evolve for mass adoption | ETHDenver 2023

is 10:20. It's This talk was supposed to be at 10:20. It's happening now. I am Tamara Adlin. This is the wallet UX teardown, how wallets need to change if the goal is mass adoption.

A little bit about me, I have been in tech since 1994, which makes me really much, much older than I look. Um and I was an early person at Amazon, not early enough so that I don't have to work anymore, which is too bad, but another story. And then I wrote a couple books on a technique called personas, and I started my own consulting business in 2005. And since then I have worked with more early stage and growth stage startups than I can count. And currently today I'm an advisor to the fund and portfolio for Blockchain Ventures, some of who are whom are here today.

I want to start with a beginner's guide to non-crypto head humans. Some of you haven't seen non-crypto head humans in quite a while. This diagram is always true. Technology happens a lot faster than humans tend to develop. All of you in this room are much closer to this line than you are to this line, and it makes it very hard for you to remember what it's like not to know the things that you know.

Because this line is so solid and down here, people like me, who have been in tech for really long time, can help people like you who are trying to introduce new technologies to people because introducing new tech to people is not new. Your tech is really new, but so has every So has every new tech that's been before you, like web 2 and web 1. Also, I think this one speaks for itself. In uh decentralized finance, we all think it's a huge problem for finance to be centralized. Mass adoption, most people do not walk around thinking that they have to get rid of their bank or their Visa card.

I'm going to start by telling you what to expect out of this talk, which you can also do when you're designing your user interfaces. You can tell people what to expect as they walk through the user interface. And we're going to go through this fast cuz we only have 20 minutes. Never say user, and we'll have examples of all of this in the talk. Create a glossary, which seems really stupid and dumb, but almost nobody does that when they're designing Web3 UIs.

Use your words, and stop thinking that simple equals very sparse user interfaces, because that's not true. Keeping it almost blank does not make it simple to use. Fix your empty state. How many wallet How many people are working on an app that or or a wallet of any kind? Uh Okay.

How many of you have a wallet of any kind? All right. How many of you have over 20 wallets of any kind? How many of you will have hundreds of wallets over the next 2 years? Whether you raise your hand or not, I don't care.

You're all at this conference. You're all going to have hundreds of wallets that you've created over the next couple of years. It's a given. The empty state of those wallets is really interesting. Design the happy path, which all of us do.

When you're creating new technology, you tend to design the path that's really easy for people to use. What you don't do is design the unhappy path. So, when you're doing the design of your dapp, your wallet, your anything, you also have to design what happens when something goes wrong. And that's especially the case when you obfuscate or abstractify a wallet. If the wallet still exists and something goes wrong, then it becomes a problem that the user doesn't know that they have that wallet, not a benefit.

Hunt mercilessly for edge cases, hire Web2 UX pros. Yes, this is a little self-serving. And test with real people early and often. So, let's look at some familiar wallets, and I'm picking on a few wallets that was so thanks and and to Near, to Phantom, to Rainbow Wallet, Exodus, and a couple of others, but it really doesn't matter which wallets I chose here because they're all so similar. Here's the way to ask some familiar questions.

Before we do, we have to ask we have to consider who are we developing this, let's just say wallet for. And if we're talking about mass adoption, mass adoption means people who have not even dipped their toes into crypto yet. That's the masses. We It's easy for us to forget that when there's 25,000 people at ETH Denver, but 25,000 is actually a real number compared to the masses. So, here's an example of someone who's in the masses.

This is Nora, Nora Newbie. She wants to maybe try the crypto stuff. Maybe her boyfriend's nephew said something about crypto stuff and now she wants to try it. She has read all of the headlines out there about people being hacked or throwing away their hard wallets or no longer It doesn't matter how secure we feel our technology is. Even if someone stole the car because you left your keys on the table, which is the way a lot of wallets get hacked essentially, if someone hears about the car being stolen, they think the car's not secure.

So, it doesn't matter how secure a blockchain is if the perception is that it isn't. She wants to learn by doing. She wants to experiment with small amounts of money. There's probably a particular thing that has drawn her to crypto and she doesn't want to feel dumber than she already feels. Fair enough description of the masses, right?

So, now let's look at some really basic wall wallet UI stuff through the eyes of Nora so that I can give you some suggestions for how you can use some really simple user-centered design techniques to make your designs better. First question, and I think we ignore this as part of the wallet user experience, KYC and AML. Are you the very first experience that Nora has with KYC and AML? You don't even think about this because this isn't you, this is some partnership that you have with your wallet to do this for you. What has Nora been told her entire adult life?

