The User Experience
We at GigLabs launched our Alpha two weeks ago for GigApps. For those of you that are not familiar with our company, we are a blockchain software solutions company. We are actively building a platform of marketplaces for the gig economy on the Ethereum blockchain. This platform facilitates payments to gig workers through smart contracts and provides some benefits such as paid vacation to those workers. The first marketplace, GigApps, is specifically for software developers to develop blockchain software for customers.
If you want to know more, check out our website: www.giglabs.io
What I’d like to talk about here is our user experience. As we onboard development teams and employers, we are conducting product testing, surveys, and user experience testing to ensure we a building a product people want. We also want to ensure the product does what our customer’s expect. We have two very different customers using the GigApps application: Blockchain software employers and blockchain developers. And as a result, I have two very different tales to tell.
The Employer
One of the biggest barriers to blockchain adoption is typically the sub-par user experience that comes with it. When developing GigApps, we put a very heavy focus on the customers that were commissioning blockchain software projects. We wanted to ensure they had an optimal user experience. We spent a lot of development effort and product planning to ensure that GigApps would be user friendly.
As we on-boarded our first customers on GigApps, this effort really paid off. With little instruction, these users were able to smoothly create projects and payable milestones. When we told them that each of these projects and milestones were being written to the Ethereum blockchain, they were pleasantly surprised.
In one case, the employer continued to input new milestones, while we sat back and observed. No explanation or guidance was needed as the employer progressed through adding their acceptance criteria to each milestone. Spending time on an intuitive design and user experience does pay off. This focus has led to some evangelism of the GigApps product. Our customers and partners want to show others how easy it is for them to add their projects to smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain using GigApps.
The Development Team
We have on-boarded our first two blockchain development teams as well. The experiences during the development teams varied from team member to team member. For developers, the onboarding process is a little more complicated. As a result, our development members had inconsistent experiences, depending on how familiar they were with GigLabs, GigApps, and Metamask.
We also have a few spots in the development portal that require a little explanation. Our observations and user testing are already providing us valuable feedback, which we will use when designing out the final product with our user experience designer partner and consultants.
The developer side does have some very bright spots as well. The feedback on our project filtering, blockchain based payment system, and agile workflow built on smart contracts have received positive marks from our initial customers and users.
Improving User Experience
Prototypes are a wonderful tool for conducting user and market testing. With a small investment, we are able to gather valuable insight about our market, customers, and user interactions. The prototype fits well in the Lean Startup mantra: Build, Measure, Learn (repeat).
The GigApps alpha is already meeting our lofty expectations and the data will come in handy as we work to define the future iterations of the product. Good user experience and intuitive design for every workflow and user interaction with a system is important to us. Brands that spend the time and efforts on these user experiences drive customer satisfaction.
We have all used and worked on products that do not take the time to go through the effort of mapping each user interaction and experience. These products are more prevalent in software and require a lot of instruction. This leads to customer frustration.
The same goes with features, it is important to think through every feature, its necessity, and purpose. Pointless features, hard to use features, and hard to find actions plague poorly designed software products.
User experience designers armed with workflows, end goals/purposes, and the user data we are gathering will give us the desired effect of crafting a product that our customers love using. The evangelists from our gig employer experience are what we strive to achieve with all our customers.
