Secondhand DeFi: Elk’s Bid to Fix Derivative UI/UX (Site Preview)
Through its short history, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has offered incredible highs and lows, and not just in token price volatility. Friends, we need to have a serious talk about DeFi interface design and user experience…
Aesthetics and design play a critical psychological role in how we judge whether a platform is a safe and attractive place to invest. Browse a dozen DeFi sites, and you’ll encounter the full range of looks, from sleek and minimalist, to clunky and barely usable.
Peer under the hood, however, the majority of these projects share one thing in common: they are copies of the Uniswap or Pancakeswap user interfaces (UI). This cloned UI is sometimes modified to serve different ends, but all projects nearly look and feel identical. These similarities in appearance also inherit security issues that developers either don’t care about, or don’t know how to fix. In the worst cases, changes are made that can create a user experience (UX) that is not fit for purpose.
There is some comfort for the user in this, as it makes the constant flood of new projects easy to navigate, but overall it makes an incredible statement about lack of innovation within a sector that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of technology.
We have entered the era of second-hand DeFi.
Why do we see so many clones? Lack of developers? Laziness? The most likely reason is familiarity. The ultra-competitive nature of the DeFi arena forces projects, even ground-breaking ones like Elk.Finance, to adopt recognizable and battle-tested formats. This allows users to feel familiar and safe on a new platform, reducing the cognitive load and minimizing fear of the unknown.
There’s another reason why second-hand UIs are so prevalent: $$$$. It’s relatively easy to build a strong UI and UX with endless project resources, but this is rarely the case. The initial stages of most projects are wholly self-funded. They are driven by the enthusiasm of developers who have the vision to see the journey unfolding successfully, but not the design sensibilities to translate their technical vision into useability.
DeFi’s most valuable resource is time. Second-hand UI helps you not to waste it.
At present, Elk.Finance is not an exception in the second-hand market. Using the Uniswap UI was a deliberate choice, and it provided a springboard for the back-end development to create a suite of products that gained immediate recognition as something desirable, useful, and with the potential to grow dramatically.
But we have been working hard behind the scenes to reimagine, from the ground up, a more intuitive, elegant, and ultimately human UI/UX for crypto.
With Elk now established as the Gateway to DeFi (DEX, LP farming, cross-chain bridge spanning 30 pathways), we can start optimizing the UX to better meet our users’ needs. This will be a multi-step process, which we plan to roll out over the course of several months.
Our first step will be to give a facelift to our UI and bring a unique ELK visual language to our users. For now, it will remain the same Uniswap under the hood, but ours is green, minimalistic, and humble — and definitely Elky.
We’ve also done extensive research into our user base to drive our redesign approach. Many of our users use smartphones to swap and send tokens cross-chain using the ElkNet Bridge, so we invested more time and effort in the mobile version of our dApp. While we still inherit pretty much all the UX issues from Uniswap, we believe the experience for mobile users must become much better.
Our next big step is to offer users the opportunity to view all their Elk activities in one place through a powerful and flexible dashboard. Gathering information about half a dozen chains and over 100 farms on a single interface is no small task. We envision this new dashboard as the go-to page where all important portfolio information will be gathered, including:
- Information about liquidity provision and farming
- TVL across all chains
- Graphs showing trends and overviews
And, of course, much more!
We plan to roll out the initial facelift in short order.
In the meantime, if you haven’t tried our ElkNet Bridge, give it a go.
In approximately seven seconds you can move value across any of our six supported chains: Avalanche, Binance, Fantom, Polygon, Heco, and xDAI.
We highly value user feedback, so if you have ideas about how we can improve or add to the dashboard, or you want to share any general thoughts about the Elk UX, please share it with us.
Suggest how to make Elk UX better
