My Summer of Bitcoin Experience

Hey everyone, I’m Autumn. I’m a high school senior and I am one of the UX designers for Padawan Wallet. I wanted to create a blog post talking about my first experience in working on an open source project and also share what my experience was being a part of the Summer of Bitcoin. If you don’t know what Summer of Bitcoin is you can check it out here: https://www.summerofbitcoin.org/

Coming into Summer of Bitcoin I had many goals, but my primary goal was to make Bitcoin more accessible to new users, and I knew education was the way to do this. In the past, I taught Math and English at Leap Tutoring Academy which was a learning center dedicated to teaching kids with learning disabilities. I absolutely loved teaching and so coupled with my love for UX design and bitcoin, the Padawan project jumped out at me.

Bitcoin is a very niche field and when learning and grappling with all of the various subject matters I knew that I wanted to help this community grow. I saw how it could help me and my life, as well as every single person in this world. Since bitcoin can be daunting, I wanted to make it my mission to join projects that help break that barrier between the bitcoin field and the regular joe, and this is why I picked Padawan Wallet. I believe that in order to spark people’s interest in bitcoin, they have to see how it can impact their lives first, and then maybe if they want to take the next step, they would see how bitcoin can change the world. So how do we do that? How do we make people who only know bitcoin as an asset that goes up and down, see a layer deeper? The short answer is to find a way to decrease the amount of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in these new users so that they can see that it’s an easy process and that anyone, from anywhere in the world can use. This is where Padawan Wallet comes into play. It’s a testnet wallet that allows users to become accustomed to sending and receiving transactions and learn about simple, important concepts that new users must know when it comes to security and privacy in bitcoin. The overall goal is to help people build their confidence and come to the realization that bitcoin isn’t this scary thing that can never be understood.

I haven’t had much experience in the UX design field just yet so this whole summer has been an intense learning process but I loved every moment of it. The only exposure I had before this was when I took a Certificate Course in UX design with Interaction Design Foundation. I went through the entire process of what a UX designer had to do in order to have a final deliverable. When I started with Padawan Wallet, it was my first time working with a team of designers which I hadn’t done before. I loved the collaboration aspect of it and since we were all working towards fixing the same problems we were able to come up with solutions that incorporated all of our ideas. This incentivised me to constantly communicate with the other designs. It pushed me to do more work on the project, and it opened up my eyes to design ideas I had never thought of before. The other two designers I worked with Himanshu and Precious were really talented and I got to learn a lot from their examples.

As time went on and we narrowed down our focus on what we wanted to incorporate into the app, and this is where I started to face some challenges. I wasn’t too familiar with how Figma worked and so when we started to design and create low-fidelity wireframes, I felt a little stuck. I knew that I wanted to continue to help this project and design and bring more to the table but since I wasn’t as adept at using Figma as the other designers were I was having trouble figuring out how I could help. So I reached out to my mentor Stephen from the Design Community as well as my fellow designers and asked them for some help. I got on a call with Steven and he was able to show me the ropes of how Figma worked and easy tips that can take your design from all rectangles and squares with the occasional circle, to making minor adjustments that created a screen that had a design. After that, I felt a lot more confident and more motivated to continue to play around with Figma. And I tell you once you get into it’s like you can’t stop cause it’s so much fun. You really can create anything. In addition to Stevens’s guidance, Himanshu sent me a bunch of helpful articles, courses, and videos that would help me become accustomed to the tool. From there I was able to help out a bit more. I took the user research that I worked on and tried to implement my solutions with visual designs.

If I learned anything from this experience, it’s that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed and unmotivated at times because there is always a way through it. Don’t be scared to reach out and ask for help. Just communicate with your team about what you need and where you are and it will make all the difference. Working on open-source projects can be tough at times because there isn’t a super structured way to do everything, and that’s the beauty of it. Just have fun creating and throwing absurd ideas out there and then you can modify them and change it. Throw out what doesn’t work and incorporate aspects that do work. It’s a constant revising process, but if you put in the work and collaborate, you will have a really great product in the end.

As for my experience with Summer of Bitcoin and the community; I was able to meet a bunch of people from all over the world and become friends with them. These were designers as well as developers. I keep in touch with them even though we are working on different projects and ideas in the space right now. I got to learn more about what their lives are like which was fascinating, all while learning about bitcoin. The space was always so helpful and encouraging. Everyone was fully invested in the topics we talked about and that pushed me to put my full effort into it. I made most of my connections through the seminars and the breakout rooms because that is when the real interaction happens with discussions and explanations. You had one person give their answer to their question and then from there everyone brought up another point of view or when we didn’t know the answer to the questions we all grappled with it together and came to a conclusion. I’m used to making connections in person and I always found it hard to maintain connections with people when it was online, but because we were all adding to the conversations and contributing, we were able to learn more about each other and what we were interested in.

Thanks to everyone who helped me this summer. Thanks to Summer of Bitcoin, Stephen, Adi, Padawan Wallet, Thunder Biscuit, Christoph, and all the friends who I met along the way through this program. I learned so much, and I want to continue to keep contributing to the space and learning more.