Data Science Driven UX Research to Improve NFT Auction Experience

I leveraged the mempool to get a better proxy of user behaviors and emotions when participating in NFT auctions on the artblocks.io platform

User experience (UX) describes how people feel when they interact with a system or service and encompasses several factors including usability, design, marketing, accessibility, performance, comfort, and utility. Don Norman once said,

“Everything has a personality; everything sends an emotional signal. Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions. Bad websites have horrible personalities and instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly. We need to design things — products, websites, services — to convey whatever personality and emotions are desired.”

Ethereum’s personality is someone who is extremely inscrutable and easily misunderstood. To make matters worse, most users don’t even think about it as interacting with Ethereum when they’re using your interface or a wallet. If you’re ever in the live chat of an Artblock’s auction, you’ll notice as soon as an auction ends there are at least a dozen people complaining that it is Metamask’s fault that they didn’t get a mint. I think in the last year the UX of many dapps on Ethereum has improved greatly in both product interaction and explainability of transactions. For…