Hito means human but we’re not just another pretty face
Why Beauty and Design are Mission Critical for Hardware Wallets
a good user experience is imperative for crypto mass adoption
Last year crypto holders lost a total of 3.9 billion dollars, mostly from hacks according to a report by Web3 bug bounty and security services platform Immunefi. A large majority of the lost/stolen funds were held in centralized exchanges; had all those crypto holders opted to hold their digital assets safely in self-custody losses would have been vastly reduced. Given this you’d think everyone would be into self-custody of their crypto. But that’s not the case at all.
With a reported 5 million users between the top two hardware wallet market leaders, only a fraction of of today’s ~295 million crypto holders are holding their digital assets in a hardware wallet (aka cold storage). Why?
In a word: design, or lack of it. The mission critical feature of hardware wallets has always been security, but when that feature’s design (or lack thereof) stops the target market from using the product, we have to consider that user experience (UX) is also mission critical to the hardware wallet.
Security will always be most important, it is what social science calls a necessary but insufficient condition for consideration. In other words a hardware wallet can be perfectly secure, but that in itself isn’t enough to attract users to the category. Users crave usability; non-users fear the utter lack of usability many current designs suggest with their tiny screens and buttons and irregular shapes nonideal for wallets or pockets.
Historically, design has in the hardware wallet category has been Mission: Impossible. The importance of the security and safety offered by hardware wallet devices to protect crypto holders from hacks, scams and rugs has been unable to overcome the inertia of bad design.
With the field littered with the bodies of unsuccessful (defined as: not mass adopted) hardware wallets, what makes Hito different? In a word, design. Hito was designed to solve the problem that most hardware wallets have: non-adoption. Oh sure, experts have adopted them; people who’ve been in the crypto industry for years, or are regular triers/reviewers of hardware technology. But the average person, much less the average crypto holder, is still just taking their chances with custodial exchanges and hot wallets.
Hito creator Mikhail Kirillov knew this was not a matter of not knowing or not caring about crypto security as it was a matter of design; that placing end users at the center of the hardware wallet design will be the key to successful user adoption. A successful serial entrepreneur, and the rare engineer founder equally adept with hardware and software, he was looking around for the next magic technology, the follow up to the computer and the internet. In hardware wallets he has found it, driven by the desire to open the benefits of a web3 world to everyone.
The word Hito means “human” — the first clue to its design focus that sets it apart from competitors in the space. Hito was designed with the typical end user in mind — which is, by definition, the people sitting on the sidelines hoping and expecting to get into crypto (but haven’t taken the plunge yet. According to research firm The Ascent, in the US that number is 46.5 million people right now — that’s the number in a 2022 survey who said they were likely to invest in crypto for the first time in the coming year. Globally the number is much higher.
Those Americans will join the 145 million American adults — about 56% of the U.S. adult population — who say they own cryptocurrency or have invested in crypto in the past. They are watching the vanguard of early adopters — i.e. crypto and NFT holders who for the most part have not yet taken the step to self-custody their digital assets. That will remain the case until the benefits of exchanges and hot wallets no longer easily outweigh the awkward, nonintuitive user experience of hardware wallets.
That means, we need hardware wallets as simple and intuitive as hot wallets and exchanges; we need devices that can be used as easily and nearly thoughtlessly as our other secure devices, e.g. phones and laptops.
“Oh they are fine for people like me,” Kirillov says of the market leaders Ledger and Trezor. “I use them myself and they do the job. But for my mother to use? Forget about it.” A hardware wallet that only experts can use defeats the entire point of crypto, is how Kirillov sees it. The hardware wallet should by design be an easy and intuitive place to onboard into the web3 world, giving power back to people in the form of owning their own data, identities, work and money.
So what does this typical crypto/NFT holder want? Based on current sales trends — with the top two hardware wallets combined selling about ~5 million units in a global market of 250 million crypto holders — we can be sure what they are not clamoring for is a device whose purpose is not suggested by its design. Like the sub-$1,000 PC, the hardware wallet with color touchscreen will become the industry game-changer that rapidly becomes the industry norm as prices fall over time and become more accessible to the masses.
Hito research with current hardware users makes it clear that hardware wallets that look like USBs and car key fobs do not inspire digital asset holders to protect their assets.
I bought a Trezor for my mom. She thought I’d be able to help her set it up, but no. It’s still in the box.
It looks like a Volkswagen key — it’s ridiculous.
2" Color Touchscreen
A design that eliminates the chance for accidental error (especially errors that make funds vulnerable to bad actors) is another key concern for new hardware wallet users. The ability to see what you are signing, and double check the address in a non-intrusive way, are two benefits that are rapidly become essential features for a hardware wallet to have…and are front-and center with Hito.
Hito’s 2" super bright full color touchscreen is supplemented by the custom Hito Emojidress feature — a combined use of color and emojis that make it simple to confirm an Ethereum address. Glancing back and forth between screens trying to see if 0xb794f5ea0ba39494ce839613fffba74279579268 is the same as 0xb794f5ea0ba39494ce8396l3fffba74279579268 (hint: it’s not) is more than a little anxiety-producing, especially with the advent of address poisoning attacks in MetaMask wallets, a case of bad actors capitalizing on the human desire for efficiency.
