UX for Cryptocurrencies — The Revolution Won’t Happen Without It (Part 1 of 3)

It only takes a brief attempt at purchasing Bitcoin to realize how immature the technology is and how far away we are from consumer-ready crypto products that normal people can use effectively. The User Experience (UX)* problems range from basic UI design issues, to underlying flaws in crypto-architecture, to problems with business models. Bad UX is everywhere in this space, and the consequences are users losing large amounts of money, sub-optimal user adoption, and woefully insufficient levels of security.

This three-part article explores the typical experience of a crypto users, followed by a look at macro-level UX issues in the crypto-currency ecosystem, followed by a look at the future of crypto design. The last section paints a vision of what traits a user-centered crypto ecosystem would have and tells a story of a future user’s experience to contrast with the present-day experience shown below.

If you lose this code, or have it stolen, you lose all of the money in this wallet. Period. This is the first bank in history that has ever offered this “feature”. You may also be asked to enter this code by hand.

Let’s follow the typical task flow of a cryptocurrency user and see where the problems arise.

THE TYPICAL CRYPTO EXPERIENCE

1. Find Something to Purchase: There are a number of comparison sites, but it’s typically difficult to even get a short description of what each currency is. For newbies it is very difficult to determine whether it is a token or not, which blockchain it uses, and whether it is more of a store of value or medium of exchange. This part may always be a bit obscure, but there needs to be more transparency and easier access to basic information. Some cryptos have hardly anyone that knows they exist, and poor communication with those that do, meaning that their brand development is very poor. Dogecoin does not have this recognition problem (see image below).
2. Find Out How Much It Is: This is more difficult than it sounds. Different exchanges have different prices for the same currency. This is often hidden from the purchaser, and they can easily pay more than they need to. To make matters worse, prices are often given in BTC. Would you pay ฿0.00000503 for 1.0 altcoin? Now you need to find a calculator.
3. Find Where to Purchase It: Not all currencies are available on every exchange. It is necessary to view a site that lists exchanges for a currency. Once you find an exchange that has what you want, for the price you want, you probably need to create a new account there.
4. Create An Account: In some cases account creation is fast, but in other cases it can take days or longer. Sometimes you are asked to validate bank accounts or enter your fiat bank’s credentials. The price of your currency may have changed significantly by the time you are actually able to make a purchase.
5. Navigate the Terrible UI: The usability of exchanges are pretty much uniformly terrible. There are a few exceptions such as CoinBase and Gemini which are decent. Have a look at the photo-cloud below for a huge number of examples of UX issues on these sites. Problems range from inaccurate error messages, to hidden information in obscure formats, to complex financial language, and insufficient feedback. Some of it is intercultural (say for Chinese designers building English-language UIs for Americans), but it’s clear that most of these companies don’t have UX departments, and even their support teams don’t understand the impact of usability problems. (see examples below)
6. Discover You Can’t Buy What You Want With Fiat Currency: What typically happens at this stage is that you discover that you can’t use your credit card, bank account, or any fiat currency (e.g. USD, EUR, etc) to purchase the crypto-currency you want. This is due to a complex system where certain exchanges support fiat, and those same exchanges only support a few cryptocurrencies. So it is pretty much impossible to simply buy altcoins directly (without paying ridiculously high fees)**. You will have to go through two or more exchanges. The IRS must hate this as much as the users because it means that purchases from US-based exchanges immediately leave those accounts and go to exchanges overseas, which is where the actual profit-making occurs.
7. Go To A Different Exchange That Accepts Fiat: Once you find the other exchange that works in your local currency, you may need to wait days to do a bank transfer of your fiat. Or you can choose to charge a credit card or debit card. If you do that, you’ll be charged an exorbitant cash advance fee for the privilege if you’re lucky, and if you’re unlucky it will be rejected since credit card companies are freaking out about you being able to buy things that will probably replace their own services with their cards. After that, you can purchase Bitcoin, ETH, or another primary crypto-currency. Once that is complete, you will need to transfer it again to an exchange. Every transfer, conversion, and purchase will have a fee associated with it, so they will nickel and dime you at every step. This gives you incentives to never do anything with your coins once you finally have them — which is precisely what everyone is doing at the moment — hodling.
8. Try to Determine How Much The Final Cost Is: After you have paid to convert your fiat, and paid for your transfer to the exchange, you won’t be done paying fees yet. There is typically a fee that the blockchain charges to make a transfer between currencies, and this varies by currency. There may also be a fee charged by the exchange. It may not always be very clearly stated. (see some of the photos below)
9. Make Your Purchase and Pray: Purchases typically take several steps for various security and usability confirmations to occur. When you finish these, it may not be entirely clear whether your transaction was accepted. If you do manage to find the screen showing the status of your trade, it is likely to say something unclear like “pending”. It can sit like that for seconds or days. Occasionally you can check the progress of the transaction directly via the blockchain, but few sites bother to add this into their own trade history screens. There is also the possibility that you sent your coins to the wrong address, so even if the transfer is successful you still need to check the destination to see if it arrived. Most sites don’t save your destination addresses for future re-use, and confusingly some people advise you to never use the same destination wallet twice for “security”. Frequently these systems have delays so the sender might say that it is sent, and the destination may not recognize it for a while longer. In the meantime you’ll be pulling your hair out.
10. Panic That Your Purchase Isn’t Safe and Find Alternative Storage: Exchanges are getting hacked all the time (CoinCheck, Bitgrail) and even if they’re not, they can go down for days at a time with no reason given (Binance), or simply stop allowing you to use certain currencies you own (Cryptopia). Finding an exchange that is stable, understandable, and trustworthy is pretty much impossible. The only safe way to store your coins is to put it in a paper wallet or a hardware wallet. Hardware wallets only accept a limited number of currencies and you place your faith in one company. Paper wallets typically use a white-labeled and poorly designed open-source wallet generator from an unknown developer. Different paper wallets have different names for keys, different numbers of keys (some have three), different types of key formats, and different ways of asking you to secure them — all of which adds to the confusion. So pick your poison.
11. Transfer Your Funds To Paper or Hardware Wallet: You will get dinged again when you transfer your coins to a wallet since transfers aren’t free. It can also be challenging to check your personal wallet balance after a transfer — something which any basic ATM does by default. Electroneum for example doesn’t offer a simple wallet balance feature, and either requires use of command-line tools to check transactions or demands that you download the entire blockchain to confirm your holdings. Once you finally manage to confirm your wallet balance you can relax — until you actually need to use that currency. Then you need to figure out how to get it back into an exchange (another fee) and then back into fiat, if that’s what you were looking for**. For certain altcoins it is surprising difficult to use coins, often requiring installation of software-based hot wallets to make an initial withdrawal.

The entire process listed above is exhausting, fraught with stress, frequently flirts with disaster, and requires a large learning curve — exactly what the world’s greatest financial solution ever should be like, right?

Dogecoin piggypacked off a popular doge dog meme which makes them widely known.

A typical exchange interface showing balances and current transaction status for various crypto-currencies.

Follow me now to get updated on the two remaining parts of this article: 2) Macro-level UX Issues and 3) A Better Future.

APPENDIX

Further examples of the dismal state of crypto-currency ecosystem usability:

*UX encompasses UI, and also focuses on overall task flows, user satisfaction, overall efficiency, and satisfying user requirements. It commonly encompasses multiple products, organizations, technologies, and both digital and analog artifacts.
**This could be getting easier with services like ShapeShift but you will be paying for the convenience of not having to use multiple exchanges.

Note: This article is part of content produced for the blog TravelUX.