Building for the New Internet

Oct 9, 2018 · 6 min read

In 2016, we started building the Blockchain University platform focused on community based peer to peer learning.

Being a team that is extremely critical about product design and human centered design principles, we were extremely troubled by distasteful state of every single application built on the blockchain.

While the landing page of every token sale platform looks decently designed, once you try to use the actual application (if it even exists), you would be thrown off right on the sign-up experience which involves extremely complicated steps of installing some plugins, saving complex passwords locally, filling up long forms and in most cases having to wait for 24–48 hours for account approvals.

We wanted to build our learning platform on the new internet but more than that, we wanted to build a mass consumer product that our users would not have to learn to use. The only UX we could accept was one which came naturally to every human. And since we recognised ourselves as a community where you come to learn about blockchain, our base premise was that you visit us without any knowledge of how blockchain works.

This was a huge challenge as most of the problems we were facing were not just because of poorly designed products but because of legitimate bottlenecks in this new immature technology. Here are some of the bottlenecks we had to come through:

1. Slow speed of transactions on the blockchain. Imagine working with a database that takes a few minutes to finish each operation!

2. Extremely high & variable cost of transactions. How do you decide to sell something at a fixed price when your input costs can vary every day?

3. Working with complex blockchain wallets. Because of the way cryptography works, you need to use a private key file to unlock your wallet every time you take an action on the blockchain.

4. Jargons! Tokens, key files, wallets, transactions, gas, miners and tons more!

These are just some of the problems we had while designing our platform.

As you can see, solving them was not just a design problem but we needed a holistic human centered design rethinking on every aspect including technology, content and design.

How did we solve it?

theblockchainu.com is the first dApp built for blockchain education

Our biggest breakthrough was when our tech stalwarts designed a revolutionary hybrid-chain solution where we built a proprietary orchestration layer that worked on top of a permissioned and permission-less blockchain together. The best of 2 most popular types of blockchain architectures were to inter-operate using our custom service. One way to understand the beauty and value of this solution is to realize the impact it created:

Our transaction speeds increased from
1 transaction per 3 mins to > 10,000 transactions per 3 mins
Our cost of transactions came down from
Rs. 10 / transaction to Rs. 0.10 / transaction
Percentage of variable costs came down from 100% to 5%

2. Our distributed architecture team worked hard on creating a secure wallet management system that made blockchain wallets work transparently in the background without a single extra button click by users.

The result of this was one of the first seamless sign-up flow for new users on any blockchain product. Using FB, Google, LinkedIn or just email, users could create a blockchain wallet and continue operations without having to worry about private keys, plugins or even constant password prompts.

3. And finally, our content and UX team worked their magic in designing a user experience that unlearns all jargons used by existing blockchain applications.

Our UX premise was based on the idea that users do not need to experience or feel the need to understand complex terms unless they want to. Instead of fluffing our platform with blockchain jargons and join the heard, we made sure blockchain worked silently in the background and adds value to users without them even knowing it exists.

Users come to the platform because of the content and the community and not because it’s built on the blockchain. On the blockchain U, tokens are presented as easily understandable credits, visually manifested as shareable certificates. Complex gas costs are absorbed into course fees without users ever realizing its there.

There’s a lot more that happens under the hood to achieve a single goal of seamless & intuitive user experience.

Where are we today?

Blockchain U Bangalore community at our weekend Open Labs

We are live in production since the last 6 months (https://theblockchainu.com) and have been getting on new registered users everyday at a rate that is constantly increasing. In terms of marketing as well, we have been constrained and have had to innovate.

So the thing with marketing a blockchain related event or content on social media is that every company from Facebook to Google to LinkedIn have policies against it. Especially so when you are a company with Blockchain in its name. And this can be disastrous when one of your major marketing source was to be social media, as is the case with any e-learning company today.

Even our marketing team put their heads down and started working on a new strategy to build our community — offline!

In the last 2 years, we have a blockchain developer community of over 1500, we have hosted over 200 Open Labs, meetups, bootcamps, online classes, hackathons etc. We are currently active in 9 cities across 4 countries.

Recently we launched our free certified blockchain training track for colleges which are run through college ambassadors we are actively appointing in various colleges all over the world. BU provides the classroom content for these courses, free access to mentors and an expert instructor within the college community on the platform.

We are also doubling down on creating new programs for technical and non-technical audience. One such extremely popular programme is ‘Design Thinking for the New Internet’.

Official communities from partner companies at Blockchain U platform

We now work with over 15 blockchain companies from US, UK and China to be their official training partners, co-creating content, handling certifications and giving them access to the community.

New reward bounties announced on Blockchain U platform

The newest feature on the platform is Reward Bounties, which allow our partner companies to announce rewards for hiring, competitions, bugs etc. and gives the community an opportunity to work on impactful challenges.