Crypto #Superapp UX — Preparing for Mass User Adoption
This post is based on a talk I’ve recently gave in EDCON 2019 Sydney.
UX in digital native environments
Today, if people want to try out a crypto application, or how the cool kids call it dapp (decentralized application). The typical user journey goes along the following lines:
- KYC: Know Your Customer — A person needs to verify their identity to a 3rd party cryptocurrency exchange provider using a government issued documents such as a passport or a drivers license. Most times they would also be required to provide a copy of a utility bill or their bank statement displaying both the matching names as well as the place of residence.
- Fiat to Crypto: After the person’s chosen exchange has processed the KYC of step 1 (which quite often takes a few business days), the person would typically transfer central bank issued currency from their nominated legacy bank account to their exchange account, only then will they be able to exchange bank currency into cryptocurrency (e.g. ETH ).
- Web3 browsing: Once steps 1 and 2 are completed, the persistent and diligent person can prepare their browser (e.g. Firefox) to include a web3 browsing extension such as Metamask.
All the cumbersome steps above are merely to prepare the environment so that one can ‘play’ with web3 supported dapps. Once All this is completed, they can proceed to the magical decentralized world.
But hang on, all that was done so that we can use this dashboard? I mean, it’s nice, but, this is 2019 and it’s way too painful and complex, it’s hard to actually envision mass user adoption of decentalized web at this state. And this Radar Relay dashboard is pretty much state of the art product in today’s crypto environment.
Now, many entrepreneurs are making an effort to move from web to mobile as people carry their phones with them and use them for many applications in life. But, here’s how many things look like for dapps on mobile:
One of today’s most used dapps is Localethereum. Localethereum is supporting Venezuelans in their struggle with the country’s hyperinflation by facilitating peer to peer fiat to crypto trades (shout out to Michael Foster and the LE team). However, LE’s mostly suitable for use on a web3 supported browser rather than on a mobile at this point, and this particular use case is screaming for a mobile native experience as many people need in person cash transactions. The other example shown in the image above is the decentralized exchange (DEX) Radar Relay which is not even supported on mobile. Basically, the current level of dapps from product and UX perspective is really really primitive. This is a problem which goes beyond only affecting the entrepreneurs who are dedicating their best years to provide those services, it hinders the industry as a whole!!
OK, now we are on the same page, the state of the industry is really nascent, we’re still at an infantile stage of the industry, but lets understand how can we change the narrative and make progress.
Lets take a step back, where do we actually live?
As UX people, often when we prepare for product design, wire-frames and all the backstage jazz we start with the question of: where do your early adopters ‘live’, where do they spend their time? When I asked that question to many of my friends the answers range from: Berlin and Toronto to Shenzhen, Sydney and Wellington, but, with taking into account how much time we’re spending using our mobile phones and other computing devices, I’d argue we’re already living as digital species in the cyberspace.
Here’s a glimpse into recent time I was really busy working with other crypto communities on putting together the EDCON Sydney 2019 event and the pre-event #EDCONHACK:
Observing Apple’s screentime feature snapshot, we can see that a very decent chunk of time is invested online in the cyberspace, in the past we used to interact in-person in a club or at the office, nowadays we’re interacting in Twitter, Instagram, WeChat and Telegram. Now, since so much of what we think of as “self” is channeled through this device, through chats, browsing, social, FinTech, it’s effectively an extension of our being. As it seems today, on the one hand, we’ve benefited tremendously from the fact mobile apps became so ubiquitous, but, we’ve also started being channeled through curated, surveilled and controlled environments where we’re constantly subjected to hooks, manipulations and tricks that product developers set for us. We are effectively at the mercy of product developers if we want to enjoy the advents of the modern digital lifestyle where we’re separated from many things by just a couple of swipes or clicks. How can we fix that?
How do we achieve decentralization at the UX/product level?
I’d like to offer one rather controversial point of view that is probably mostly relevant for UX people and product managers: One of the most powerful forces that decentralized the digital products ecosystem from UX perspective is the great firewall of China. Because China is virtually forked the internet and established itself as a rather closed environment, the interfaces that were built there that aren’t influenced by the western world and manifested with entirely different UX paradigms. The reason being that with the amount of hours we netizens use products wires our brains in the way we relate to the cyberspace. People who are designing the products are following different product philosophies and this means that we and up with a vastly different UX school of thoughts we can learn from.
