The User Experience of Blockchain Applications
Imagine your friend sends you a message on Facebook…you tap on the little chat box, and intuitively, a nice keyboard comes up where you don’t even have to think twice about how to search for a GIF and click send.
Think about the power of this usability for a minute…did you ever have to think about TCP/IP networking and Websockets when you sent that message? Did you have to think about databases, API’s, making sure Facebook fetched back the proper user account with your credentials?
Major companies invest copious amounts of money on making sure even babies won’t have a hard time navigating through an iOS application. In fact, usability has come so far that even cats are beating high scores on iPads.
“User experience design is the craft of shaping most satisfying experience possible given the purpose and constraints of any given interface”
When it comes to the current state of blockchain and decentralized applications, this is an entirely different story. One has to be fairly technical to even begin using Ethereum, let alone to transact and to use one’s own Ether on the web.
Blockchain User Experience
To use most decentralized applications built on Ethereum, one has to install Metamask through Google Chrome, buy Ether through an exchange, understand how to manage your keys to access your funds, pick a good wallet, and more.
In web development, UX is also about getting our users to hopefully use our app in the way we intend them to without requiring much guidance. This granularity of control is crucial when building abstractions on top of advanced technologies.
One of the goals of UX design is to achieve a required level of abstraction while maximizing usability for the end user. Right now, our tooling is not mature enough to build applications that jump through layers of abstraction and therefore we leave it to users to figure out many technical details that are completely tucked away in traditional apps.
Sure enough, we could abstract away these details and take this burden away from the user, but then the burden falls on the security and robustness of our tools, which still have a long way to go. To get to the point where using apps such as Facebook Messenger feels second-nature, designers and web architects needed to have enough confidence in the best practices of the underlying technologies to put the burden back on themselves.
So what’s a short term solution? What are ways people can build elaborate dApps that use their own tokens and complex protocols while allowing the layperson to interact with them?
One Solution: Hiding the Blockchain Technology Behind Abstractions
One way various blockchain companies that are going to market at the moment handle their user experience is to abstract away as much technical details of their blockchain from the client. Some are opting to use their technology in a B2B fashion and expose very little about their internals to their users. Winding Tree, for example, is a company that is using blockchain as a public ledger for travel bookings that will eliminate the need for intermediaries that typically inflate prices when people book their itineraries online.
Winding Tree’s model is fairly simple: company books and posts on a blockchain, customers go to a travel agent that then searches bookings available on this blockchain and pays the airline/hotel that posted it using a unique token that is specific to this ledger. The customer pays the agent in USD and the agent books the itinerary using his/her own amount of tokens based on the USD/token exchange rate.
From a client’s side, this user flow is exactly the same as the current system people are used to, where they simply find a travel agent and pay in USD to get a good booking, but there is far more happening behind the scenes between the agent and the airline.
In this case, blockchain is solving a very critical part of a sales process that typically requires third parties. The blockchain is used as a shared ledger that guarantees immutability and transparent transactions. The end user does not need to be aware of this making things as easy as they would have been before.
But What If We Do Want Blockchain to Be at the Front and Center of Our App?
All of this sounds great for now, but moving forward it is also critical to be able to transmit the added benefits of blockchain technology to our end users. How can we design applications with this in mind? Over the next few years, we will see a shift in how designers build blockchain systems for larger public adoption.
In the Short Term = Abstract the blockchain as much as possible to test the waters of decentralized applications
In the Long Term = Applications with an entire UX centered around the values of blockchain as a cornerstone. This is once our tooling is advanced enough for the public to use a blockchain application for its inherent values.
In the long term, we want users to clearly understand the benefits and safety of blockchain technology powering the apps they know and love. The decentralized web will be at the core of so many products that it will be impossible to ignore.
Build & Transmit User Experiences With the Key Values of Blockchain in Mind
What do I mean by this? For example, if I’m building a decentralized casino or gambling site, it is critical to transmit the idea of fairness and transparency as the key value props of using blockchain for this problem. I want my users to understand that this casino is fair and that the system is by no means rigged towards them.
This is going to be a major driver for the layperson to become very comfortable with using decentralized alternatives. We want our applications to give our users enough reasons not to use the centralized Internet, and with enough smart minds tackling this problem, we might get there even sooner than we might imagine.
I’m extremely excited about the future of UX in blockchain apps, so please leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
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