Do not share any of this information online. Do not share your passport, do not share anything with your actual address on it and any financial information. And yet, the very first thing we ask the masses to do is to do exactly what they've been told not to do their entire lives and we don't tell them why. And not only that, but they have to do it every damn time they interact with a new wallet. So, Nora's perception is in order to get into this really secure non-hackable thing, I have to share everything that makes me personal personally hackable multiple times on the internet.

Once you get past KYC and AML, what does your empty state look like? Those people who know me in the audience know that I'm particularly spicy about empty states. Here's the near empty state. I I don't think near is bad. This is just an example that I'll show you another example in a second.

Empty states are like riddles. There is one and only one button that will work on an empty state for most people. Do you know what that button is? In this case, that button is top up. That doesn't make any sense to Nora because top up is to get funds into this wallet.

If this is her first wallet, she can't really receive from any of her other wallets because she doesn't have them. Same thing here is happening here. This is the empty state I believe of Phantom. You can't see it at all because your experience is flooded by these lights. But anyway, you know what an empty wallet looks like.

It looks like lots and lots of screens and lots and lots of buttons. Take a close look at the empty state of your wallet if you have one. Is there one and only one button that will work? If there is one and only one button, then why are you presenting this vast riddle to people who are in the mainstream? Are you making it simple by making it blank?

Here's what happens with new technologies. Those of us who are fluent in new technologies, we get really excited about the fact that we're fluent and we're really proud of ourselves. So, if we know what this means, we're like awesome. This is a cool UI. It's really simple.

Meanwhile, it's completely incomprehensible to an ordinary person, right? Makes absolutely no sense. So, Rainbow, one of the easier to use wallets. And one one thing this is tells you is if you do have only one or two things that you can do in your app, dapp, whatever wallet, take advantage of the fact that there's only one or two things that can be done and design a path that enables people to just do those things. So, yes, Nora is being asked to put some money into this wallet.

Relatively small amounts and there's words like Apple Pay on there, which are familiar and which are reassuring. If Nora, here's another trick for you, have someone who is in your user base read your UI out loud. If you don't want to dive into user testing fully, you can even do this with your own team, but or grab somebody off the damn street and have them read it out loud. So, here's an example. Create your account.

NEAR Wallet is a secure wallet and account manager for your accounts on the NEAR blockchain. Once you create an account, it's a festival of accounts, right? And NEAR is cool because it does allow you to make accounts and manage accounts and all but it is mind-boggling to read this sentence if you're an ordinary human being. Instead, very easy thing you can do, no matter what you're working on, stop, create a glossary for the thing that you're working on. So, in the case of NEAR, the word account would have to have several different definitions, right?

And add text that makes me feel less stupid and less likely to screw something up. I just added this text in red, transfer assets to your NEAR wallet using your public address. Use this QR code or copy and share oops, account ID. This is a public address, but for some reason NEAR is rebranding it an account ID. Why are they doing that?

I don't know, for some reason they think that's a better word. But if you're having people looking for public addresses, call it a public address. So that people know what they're looking for. Have you look closely at the entire experience. Again, we talked about KYC and AML.

This is the adding money to your wallet flow. In this case, it's using MoonPay. So buy with MoonPay, transfer from FTX. This is a slightly old screenshot. I don't think that would show up anymore.

But buy with MoonPay. And what happens when you click buy with MoonPay is you get a completely different UI sitting right next to the UI you just came from. By the way, that tends to look scammy. And plus, the only label on the MoonPay thing is a tiny little thing that says MoonPay. So now you come from something that you've just gotten used to, white on black, which of course everything is for some reason Web3 is all white on black.

I don't know why. And then you go to uh-oh, very scary, black on white. It's not labeled and you don't understand why you're there. Then, if you do get through this MoonPay thing, remember you came from creating a Phantom wallet, you're putting money in it using MoonPay. Here's the read before you proceed, and I call this slide, are any parts of it terrifying and super confusing?

This warning said, "Don't do this if you are being guided by a third-party and have been given a wallet address to enter." That's exactly what you just did. The third-party is Phantom. You have been given a wallet address to enter, and it's like warning, warning, danger, danger. And it says, "You did not set up and generate your wallet address yourself.

Of course you didn't set up your wallet address yourself. You didn't type in all those numbers and letters. You just got it from Phantom and now MoonPay is warning you that you are in significant danger. And are you creating dead ends? Big rule from the Amazon days, never create dead ends.

This is an example of trying to use UTR to get money into whatever wallet I was playing with here. I think it was Near. So you go through these steps and then you get the sad trombone moment. And the sad trombone moment is, guess what? You can't do this if you're in the United States of America.

Figuring out whether someone is in the United States of America is not that hard. There's some really old tech that is used like in e-commerce. Hey, are you in the United States of America or are you in some other country? We We can see that immediately and tell you whether or not this option is available to you without having you go through the entire process and then get the sad sad trombone at the end. Or just ask your location, your state, in the beginning of the UI rather at the very end.

