Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - DappCon 2019 – Look at My Flashy Colors 
And Rounded Corners!

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

As we take some time to record new interviews, we're releasing content from DappCon which took place in Berlin in August. This week, you'll hear a panel moderated by Sebastien on usability and user experience in blockchain-based apps and products.The panelists where Chriss Sugg of AirSwap, Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation, Itamar Lesuisse or Argent and Pedro Gomez of Wallet Connect.Topics covered in this episode:The state of usability in the blockchain spaceHow evolving technology inform concepts in user experienceBuilding products in Web2.0 vs. Web 3Creating dialog between engineers and designersWhy crypto product haven't gained adoption from non-crypto savvy peopleAdoption of crypto by the unbankedGathering usage data for the purpose of product developmentEpisode links: Chriss Sugg on TwitterAlex Van de Sande on TwitterPedro Gomez on TwitterItamar Lesuisse on TwitterCommunity manager job postingDAPPCONThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/307

Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastnik with you. I hope you're all having a great week. I am happy to be back in Paris after spending some time in Tel Aviv. I got to say, though, the temperature difference is really, really rough. It's hard to go from a warm and sunny Middle Eastern climate to whatever's happening in Europe right now. But I'm happy to be home and I plan to stay put here for the next little while. A lot of you are probably on your way Japan or even already in Japan as this comes out. As I've mentioned before, I've decided to pass on DevCon this year. I really need to hunker down and do some work. I'll be following closely though, probably watching many of the talks on the live stream. I will miss the mingling and the parties and meeting with all of you, but sometimes, you know, you just got to resist the FOMO. And that's what I'm doing this year. Sunny and Frederica will be there, so you should definitely reach out if you want to meet up with them. Frederica will be giving a talk with Stefan George of Nosis, titled Conditional

Tocons Road to Futarki, which sounds really interesting. I'm looking forward to that one. And Sunny will be giving a talk titled conservative approach to a radical roadmap. And I can only imagine what that's about. So these are both happening on day four of DevCon. So check the schedule if you'd like to sit in on those. We're taking the next two weeks to record some interviews. and we'll be releasing some content from DAPCon, which happened in Berlin in August.

Today you'll hear my panel about UX and Design, which is titled, Look at My Flashy Colors and Rounded Corners. So when the NOSIS team asked me to moderate this panel, I thought that UX probably wasn't the thing that most people would be super excited about. So I suggested this tongue-in-cheek title to try to entice people to come. It kind of worked. But even though it's slightly facetious, I think it's somewhat, characterizes maybe with some exaggeration what I think most non-product people think design is about.

Of course, it's about so much more than just aesthetics and it goes to the very core of what a product is and why it should even exist. The panelists were Chris Sugg of AirSwap, Alex Vandesande of the Ethereum Foundation, Itamar Lus Tris of Argent and Pedro Gomez of Wallet Connect. I really enjoyed monitoring this panel. first of all because the panelists were just a really high caliber, but also because I think UX is something that should be at the core of everything we do in this industry. I think collectively we should always be asking questions like who is this product for

and why are we building this and that would greatly benefit many of the things that are being built in this ecosystem. So I hope you will enjoy this conversation and if you have any comments with thoughts about it, please reach out to me on Twitter. Next week we'll have Sunny's Tales of Governance panel with Amin Soleimani, Sebastian Gaiyke, Jorge Iskieldo, and Stephanie Herder. So look forward to that one as well. And Sonny Frederica and I also did a live recording of Epicenter on stage at the conference. The video of this conversation is already up on our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash epicenter podcast. And we might also just release this as a bonus episode sometime next week.

So one last thing before today's episode, we're hiring a community manager. Epicenter's grown a lot in the last couple of years and it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain consistency around promoting the podcast. So I'm looking for someone who can take ownership of communications. This person should be passionate about the crypto space and be eager to learn and educate others. I'm looking for someone with social media growth experience, good writing skills, and importantly, someone who's organized. So if you recognize yourself in what I just described, please go to Cryptojobslist.com to apply.

You'll see the posting in the featured listings on the homepage, and you can apply directly on the website. I look forward to your applications. And I'd like to thank my friend Rahman for featuring our listing. Rahman is the one-man team behind Crypto Jobs List. He's been running this website by himself for two years and has grown it from a Google form to what it is today. It's really a fantastic resource for the crypto space.

