UX++ for Beam mobile wallets(part 2)

Published in

BEAM Privacy

5 min readOct 30, 2019

A while ago when we’ve started to think about how to improve and redesign our mobile wallet (see Part 1 here) it became clear that one step won’t make the whole story. In the previous release, we’ve added a lot of new functionality (e.g. finer control over addresses, search, address categories, etc). In the current release, we bring 3 big things under your fingerprints:

Funds restore from a seed phrase: that’s right, you can restore any wallet given that you have the seed phrase kept somewhere. This fairly complicated and highly anticipated feature is available now and we dare to ask those who gave a lower score to the app to play with the app and to do the right thing ;)
Many screens since the previous release were redesigned (see below). Brand fresh touch will bring the eye-pleasing info in a more structured and more functional way.
Languages (our community effort) the wallet is closer to the way of your thinking :) The challenges of this adventure and the names of the heroes participating will be covered in a separate article (stay tuned).

So, let’s see what’s in the box.

☀️ Features (UX/UI and more)

Mobile restore came to town: no need to switch to the desktop and to transfer the funds back anymore. You can restore from the generic node in the cloud or from a specific node you trust!

We want the app to be as stable and as robust as possible. To achieve that, we’d like to ask you to submit technical details when a crash occurs. However, as a confidential wallet that prides privacy, we’ll ask you very politely each time before trying to submit that kind of info. Since the info is sent, we obviously won’t collect any information in the background.

Transactions and transaction details screens were redesigned to match the new style.

Addresses and address details screens were redesigned. Categories are now called “tags” and a single address can be denoted by several tags from now on.

The redesigned UTXO and UTXO details screens display the list of transactions for every UTXO.

Payment proof screens were redesigned.

Did you ever capture a screenshot to send the transaction details to the sender? Well, we’ve thought about a more stylish way to achieve the purpose, we’ve called it “Share transaction details”.

Some customers suggested scanning the QR code from a photo, taken once and kept in the library. All you needed to do was to ask for it :)

👍 Improvements

Smaller things we couldn’t leave behind:

Since we value your every tap, some textual fields provide a nice way to reset the value with a single click (on iOS).
On receive and send screens addresses are copiable with a long tap.
Transactions can be searched by Kernel ID.
Loading bar works smoother and is a bit more informative
Online status works better when a phone is disconnected from the Internet
Show Owner Key flow became much more informative
On Android, the app doesn’t need to be restarted when a language is changed
On Android, the app responsivity became much faster and usage feel became smoother due to significant architectural rework
There’s much more to tell as the iOS sprints (2 in total) counted 80+ issues and Android sprints (2 in total) counted 100+ issues. Many fixes of typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more intuitive to use. We could add more details here but your time is precious and we’re happy with fewer details and more “it just works” feeling.

🍳 What’s cooking

Luckily, there is always something that keeps us busy:

Android version that supports the same features set is in the works as I type.
We are considering to make addresses even more usable. We realize that in Mimblewimble the same person usually has many addresses (some of them were created to be used only once). We are aware of that and need to brainstorm on that a bit.
More BIG features are coming, but it’s a bit too early to elaborate. Hint: follow our desktop projects.

🗣 Calls to actions!!!

Please rate our app in the App Store or in Play Store or revise your lower score (if given before) in case you think the current version suits your expectations better.
Let us know what do you think. You know where to find us. We take pride in what we do yet we are eager to hear how we can do even better.
Use Beam: probably the most usable wallet for the Mimblewimble-based privacy coin!

UX++ for Beam mobile wallets(part 2)

☀️ Features (UX/UI and more)

👍 Improvements

🍳 What’s cooking

🗣 Calls to actions!!!

Written by Alexander Abramovich