Help OpenUX provide open source UX insights for the whole web3 ecosystem

🌐 How we at OpenUX plan to change the game for builders and users, and how donations to our Gitcoin grant application support us on this mission.

I’m happy to announce our Gitcoin Grant 18 application. We’re seeking donations to fund several organizational workstreams that we believe will elevate the quality of web3 user experiences, and support teams and builders across the whole ecosystem. One of these is an open insights repository, making UX research a public good. Here’s why it’s needed…

The challenge for the ecosystem

If you know me, you’ll know I have a lot to say on the topic of UX in web3, especially around the challenges teams face in our unique context.

The web3 ecosystem today is at the whims of market movements. Bull-market conditions allow essentially any project to succeed with enough marketing spend.

But in bear markets, projects that fail to provide meaningful value to end users, or have poor UX, cannot survive these downturns, and we’ve seen plenty of once-successful projects fail to find and retain users.

Why is there such little user research being conducted, and such little reliable data to call on?

• UX Research conducted in the space usually happens behind closed-doors. You’ve no way to know if a product has conducted discovery or evaluative research. If they have, these insights sit in silos and are not shared across teams, despite their overall benefit to the ecosystem.
• Teams default to “code first, ask questions later”. As a result, many projects exist without certainty about what user problem to solve, with unclear value propositions, often targeting the wrong audience, and failing to reach their full potential.
• Teams know data is important for decision-making, but many lack the time or expertise to run reliable user research — often it’s not the person’s core competency, and doing this work competes with other pressing priorities they have.

The OpenUX mission

We envision a world where web3 development teams understand their users. OpenUX provides builders with context, meaning and insight by contributing expertise and promoting an ecosystem of open-source user research. We do this through a practice of collaboration, empathy and simplicity.

Donations to our Gitcoin Grant will go to funding a series of workstreams that map to our mission…

Support the OpenUX Gitcoin Grant and enable us to:

1. Create an open research and insights repository

Since OpenUX’s launch in January 2023, it has always been our intention to create an open UX insights repository that is public and available to all builders in the space. At OpenUX, we publish the research we conduct, and there are other fantastic researchers out there doing the same, but there’s no easy way to mine those insights to find learnings that are applicable to a specific use case or user, and no single place to discover them.

We will build and launch an open UX research repository that solves this problem. It will give builders a jump-start, providing them with reliable findings that they can use for internal decision-making and better product strategy.

2. Publish self funded and community funded research studies

Currently our main revenue source is from bespoke client work. But there are important research themes to explore that a single client wouldn’t naturally fund. Donations to our organization allow us to self-fund ecosystem-wide research, and produce assets such as data-driven behavioral personas, ‘State of UX’ reports and more — which all feed into our open insights repository.

3. Develop open learning resources on discovery and validation methods

As a group of expert UX researchers, we are well versed in all discovery and validation methods. We want this knowledge to be shared and adopted by the very talented people building in web3, and we aim to do this through workshops, webinars, open office hours, best practice guides and more. Check out our webinar on how to recruit research participants in web3 as an example of the types of content we wish to be producing more of.

How to donate

• Gitcoin requires grant donors to set up a Passport as a means of proving your unique personhood (and avoiding bots from gaming the grants system). Here’s an easy to follow How To Video.
• Donations from passports that have a score of over 20 make your donations eligible for Gitcoin’s match funding mechanism. So please verify as many Passport stamps as you can! This vastly increases the impact of your donation.
• Grab some Ether or DAI on Optimism network.
• Donate! Every dollar helps us achieve our mission. You can follow these instructions for donating.

Any and all donations are welcome! We deeply appreciate your support in making UX in web3 better for all.

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