Making Crypto More Usable, Inclusive, and Responsible for Last Mile Users
What we’re learning from design reviews with founders building on Celo on how to make web3 better for last mile users
Web3 has had a rollercoaster of a year. After promises to rearchitect the internet, the financial system, and reality through the bull run of 2020–2021, in 2022 the movement saw dramatic falls from grace, economic crashes and questioning on utility. Speed running failures has been painful — but it’s also put us closer to something new. The promise of web3 remains enticing — a more open infrastructure for our financial system that is uncensorable, programmable, accessible to anyone with a smartphone, and ultimately more resilient.
Web3 has offered particularly transformational promises to unbanked users — that borderless currency would reduce the costs of global remittances, that higher-yield investment would be unlocked from the global 1%, that programmatic money would be cheaper to deploy and able to reach more people, that peer-to-peer by default business models would create new income opportunities that lift people out of poverty.
This is a vision of the future of web3 that we still believe is possible at IDEO Last Mile Money. The path to get there requires design.
“The promise of web3 remains enticing — a more open infrastructure for our financial system that is uncensorable, programmable, accessible to anyone with a smartphone, and ultimately more resilient.”
IDEO Last Mile Money and Celo Foundation’s Product Reviews for Web3 Teams
That’s why we were so excited to kick off a collaboration with Celo earlier this year, working with exciting organizations building real products and services for last mile users — and solving for gnarly design challenges while doing so. Crypto is exciting to talk about but, honestly, it’s too often still far from usable — especially for last-mile users.
Case in point — we’re seeing examples of businesses that are making Universal Basic Income a reality for the marginalized. But a typical user has to take more than two dozen steps across multiple different websites and mobile apps to cash out the money they can actually use to pay bills and invest in a better future. Those steps are landmines where poor network connectivity, incorrect choices, and losing track of transactions are real dangers, particularly for new-to-digital users.
Ultimately, we’re asking all internet users to build new behaviors, and we can’t rely on our previous models of centralization to absorb risk. How is the promise of web3 infrastructure going to translate into the reality of creating usable applications for people? And if it’s breaking down for people using iPhones on 5g networks, how can it operate across different devices with intermittent connectivity and no mental models for concepts like “key storage” or “liquid staking”?
Supported by the Celo Foundation, we launched a series of product reviews — or “design crits,” as we like to think about them — with startups building on Celo for last mile users. Here’s some of what we’re learning:
1. Signpost what comes first, next, and later.
Users will often land on a crypto dApp and need some prerequisites before they can use it (e.g. crypto, a wallet). It’s not enough to just explain how their specific products work, dApps need to signpost what comes before and after their product. If users get stuck on how to get started, they’re going to drop off. This is doubly hard for unbanked users, where existing mental models from familiar web2 concepts like mobile money don’t neatly transfer to crypto. Designers need to support users in building new mental models.
There are a few ways to do this:
- Introductory splash screens/walkthroughs that explain prerequisites in ways that feel immediate and clear to users
- Abstracting away the complexity of multiple steps where possible — for instance Impact Market’s Libera Wallet (built in collaboration with Node Wallet) has a nifty one-tap interaction to set up a wallet that abstracts away the complications of understanding and noting a wallet address/recovery key for later
- Progressive onboarding where users are offered some initial no/minimal access to features to build trust and familiarity, and later progress to KYC and transactions — for instance Bitssa’s landing page is a simple way for crypto-to-fiat remittance senders to check conversion rates and fee without signing up
2. Help the user see how using a non-fiat currency is benefiting them now, as well as later.
Many web3 apps highlight the future potential of crypto — but users’ attention spans are short and competition for their time is fierce. It’s important to land the benefits of a crypto transaction versus a fiat one right up front — and make sure that benefit isn’t only “the graph goes up” (since, well, often it goes down!).
In the absence of this, we’ve seen last-mile teams needing to focus on high-cost in-person approaches to build trust and familiarity through field staff and agents, but there are other ways to land immediate benefits. For instance, Nuzo is building an ecommerce marketplace and crypto wallet for Kenya. They’re trying to land the value of crypto in a market that’s almost monopolized by a single mobile money service, mPesa.
Nuzo’s design uses a few key elements that are critical for building confidence among users:
- Simplifying the value proposition — the homepage and each product listing includes information on variable discounts that can be unlocked through their wallet
- Highlighting the value of crypto in the moment of checkout by showing that users are paying significantly lower transaction costs when they pay via NUZO
- Demonstrating how the Nuzocoin grows in value over a period of time, not right up front
3. Anchor design in intuitive mental models of risk, rather than assuming users are forex traders
Users still grok money in terms of fiat, and it might be tempting to design frontends that are fiat-centric with web3 abstracted away as rails. This might be more user friendly, but it doesn’t communicate risks — as we’ve seen with the many CeDeFi offerings that promoted “crypto fixed deposits” that crashed.
For many last mile users, their capital is limited and crypto markets are volatile so protecting their resources should be a north star in design.
On the flipside, showing a farmer in Zambia that she’s saved 0.0008897654 cUSD is not the answer either. So how might we meet users where they are in their financial knowledge but also help them understand risks?
Here’s what we’re exploring:
- Show balances in fiat and crypto, rounding off the crypto to a few decimal places, perhaps with a tap interaction to extend
- Embrace transparency by clearly communicating volatility to users through mental models that make sense (e.g. your wallet balance has lost 50 Naira in value this week, but on average has gained 200 Naira in value since you set it up)
- Build default “opt-in” guardrails for new users to control exposure (e.g. set automatic cash-out floor values, help them hold assets in a blend of web2 and web3 tools)
4. Embrace mobile-first dApps that can extend to desktop users if needed (not the other way around)
Many of the “early adopters” in web3 are interacting via desktop, but we know that mobile first is how the majority of the world interacts with the internet. While many current web3 users live in the paradigm “mobile to view, desktop to do” the next billion (or even million) users will likely be mobile only, not mobile sometimes — exactly while Celo’s mobile-first approach is so critical. Design dApps to be mobile-first, and extendable to web.
Here are some ways to get there:
- Design sites in default screen sizes of lower-end Android phones, but make them responsive so they can scale up for the 4–5% desktop users most last-mile focused dApps have
- Adopt standard app layouts in site design with a navigation tab in the footer, anchored banner card in the header etc. so users can bring their existing app navigation mental models to dApps
- Nudge users to save dApps as webpages to their phone home so they can open it up in one tap, rather than two or three
Join us in designing delightful user experiences in web3!
Usability is key to landing the benefits of crypto for last-mile users while building guardrails against the risks. We’ve made an early start with our design crits and are excited to keep learning and exploring. Follow along by subscribing to our newsletter, blog, and our Last Mile Design Patterns Library.
We’re also hosting a few events with Celo in the next few weeks. If what you’ve read today sparks your curiosity, come join us:
- In-person in San Francisco on Jan 25 from 5–7pm. Find out more and sign up here.
- Virtual design salon with some founders building products at the last mile on February 7 from 8 to 9am Pacific Time. It’s going to be a small, intimate gathering with plenty of audience interaction. Sign up here.
