Blockchain Assumptions

Over the past half year or so, I’ve gotten very interested in blockchain technology. My initial interest was sparked by how intriguingly unintuitive the technology seemed to be. There seemed to be so many things going on in such unusual ways that it was difficult to latch onto an analogy we are all familiar with to explain. Due to this, I feel good design is critical especially at this stage of the technology’s development to encourage adoption.

One concern I had was to ensure that the use case of the technology introduced novel enough interactions that it presented a unique and interesting interaction design challenge.

I did a quick presentation on the subject and proposed designing a platform to make creating and deploying smart contracts on ethereum easy and code free, similiar to squarespace or wordpress for web pages. I got some valuable feedback to focus more on what the technology enables and why people should care than on the database architecture and technical workings.

I additionally made a map of assumptions I have about the space to help me focus in on assumptions to try to test through a prototype.