Simple things. Are you helping Nora avoid errors? Thanks to Cam who reminded me of this $2 million Kevin Rose hack where he signed this and oops, somebody got access to all of his NFTs and he was screwed. We may be really proud of the fact that we know what these kinds of things mean, although nobody knows exactly what these numbers and letters include just glancing at it. But there are ways to help keep these things from happening.

So when this was tweeted out, Fire showed an example of what this would look like if you just added some pictures and just show what's included in this in if you sign this. And you can do that, too. So, instead, what you want to do is you want to provide the right information at the right time. This is um Exodus wallet. Right here before you even put money into it, don't have don't lose your wealth, back up your wallet.

But this isn't the only time they tell me to back up my wallet. The next time I see the word backup, whether or not I click that, the backup has already been done for me. So, they say back up my wallet, I don't click it right then, I go through a few steps, and guess what? Backup has already happened, which is awesome. And now I have to uh I could reset my password, or I can view my recovery phase.

If I do view my recovery phase, help Nora help herself. There's a little quiz here, which is which is the fourth word of your recovery phase or something like that. Super easy for us to develop interfaces like this that help Nora not screw herself over. This is a quote from um and thanks to Rob for being at uh the StarkWare Sessions in Tel Aviv, Bravo CEO Moti Levi, and this is a techy tech techersons guy, right? Security should not be solely measured by its resilience to attack, but also on the ease of adoption and level protection against user errors.

Protection against user errors, there are some easy lessons to learn, easy user-centered design techniques that you can use that are all out there and waiting for you guys to just grab them. They're in articles, they're in blogs, they're in old stuff from Web 2.0. We've only scratched the surface of digital wallet functionality. I mean, I've This is the most basic of basic, basically the empty screens of wallets, right?

We could talk about wallet UI all day. Wallets are going to get a lot crazier, right? And a lot more simple. In some cases, people are abstractifying them. Cool, that's all good until it's not good.

If there's a problem, that can be a real problem because the user doesn't even know they have a wallet. But in in the cases of all of us, our wallets are going to get more complex. Right now, they don't even include all of this stuff, and they will, right? And even including elements of digital ID, even elements that allow you to unlock your office door, or show that you have health insurance, all of those things are going to take permissioning from massive data sets on an individual level. Permissioning is really hard to do from a user experience perspective.

So, they're going to get even tougher, which is why we have to make them simpler now. They're still wallets. Everybody is going to have hundreds of wallets whether they know it or not. So, it's not just one. And there's concepts across wallets and having multiple wallets and multiple chains and cross-chain communication and wallet-to-wallet communication and incompatible chains and I don't understand all this stuff.

The fact that I don't understand it is okay because people like me with training in UX can help you make it make sense to regular people cuz if you can make it make sense to us, we can help you translate it into a UI that will make sense to other ordinary non-techy people. So, that's another point I'm going to make in a a second. And this is a little quote that I like, "There will be no help desk for DeFi." Um you can even see it in the language. The language here is passive voice.

"When crypto is purchased, a refund is not possible even if the coins are sent to the wrong ad- There's no help here. We're just like, "See ya. Wouldn't want to be ya." We are the fanciest new technology on the earth, and guess what we tell you to do to keep yourself safe? Buy two notebooks and a piece of tin, scratch your passphrases into a piece of tin, and store them where they won't catch on fire.

That sure does sound super high-tech. And the ironies in this stuff are crazy. And there's no one to talk to. All right, so back to Remember I told you what to expect, which is a good thing for you to do in your UIs, too. Here's what's going to happen as you go through these UIs.

Never say user. Create a profile of your user instead. I created Nora, who is the masses. Don't stop with words like institution or developer or transactor or whatever. Actually create these profiles.

And if you want to do that in an easy way, just create lists of statements that start with the words I want, I need. This will keep you in the heads of your users. My philosophy is if we decentralize from institutions, we have to centralize around users because the user, individual, is going to be in control of all this complexity that used to be partially handled by institutions. That means we have to make it easier and easier for an individual to handle massive amounts of complexity. The good news is there's some shortcuts that are out there.

My strong request to all of you tech people, you glorious tech people out there, is just reinvent one thing at a time. If you're going to reinvent how value is stored and exchanged, that's great. You don't have to reinvent how software is created to make sense to people. You don't have to reinvent user-centered design. There's some easy easy ways that you can integrate old lessons into new technology.

And that's my message for you. Um if you have your own app or project or dapp or wallet you want me to take a quick look and give you some feedback, I'm more than happy to do that. Come find me. And we have 38 seconds left and I don't know what else to say. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I got that boom. I got that I got that