Diversity of Digital Species
OK, now that we’ve established the concept of diversity of digital products, lets examine some of the differences in *how* UX and products evolved in the Chines context vs. the western school of thoughts.
People’s ‘Wants’
In China, when someone is opening an app, they’re expecting an experience that will complement the lifestyle and culture that matches the way their digital self is wired. There are various hypothesis for where the differences between China and the west stem from, such as the fact that Chinese is an ideographic language (as my friend Weiwu Zhang suggests) or the fact that Asian urban lifestyle is a constant encounter with flux of randomness as you simply walk out in the street. Anyone who lived in China/SEA would know what I’m talking about.
In western countries, when someone opens an app, they are expecting a clear, focused and simple way of using a product. This has been historically how Steve Job’s has set the tone with Apple’s design philosophy for minimalism and simplicity. And it could also stem from the fact that western countries tend to be structured and administered in a very templated, repeatable and organized manner. I mean, look at how well European and particularly the English administration methods and culture has been spreading all over the world.
The examples above are a showing the stark contrast in the approach product developers take when working in western markets vs. Chinese/Asia ecosystems.
Integration above everything!
In China, developers attempt to give an end to end integration akin to the Apple approach with the logic behind it being:
Integration leads to reduced friction and thus increased usability.
Divide and conquer, or is it?
Meanwhile, in the west, the mentality of a product developer is prioritizing minimalism and ease of management which results in fragmentation. take a look at an example of a folder in iOS that is entirely dedicated to Google products:
The reasoning behind the fragmenting products is to help teams manage products efficiently without constantly interfacing one giant app. thus allowing each app have it’s own independence. Another ‘advantage’ in that approach is the seemingly more focused and efficient interaction that users get out of the product, however, in the process of dividing the services into many apps, we’ve increased the number of steps users take when navigating between different apps and often clunky redundancy is introduced in the process. As you can see in the image I ended up having both “Meet” and “Hangouts”, it’s unfathomable and completely backwards IMHO.
Now that we’ve touched on the differences between east and west, to understand the product philosophy behind one of the most successful Chinese Superapps, lets take a look at principles laid out by WeChat’s creator Allen Zhang 张小龙 and covered really well here by Connie Chan (GP of a16z)
WeChat as the world’s greatest Superapp
These principles in the way they are laid out can be rather counter intuitive for a western product manager.
- “User is your friend” — mostly it refers to the fact that for Allen Zhang, the priority you should have as a PM is that the user’s experience will be treated as sacred, if an advertisement or banner is popping to increase profitability and it hinders the experience, then it must not be there in the first place.
- Technology is for efficiency — This means, that the user should be able to get what they need in the most efficient way possible and get out of the app, that is despite the dogmatic narrative often product managers hold: maximize user engagement/time on the platform.
- KPIs are secondary — Zhang’s product management style suggest that tracking data is to help teams be informed, but, they should not be driven by data based on isolated KPIs. Everything has to feed back to the first principle which prioritizes the user’s experience above everything else.
- Decentralized ecosystem —This principle may sound like an oxymoron given the level of centralization WeChat as an app has. But, Zhang’s reference to decentralization is mostly in terms of the products UI, UX, and distribution. It does not address the protocol or infrastructure layers. Quite often westerners mistake WeChat to simply be a Chinese version of WhatsApp, that is because when you’re opening the WeChat app, there’s ‘chats’, ‘contacts’, ‘discover’ and ‘me’. Nowhere in the app there’s the mini-programs AppStore or a ‘trending publications’ section, however, these exact invisible items are what differentiates WeChat from WhatsApp or any other seemingly similar western messaging app. That means that all mini-programs developers or subscription accounts publishers enjoy a leveled playing field and no particular priority is given to bigger or more funded product teams. This is what Zhang refers to when he means decentralized ecosystem, because the experience difference users have across the ecosystem can be significantly different.
