We’ve got it all wrong. Web3 isn’t about the tech; it’s about the capabilities and potential it offers users. That’s where we, as builders, have fallen short; we believe that because we are on the cutting edge of such a powerful technology, it will compensate for the forgotten aspect of design.
Users have spent the last 20 years developing online habits; digital payments, surfing the internet, creating accounts, avoiding scams, and so on. When web3 emerged, the goal was not to upend these habits but to decentralize the infrastructure and grant users unrestricted access and privacy; a vision that took a mind of its own and went down a rabbit hole of jargon, memes, and intentionally difficult user flows.
The industry preaches a consensus around onboarding the next billion users but then builds platforms oriented for an echo chamber of no more than 100k active users. Now, this criticism should be taken with a grain of salt, as we must also acknowledge the value of the new iteration of infrastructure.
Naturally, procedures and products will gain new meaning, alter or improve on functionality, or experience growing pains as builders test in the open — but there is potential for a web that optimizes for both.
Below are the top three things plaguing the Web3 UX, what we can fix, and what we can’t (yet):
Account Interaction
The hurdles presented in creating and maintaining a self-custody wallet are an exhausted topic, and much of the current discussion surrounds the idea of wallet generation and key management. These issues have been resolved through legacy solutions like Magic or Web3Auth, but if either of those tools were the answer to adoption and user onboarding, they’d have more than a combined 10m accounts created (a number that doesn’t account for duplicate or false accounts). Ultimately, only a single friction point is solved with traditional social login for wallet creation and login. Once a user has a wallet, then what? They are still left to their own accord to choose between the various failing on-ramp solutions, approving nominal transactions with no impact on funds, paying for actions that require gas but offer no value in return, and defining the network the account needs to be operating on.
Industry leaders in the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) ecosystem are all starting to get excited about the push to incorporate EIP-4337, the Ethereum proposal exploring the idea of account abstraction, into their applications and wallets. They continue to fall short by using the framework outlined in the proposal to add product features and reduce costs for existing users. And don’t get me wrong, as we look to include much of this framework in what we’re building, it is undoubtedly very valuable in pushing to increase efficiencies; it is only scalable to a minute degree. Reducing or eliminating gas, allowing paymasters to take on the gas fees as they would a server cost, and batching transactions to eliminate latency are massive for blockchain development. But, this advancement does not remove the barrier for most users who still drop off from the dapp when they see “crypto” for the first time. We will solve this by taking the abstraction of the user account to a new extreme, a topic we will dive into in-depth next week.
Web3 Dogmatism
The vocabulary, the gatekeeping, and the lack of assurance and validation. Two points, one from Y Combinator; something we agree with, “make something people want,”; second, from Mark Zuckerberg, with something we disagree with, “Move fast and break things.” Most, if not all, founders have aspired to either be a part of YC or be like The Zuck, so naturally, they’ve inspired a lot of the operations behind most products built by the younger generations. Web3 may not have listened as well to the wise words of Sam Altman, as they misconstrue “people” to mean either whales who want to maximize anonymity and hype beasts who like digital art and not the millions of the unbanked, those without stable financial infrastructure, or a currency monitored and controlled by a tyrannical government.
But, they were really good at listening to Zuck, they built platforms run on unaudited smart contracts, they built applications that thought the backend could carry the load the front end should’ve taken, and they created an entirely new way to gain financial freedom that was safeguarded with new terminology, technological requirements, and blasted it with gradients.
A great user experience will help to ensure that people keep returning to your platform. Optimally, if a platform was built for adoption and a large subset of users, they would include approachable and familiar terms like “invest” rather than “stake” or “Purchase” versus “Approve Transaction.” Small nuanced things in web2 were the standard, but web3 felt the need to evolve into a new language that can only be learned in the depths of CT (crypto Twitter, for those new to web3). Again, I’ll play devil’s advocate; the community dynamic is more bought in and inspired by a common cause in most communities today, sounds somewhat cult-like when written down, but I digress.
The community has gone through massive highs and indescribable lows, and trauma bonding is bound to create a strong relationship between those present. But, if the web3 community is as focused on the all-inspiring phrase “onboard the next billion users,” then rather than forcing one billion users to adopt the language of a few million, it may be advantageous to adapt to the common tongue, just bring in some new slang here and there.
A Tech First, Design Never Focus
In the best way, possible web3 builders are entirely focused on proving the science behind the technology they’re creating, but the problem is that the code powering these applications appears to supersede the importance of the application layer built on top of it. This is a notorious pitfall of brilliant inventors, as their infallible focus on the product enables complacency in a user-obsessive mindset. Famously, Steve Jobs would take enormous vision bets that would direct how the product was made but was produced with the end user having the product in their hands.
This is a requirement for devs to adopt this mindset to propel the future innovation and adoption of web3 technology. User experience isn’t just necessary; it is essential for a technology’s longevity. Unless the industry is fine with blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs being tucked away behind web2 and TradFi behemoths, and crypto, NFTs, or blockchains as a whole never seeing acknowledgment, they have to reorient their focus to prioritizing seeking direct user feedback as their smart contracts go through the auditing process.
There is no sin behind exploration and allocating the top minds to focus on researching a new age of technology; just so long as if it has the potential to liberate and empower, it does just that. A great user experience will ensure that users keep returning to your platform, and the more positive the user experience, the larger audience it will attract and the more impact it can achieve. We are working around the clock to build tools that genuinely enable developers to tap into the limited-crypto knowledge crowd while utilizing the exciting infrastructure they’ve built. We believe that we can achieve the best of both worlds by offering a user experience stack that eliminates the web3 learning curve.
We promise Peaze is coming soon! As in next week soon.
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