MetaCartel: Shipping a Mobile-First DAO Experience
The MetaCartel cares about UX-UI, putting our best foot forward with our new sexi DAO DApp.
The MetaCartel community focuses our energy on thinking about UX in a space where the sexi backend rules all.
Sharding, state channels, plasma, etc… these are critically important projects and technologies soaking the majority of the community conversation. Despite the need for transitioning to Serenity to create a more effective SoV the need for increased throughput for the Ethereum network will only come if the number of users also increases.
Today, these numbers are slim, and the Meta Cartel community is here to change that.
Similar to the Moloch DAO rallying around the narrative to spur on a successful delivery of ETH 2.0, the MetaCartel DAO formed to spur on the growth and development of applications.
Application development involves a rigorous understanding of the human experience involved with the application.
What emotions will the app inspire? Frustration? Confusion? Delight? Boredom? Excitement? Is the app intuitive to use for the crypto-native community? How about the normies? Will users be able to do something valuable in the first 30 seconds, or will they resort to scourging the internet reading crypto onboarding documents, throwing their phone on the ground because they don’t have MetaMask, not understand private keys?
These are the questions to be answered by the members of the MetaCartel community interested and inspired by the most successful onboarding technique today, the burner wallet.
With the announcement of the DAO in early May, the community brainstormed many fascinating ideas. What is the DAO? Will we follow Moloch and be solely grant giving? Could we build a proper decentralized accelerator-type community? How could the DAO create a sustainable resource for the ecosystem?
While answers to most of these questions continue to develop, a number of teams within the community did feel strongly about one factor: a need to prove that we are serious about UX. This amounted to a call for execution on a really sexi DAO app.
Teammates of Odyssy and Abridged came together to make this dream a reality, and guess what? She’s here, a DAO in our pockets.
The MetaCartel DAO community hopes to provide this app as a flagship example of the quality of experience we want to see emerge in Ethereum application development.
Let’s dive into the DApp!
The Purpose
Fork the Contracts, Iterate the Experience
We wanted to fork the Moloch contracts, but iterate forward on the product and user experience design of the DAO’s interface in order to open access/usability and enhance member participation and engagement, as well as sending a clear signal to the community about what we expect out of DApp usability going forward.
Here are some design decisions made based on feedback from members of Moloch and prospective members of the MetaCartel DAO.
Mobile First
Within the design space, we kept to a mobile-first UX-UI process, wrapping interactions into microinteractions. Technically, we began planning a native app but moved to a progressive web app (PWA) so we could iterate on one interface first, collect usability test feedback, and when stable ship to native if desired.
No Web3 or Metamask Required
A PWA is a great start, but we would still be locked into mobile DApp browsers if we used Metamask or other web3 authentication. Instead, we’re using contract wallets via the Abridged SDK. This has enabled us to use a familiar web2 registration process, where users sign up with a username and password and we initialize a contract wallet. We prompt the user to deposit funds into the wallet, at which point the wallet auto deploys to Mainnet, and the user can interact freely through the DApp on any device/browser. There are many more benefits and enhancements possible through the use of contract wallets and we look forward to maximizing its potential.
Data Viz
We’re starting by visualizing the historical data of transactions in and out of the DAO Bank, but look to expand this into many visualizations of useful data to help the DAO understand the current state of its health, and inform members towards what is needed to become even healthier (more sustainable).
Emojis as Governance
Though a couple members weren’t into it, the vast majority wanted to use emojis for the vote yes/no buttons on proposals. Through rigorous user testing 😂, we settled on 🤩 for ‘yes’ and 👎 for ‘no’.
This is all but the current state of the DApp, and we have a lot of interesting improvements to iterate on going forward, so follow along or join the #BUIDL effort within the MetaCartel community.
Explore the MetaCartel DAO DApp
Co-authored with James Duncan
