The 6 Essentials for Good Crypto UX

7000 DAI in Hacker Prizes Available for the Pepo #ETHDenver 2020 UX Awards!

Pepo is thrilled to partner with ETHDenver to award the ETHDenver 2020 UX Awards.

We’ll also be hosting a workshop at ETHDenver on Friday 14 February with tips and best practices for designing good crypto UX.

UX Awards Awards Any Hacking Team Can Win

We have 7000 DAI in prizes available for projects demonstrating great UX.

• The team chosen with the #1 best UX will win 3000 DAI
• Two runner-ups will each receive 2000 DAI

😲The UX Awards are technology agnostic — every hacking team at ETH Denver can submit for the UX Awards.

If you’re looking to BUIDL a project with great UX, here are six essential components. We’ll be evaluating projects for UX Awards at ETH Denver based on these criteria. Even if you won’t be attending, we hope these ideas can serve as inspiration as you design and optimize your own UX. We wish you the best of luck!

Good UX is about solving real problems

Good UX is not just about graphic design or user interface. A high-quality user experience requires a seamless merging of engineering, product, and design. It’s about the totality of the solution: its story, its architecture, its implementation. Most importantly, good UX solves a real problem. The user’s need is central — good UX starts with understanding a need and delivering a better solution.

6 Essential Components

1. Use Case

No app can succeed without a real use case. This has often been a problem for the crypto space, which has been a launchpad for too many solutions in search of problems. But simply identifying a problem isn’t enough. A good UX must effectively solve the problem.

At Pepo, we call this “Yes, but, so, how.”

• Yes, there are people who need something.
• But, there’s a problem that stops them from fully achieving it.
• So, we build a product to solve their problem. Here’s how it does that.

An intuition is not enough — it’s essential for builders to do meaningful research, to meet the people whose problems they hope to solve.

• Does the project identify a meaningful problem that needs to be solved
• Are there real people poised to adopt the solution?

These are questions that must be answered in establishing a robust use case.

2. Focus on Users

The mantra for good UX is users, users, users! Without an earnest commitment to the needs and habits of their target audience, new apps are bound to fail. Devs need to ask themselves:

• Are the user interface and flow intuitive?
• What obstacles are there to getting users on the platform, and how can those be mitigated?
• What will make people want to keep using the app?
• Is the product more convenient than existing alternatives or competitors?

Inertia is a powerful human force. User experience must be air-tight to convince large numbers of people to change their routines and adopt a new product. No matter how powerful the use case, how real the problem, how deeply researched the rationale, an app that doesn’t make it crisp and easy for new people to use is going to encounter strong headwinds.

3. Relevance

The next key to good UX is relevance: does the project represent a significant improvement over the status quo?

To be successful and gain users, any new product must create new, real value for the user groups it has identified. To illustrate the point: a car that gets double the gas mileage of last year’s model, or a blockchain platform with transaction processing speeds 10x those of its peers, would obviously offer a real benefit to their target audiences.

While it’s impossible to predict the reception a new app will receive (if it were, there’d be a lot more billionaires around), founders and devs can and should quantify a project’s relevance as much as possible. Measuring task times, data quality, incidence of errors, and other metrics can help teams see clearly how much of a benefit a solution offers over existing options, and where its weaknesses might be. This understanding is key to delivering the strongest possible product to users.

4. Empowerment & Adoption

This may seem like a broad concept, but it’s particularly key in the crypto space, where projects have sometimes struggled to grow beyond existing blockchain audiences. Good UX facilitates further adoption and usage of blockchain technology, strengthening inclusion and participation. It opens up new potential avenues for further exploration and development, and enables access to new fields and applications of knowledge.

A truly excellent UX must expand the universe of the possible. For a crypto project, that means using blockchain technology to make something better, not just bearable. Pepo users can send and receive tokens without any need to use an exchange, install a wallet, or even know they’re using a crypto app at all. It’s this kind of seamless experience, where dapps feel just like apps, that a crypto UX needs to succeed.

5. Innovation

It sounds obvious, but great UX should be innovative. It should achieve things other solutions have not, and empower users in new ways. This innovation can take many forms. At one end of the spectrum, a great product can bring a whole new experience to people — think of the Internet or the iPhone. But UX can also succeed by approaching long-standing processes from new angles. A good UX can take something that requires 10 steps and cut it to two, while making the steps themselves easier and more intuitive. Above all, innovation must solve a real problem, using novel technologies to add value for its target audience.

As an example, the Pepo app contains a seamlessly embedded smart contract wallet that interacts with a Gnosis Safe multisig. It also makes use of meta-transactions. This enables UX-driven innovations such as not requiring users to have “gas” for transactions, not requiring users to manually sign low value transactions, and being able to recover wallets using 6 digit PIN recovery from contract.

6. Responsibility

This is the wild card. Sure, there are plenty of successful apps with lots of users and impressive revenues that don’t necessarily contribute much to society. But we want to do better. The crypto community is united by a commitment toleave the world a better place than we found it through this technology. So when we evaluate crypto UX, we are looking for this element of responsibility.

Does the project contribute to strengthening social cohesion? Does it further openness? Will it help democratize access and power around technology? Will it contribute to sustainable principles and resource conservation? Above all, does it contribute to the common good? As crypto developers who believe we have a responsibility not just to our shareholders, but to our communities and the world we all live in, responsibility is as crucial to UX as anything else.

We’re putting UX to the test at ETHDenver

At ETHDenver, devs will have the chance to show us just how seamless a crypto UX can be. The contest is technology agnostic, so you can build anything you want. Simplicity, elegance, convenience — these are the things we’re looking for, as part of products that make life easier in some way and are intuitive and a joy to use.

All you need to do to enter the UX Awards is:

1. Build something awesome that meets the criteria above.
2. Download Pepo (if you haven’t yet!) and record a team video with the hashtags #ETHDenver and #UXawards on the video description. The video should link to the project (code, devfolio, GitHub).
3. Then on Sunday, find the Pepo team and walk us through your project and why you think it deserves to win a UX Award!

Whether you’re there to build or just to learn, we invite everyone who’s planning to be at ETHDenver to come see the UX Awards, and to learn more about Pepo and the OST technology that powers it. See you in the Rockies!