Try to find the difference in these addressees and very quickly you will recognize why crypto senders fall prey to the scheme with the most typical of behaviors — copying and pasting an address, without first expanding an address to see all 42 characters (in the case of Ethereum) and not just the first and last few characters.
Hito enables users to confirming an address by comparing graphs of 6-emojis — a far simpler and more fool-proof proposition.
Hito Ethereum Emojidress 👗
To date there hasn’t been much talk about design in the hardware wallet space…maybe because people don’t notice what’s missing. And good design has mostly been missing in hardware wallets; most design has been derivative, solving for one problem while creating others (teeny tiny screens on USB devices are going down in history as “problems we didn’t need to create”). Now with Hito | Crypto Wallet and even Ledger #Stax we’re starting to see the concepts of usability and style solved for in mobile phones and mobile music solved for in digital asset management.
Many people compare the design of the Hito to the design of the iPod — the sleek rectangle of glass and metal with 2" color touchscreen does bring to mind the breakthrough Apple design. But it’s an apt comparison for more than just the UX similarities.
Before the iPod existed people really committed to listening to music on the go bought Walmans and Discmans then mp3 players, and sales were brisk for awhile. In 2001, 3.3 million mp3 devices sold, compared to 19 million portable CD players. The introduction of the iPod changed everything; the iPod mini, nano and shuffle designs (plus the first ever sub-$100 price point) brought 22+ million purchasers to the category in 2004–2005; the iPod touch peaked at 54 million units sold in 2008. The right design at the right price point brought nearly 18x more purchasers to the category in less than a decade. Apple succeeded in wildly expanding the category because it put users at the center of the design — the iPod was simple, intuitive and fun to use.
Similarly, the current market for digital assets — not just crypto but NFTs, domains, identities, and more — is not reflected by the 250 million holders of hot wallets at this writing, but also includes nearly 20x more sitting on the sidelines, waiting for it to be easy and fun to participate, with features that protect them from, and not just not expose them to, the typical security risks that are still rampant in the industry.
In business, a mission critical task or system is one whose failure or disruption brings the entire operation to a halt. There is a good argument to be made that UX is the mission critical feature of hardware wallet design. Without a UX that brings more users to web3, the true benefits of disintermediation at the core of blockchain technology will never be realized: a new digital economic system that utilizes peer-to-peer networks that no single person or entity controls, yet anyone can use is supposed to be, by design, for everyone and anyone — not special technical someones.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has pointed out the importance of UX in hardware wallets, noting that “more developments need to be made on wallet infrastructure to make crypto easier for everyday people to use and ensure that it is capable of onboarding billions of users.”
Echoing Vitalik, Blake Ross, co-created of Mozilla Firefox notes, “The latest wave of technologies like AR, VR…and bitcoin have the potential to disrupt the market — but the challenge lies in making them usable for the masses.” This, he says, is where technology and UX go hand in hand — and the former is nothing without the latter. As the iPod demonstrates, a product cannot rise above its UX, but a product’s UX can rise above the product.
The value of design has even been quantified by the Design Value Index, which shows that design-driven companies outperform their competitors by as much as 228%. A study by the Design Management Institute indicates that design-led companies have many benefits over their less well-designed peers, with:
- 41% higher market share
- 46% competitive advantage overall
- 50% more loyal customers
- 70% digital experiences beat competitors
Clearly the hardware wallet category can no longer ignore the value of design, or keep the value narrowly defined by how the product looks. As Apple products have made abundantly clear, design is intrinsic to a customer’s experience with the product.
Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. — Steve Jobs
A Word About Beauty
The importance of design is enshrined in the book Emotional Design the central argument to Don Norman’s book is that “The emotional side of design may be more critical to a product’s success than its practical elements.”
According to Plato, we are drawn to objects that are a pleasure to look at because they represent an ideal of perfection we aspire to. Beauty, therefore, is less a feature of a product than an accurate expression of its utility. Attractive things, Norman writes, do work better — their attractiveness produces positive emotions, causing mental processes to be more creative, more tolerant of minor difficulties. The reverse is true as well: a product’s purpose can be hindered by its ugliness: research shows that ugly interfaces have a lower margin of error of task completion.
We love beautiful things; this in and of itself makes beauty impactful. Beauty, in fact, can be the very thing that signals a product is usable.
In summary
It is the year 2023 and people accept as ordinary things that sounded fantastical just a decade ago — remote monitoring of products delivered to your door, cars that self-drive, paying for items in a store with phone apps, chatting by video with people in four different countries at once via wifi. There is much speculation that as we evolve to the age of ownership — owning our own data, our own work, our own money — the importance of the hardware wallet, the keeper of the keys to all of these assets, will evolve with us. At Hito we know the usability and stylishness of hardware wallets will follow the same path as the other mission-critical devices of our digital lives. We look forward to being a haven of simplicity and intuitive use for digital asset holders of all experience levels.
