Design It Well and They Will Come: Blockchain Companies and dApps Must Focus on Design, UX & UI, to Carry Us Forward
This is a guest post by Menajem Benchimol of LATAM Blockchain.
Throughout history, the most influential tech entrepreneurs have had their take on what made their company stand out to become the best in their field: Healthy habits, education, community-driven, growth, work-ethic, trendsetter, focus, design. These are some skills and strategies they took upon themselves to follow religiously, based on their respective company’s strengths and needs at their respective investment or development phase.
Nir Eyal, the best-selling author of Hooked, said it best in an interview last year: the best technology doesn't always win the race. There are many factors for a company's success aside from backend tech, including but not limited to design, UX, UI, design, community, team, education, partnerships, positioning, etc.
Blockchain companies are no exception to this! Even if they have raised millions of dollars, launched a mainnet, and promised to revolutionize every industry with their technology. Whatever traction we in the industry had months ago — with buzzwords, ICO marketing, tremendous rise in prices, and industry disruption — won't work for mass adoption, now or ever.
Users AREN’T interacting with Dapps
This is a critical problem for the industry. Alongside some blockchain platforms launching their respective mainnets of late (EOS, Tezos, Vechain), some dApps have also unveiled their promise of decentralized applications to the public atop the Ethereum platform. You can invest in market predictions with Augur, create virtual worlds with Decentraland, and convert different tokens with Bancor.
Ambitious projects have been brought to life. It’s great, perhaps revolutionary technology, yet very few people interact with it. If we take into account the number of users using the dApp with their market cap, Augur would be worth $1 million per user, Decentraland $900,000, and Bancor $250,000.
Obviously, we cannot estimate value that way. Yet, it is a correlation for future adoption and growth.
If we are trying to save the world with trustless networks and decentralization, we have to either educate people on the necessity of such solutions — which might take years — or build dApps with the mentality to compete with conventional apps already on the market while having real end-users in mind. Decentralization should not be the selling point at this stage, not anymore. We have passed the phase of pioneering and early adoption. Now, blockchain is out in the open and needs to attract millions — if not billions — of users worldwide.
Problems nowadays
Yes, blockchain can solve some problems across verticals in different industries.
Blockchain is not here to kill industries but making them better, tokenizing/digitizing them. Just as the internet connected the world without killing communication, blockchain can provide P2P trust without killing industries.
Banks can benefit from real-time settlement and instant cross-border transactions; real estate firms can leverage smart contracts for trusted & transparent P2P transactions; the healthcare industry can use trustless networks to verify a patient’s account and medical history without compromising much, thus relying less on third parties.
Now, just because a blockchain company offers the tech to solve certain problems, it doesn't mean it will sell by itself even with such hype. Cryptocurrencies might have been the initial viral ‘app’ for blockchain technology’s breakout era to go beyond just Bitcoin, but it’s high time we adapt the chain for other uses:
Three Solutions to Blockchain’s Usability Problem:
- Design
- Growth
- Education
Design
“The world’s got problems. Crypto can facilitate solutions, but broad adoption of decentralized technologies hinges primarily on fixing usability and design in the industry — something that’s in shockingly short supply today. We can quantify the outperformance of companies that win on design, and the same will likely prove true for crypto communities. But what is design, really? In crypto, it’s a usability battle that’s as much as about designing for the wider ecosystem’s future needs as it is about today’s user needs.”
-Messari’s Unqualified Opinions Issue #3
There has been a massive influx of software engineers into the industry, but designers have not been enticed enough to make the leap. Some of the most successful companies in the world have been design-oriented as the product developed.
We have reached a stage in crypto that products are launching on their mainnets, yet the design of those applications are, frankly, unacceptable. Even an experienced crypto adopter will tell you they have had trouble interacting with certain dApps. We need to bridge the gap for designers to join the industry so they can improve and facilitate usability and more.
Check out this great article by Messari about design within the industry.
Growth
“Growth Hacking” has been a strategy used in the Valley and startups all over the world to reach certain milestones as fast as possible to thrive in a funding series. Dropbox, AirBnB, Instagram, and Robinhood were some of the pioneers of ‘hacking’ growth. Many techniques used nowadays to attract users into interacting with a certain startups’ products or services were taken from the growth hack playbook.
Coinbase wallet, Trust wallet, and Metamask are just some of wallets that support the interaction with dApps. They still need to be simplified in order to achieve their growth phase. This doesn't mean blockchain companies cant test their hand at growth by attracting users with techniques that have worked tremendously. Once a blockchain company has a solid design and tech to back it, founders should focus on growth to attract users to use their Dapps without them realizing its a Dapp.
Be aware that marketing stunts made by Tron, Electroneum, and others were not meant to grow their user base in any way. For example making an announcement about an announcement of a strategic partnership like Justin Sun did continuously on Twitter while its product being on testnet, or Electroneum and others paying high influencers such as John Mcafee to pump their price and raise awareness about their project. Their techniques were great, but now that they secured the funds to show a better design and product, they should focus on attracting users.
Education
Blockchain broke the news everywhere back in 2017 when almost every cryptocurrency and token reached ATH. People were attracted more by the price aspect, rather than usability or ‘disruption.’ As prices fluctuated, so did people’s belief in the industry, thus creating a fear about the blockchain industry. Every time someone asks me about blockchain, they are more interested in the price because they think its the only thing for blockchain. That, alongside many misconceptions, keeps people away from pursuing dApps, NFTs, security tokens, etc.
There have been some initiatives to educate people about the industry with different techniques and approaches. Consensys and Binance have launched their academies in English filled with blockchain education.
LATAM Blockchain together with Lumit Blockchain Tech in Mexico City have recently launched the Alpha testnet for our e-learning platform called Academia 21. We will focus on providing the power of micro and self-paced learning for the Spanish speaking community. If you are interested in collaborating feel free to reach out at info@LATAMblockchain.net to help Latino students, entrepreneurs, and professionals leapfrog and take advantage of this technological advancement.
The industry has a broad spectrum of topics to learn from like token economics, blockchain dev, regulatory frameworks, fundamentals, trading and more.
As blockchain leaders, it is our duty to educate and fill the knowledge gap all around the world if we want people to interact with this technological advancement. If we want mass adoption, we have to step up our game and help others learn what to do and interact with blockchain.
Menajem Benchimol is the co-founder of LATAM Blockchain, along with his partner Jaime Gutt. LATAM Blockchain maintains a consulting service for Latin American blockchain projects and a non-profit educational non-profit educational arm for the Spanish-speaking world.
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