Lets take a look at the most interesting aspect of a Superapp:
Mini-programs
We’re familiar with the idea of opening an in app one tab browser to read an article, mini-programs extend that to a far deeper level of integration and introduce a very powerful concept: each mini program is effectively a native mobile app that can be opened within WeChat and offer rich functionality without forcing the user to get out of WeChat. One of the reasons this is so powerful is because WeChat has payment integration through WeChat Pay and social features with your contact list. This allows mini programs developers to use WeChat’s API and build for example an eCommerce service without having to develop their own standalone payment channels. A notable example is one particular social eCommerce mini program called Pinduoduo (though quite notorious at the moment): Leveraging the social features of WeChat as well as the WeChat Pay payment channels. It allows users to participate in group purchase straight for the manufacturer for more competitive price than the products would otherwise sell on the market. Pinduoduo as a mini-program on WeChat became the fastest growing eCommerce platfrom in China in 2018 and IPO’d for over $1B. This example showcases the power of integration that WeChat offers, this is why some people refer to WeChat not as merely an app but rather as a mobile OS!
The design philosophy of a superapp is a natural fit for open systems like public Blockchain ⛓🥳🚀
Crypto + Superapps are a natural fit!
There are several good reasons why crypto superapps are the solution to bring mass consumer adoption. The fact public Blockchains can be accessed in a permissionless fashion, dapps and services are typically built for integratability and the global nature or crypto are among the major reasons. My cofounder Mark Pereira covered more architectural tech consideration of our crypto superapp project Alice in another post here. Lets take a look into one cool example of project that took integration of #DeFi products as their north star Zerion.io.
The team at Zerion does amazing work integrating various dapps into one interface: Uniswap decentralized exchange, Maker’s CDP to borrow stablecoin Dai and more products coming soon. What’s exciting about Zerion’s work is seeing how integration has the potential to reduce friction and make the experience a lot easier. There are still some crucial elements missing in such an interface model:
- 📱 The interface isn’t en par with modern slick mobile native apps as it is a web3 supported interface at the moment.
- 👛 There isn’t a native wallet as a part of Zerion’s interface because it’s a web3 supported interface rather than wallet. That means that users go through additional steps (friction) when they need to connect an external wallet.
The 2nd point touches on a really challenging problem every dapp team get to when they want to develop a standalone mobile native app. They would need to build a dedicated wallet just for that one app, this would hinder the user’s experience as their crypto assets will be spread across multiple apps. In addition it adds a lot of development overhead for the dapp team that suddenly needs to develop a full flesh wallet just to support their typically single use case dapp.
Alice — Crypto superapp to achieve mass adoption
👱🏻♀️📲🕳🐇😺🎩🐛🍄🃏👸🏻♦️♠️♣️♥️
My co-founder at Alice Mark Pereira wrote a great introductory piece about Alice already. We see the solution to crypto mass consumer adoption being a mobile crypto superapp because of the following factors that make crypto + superapp a natural fit:
- Crypto dapps are unstoppable and accessible to everyone on the Blockchain.
- Integrating between dapps/protocols is adding more ways to use them and reduces the friction of having a dedicated wallet + app for each dapp following Allen Zhang’s product philosophy.
- Introducing minidapps into a mobile superapp will unleash all the power mobile has to offer: 📸 camera access, 🧭 location features, 💬👭 Chat and social features.
More on the that will be covered in following posts we’ll release as Alice develops.
How would the transition from web to mobile dapps look like?
The ability to give dapps full advantage of the mobile features means that an application like LocalEthereum which currently offers browser interface, would look and feel like the applications we use everyday to make our lives easier. In this particular example, the user base demographics of LocalEthereum is predominantly Venezuelans affected by the hyperinflation crisis. They would benefit tremendously from location features, camera access, smooth chat that will allow them to engage in trades in person with much more convenient coordination.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the read and let us know if you’d like to get in touch! Stay tuned for updates about Alice.
Socials for Daniel
- Twitter: @danieltbar
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dtbar/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danieltbar/
- GitHub: https://github.com/dtbx
Learn More about Alice
- Website: Alicedapp.com
- Twitter: @heyaliceap
