Designing the Best UX for the Blockchain

Nicola Di Marco
4 min readFeb 21, 2018

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Also Vitalik Said That!

A couple of days ago Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential mind in the crypto space twitted something regarding the lack of good user experience in the d-app (decentralised application) world.

Think about it: right now for most of the people it is still even relatively difficult to buy BTC or ETH for the first time.

However, it is worth mentioning how, in the last few years, mobile first approach and user centered design had a huge positive impact on the fintech industry as a whole, with a few unicorns dominating the space and traditional banks following trying to improve more and more their online services.

From all of the sudden banking, a well know hyper-bureaucratised, slow industry, became sexy again.

Blockchain First

The Harvard Business Review has recently declared that “blockchain will do to banks and law firms what the internet did to media.”

Blockchain is in fact a completely different beast with specific pain-points and opportunities and, if we want people to use our decentralised services well and without frustration, we should focus on creating delightful experiences and reduce friction as much as possible.

The main question is: how do we offer to the users all the information they need, hide the ones they don’t, and guarantee an easy and intuitive experience from start to finish?

One may argue that blockchain is only the backend infrastructure supporting but in reality it has some specific implications although, in many ways, blockchain presents the same UX challenges as digital design generally.

Where is different then? The first problems to address are lack of clear feedbacks and dramatically increased latency time.

Because transactions on blockchain take much much longer than in a traditional network (with BTC transactions taking currently up to few hours) users need to have a clear idea of their status and progress.

It is also worth to notice that today users need to use several services as such wallets, exchangers and dozens of d-apps in order to access to trivial features (payments, money transfers, loans, overdraft, news, insurances, spending tracking etc.).

Would it possible to aggregate all this traditional banking features in a single mobile decentralised app?

A Blockchain killer app

Blockchain is today to a point where it needs killer apps to break trust points, increase accessibility and finally stimulate mass adoption and you can do this only by designing a great UX.

Our goal is to design a Wallet, iterate, add features and make it the “One Stop Crypto Financial App”

We will start with a first iteration that will include all the basic features of a crypto wallet taking in account all the best practices of the fintech space and the most common pain points of the dapp (with a focus on transparency, feedback and latency time).

We will then continue adding features as planned in the following roadmap.

Screenshot of the Roadmap on Trello

Join Us @ DexLab

Vision
Dexlab.io it’s an independent group of open source developers, designers and data scientists formed to foster the adoption of blockchain technology to the masses.

Why is it important
… We need to involve philosophers, NGOs, social scientist into the blockchain revolution. … We Design cryptoeconomics incentive to promote a positive outcome.

Principles of development:
Great UI/UX
Open source MIT license
Security
State of the art development
Accessibility
Governance

Dexlab.io aims to be a virtual organisation where members vote on issues.

There will be a high council composed of 4 members of the council. They are the Maintainers of the Council team.

Any member of Dexlab.io can create and collaborate on projects.

Rewards distribution will be voted on by project before being sent. There must be a majority agreement of all high council members.

Every council meeting which include votation we’ll be operated and permanently stored to the ethereum blockchain via contract

Project topology
Education, in form of:
Articles
Video Animations
Courses
Ebooks
DAOs, such as:
Identity verification platform
Decentralized Exchange
Animal adoption platform
Decentralized auction system
Trustless rating system
Decentralized e-warrenty system
Funding project
Each individual project will have his own funding strategy.
A reasonable amount of profit from one project might be used to fund other projects.

Support the development of Dexlab.io!

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ETH: 0x1e3c6aADcF9eCE27fEF76d7087E2eFf0f559eeb9

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Nicola Di Marco

Founder & Designer DexWallet • Member of InVision Design Leadership Forum • Formerly: SumUp, AmorelieDE, Rocket Internet, LQID, Mosaicoon