And if you're looking to hire someone for your team, you should definitely consider using crypto jobs list and supporting Raman's work. So with that, here's my UX panel at DabCon. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for this panel on usability, where I hope we'll get to the bottom of the age-old question of should we have thin rounded corners or fat rounded corners or drop shadows flat or no flat

and all these really important questions that are core to bringing more users to the space no i'm kidding um i hope we'll get to talk about more important things than that so i'm sebastian quichu i'm the host of epicenter and i'm here today with uh four experts on the topics of usability user experience and design and uh we've got a list of topics of topics of usability user experience and design and uh we've got a list of here to talk about today and I hope we all learn something from the panel of experts. So first I'd like to get everybody to introduce themselves and just briefly talk about what they're up to. I guess I'll go first. My name is Chris Sugg. I am a UX, UI designer from AirSwap. Basically what we're trying to do is create a network for peer-to-peer trade. We have a suite

of products right now that are aiming towards that. I think I'm probably the least technical on this panel, so I'm going to be the sort of brazen advocate for design throughout. But nice to meet you. I'm Alex. I'm a designer. I've been with the OATM Foundation for four years now, but now I'm focusing on another project called Universal Logins, which is later focused on how do we get users on board without any ever having to do, like just one click without seed phrases, without passwords and browser extensions. Hi, I'm Pedro. I'm not a designer. A lot of people think I am, but it's just a developer that

actually cares about users, which is kind of like a designer. So I work on Wallet Connect and Web3 Connect, which are two developer tools that allow for a better user experience for private key management and authenticating with your wallet. Hi, I'm Itamar. I'm actually colorblind, so definitely not a designer. I'm the founder of Argent, and Argen is really, we try to be the wallet for the next billion users, abstracting every single piece of complexity within the Atherm experience. Great, thank you. So I'd like to get a sense of where we are at this particular time and get your thoughts on how the space specifically regards to usability is evolving. And what I mean by that is you know, let's look back a year or maybe even two years,

and what are the types of things that we're seeing now emerge in applications and specifically features that, you know, weren't possible a year or two years ago because the technology underneath it wasn't mature enough? So, like, what are the types of things you're seeing in that front? Are we going in a row? Okay. No, I'm happy to whoever.

We're just trying to think before speaking, you know. I think for us, we see a lot of the building blocks were probably there, some of them. So important building blocks for origins are, for example, meta-transactions, so it allows us to abstract gas, pay for the gas. But it's been there for, I think, four years. The ideas were there. So we were able to start almost two years ago with that. But then I think new building blocks came on the way.

So Wallet Connect, Universal Login, were just ideas. when we started and suddenly now we have a way to interact with DAPS. And then use case came in the form of compound, of maker, that were not there before. And so suddenly now we're in a place where, I would say, a few months from now, Argen will be able to sell a product to non-crypto people where they can open a savings account. And that would not have been possible two years ago. Cool. I'd like to come back to that point of non-crypto people later on the panel. Just so we don't make a line, I'm going to go there.

So I think it's interesting that, and I want to compliment, that none of those things are possible right now are possible because, oh, in the last hard fork, we had this specific ZK, whatever, right? I think all of those building blocks are just things that were always there, but we have been just maturing, maturing, maturing, right? Right now we have things like compound, which is there because there's dye, which is there, because it's everything is, it's, those are like building blocks are just being mature enough and having enough things that we can build upon them. And like metatransactions, for instance, though that's, that's it, the name of the transaction exists for a year. The concept has existed for like two or three years, but the name and then people building stuff on top of it has. has been something that existed basically for a year. Yeah, and something that has helped a lot is that this kind of infrastructure as open source,

like that it's not common with Web 2, a much better composability. And sometimes it kind of like just commoditized what it is to kind of have these technologies, and people can just like build different interfaces, which are just kind of different flavors that are optimized for different experiences. But there,

It's not even on the back end. We're talking even on the client's side. The same thing, but just different iterations of the same thing. And we can just kind of experiment more and learn from each other. So it kind of has helped not only developers, but users as well. Yeah. And to build off of some of what you said, I think for us, it's not that there has been something necessarily in the industry at large that has changed everything. But I think it's been this sort of iterative dance between our technology,

and how that is evolving as well as the design that we've implemented on top of it and how we have continued to iterate upon user experience flows. So an example here would be like really annoying setup steps for a Dex, like approvals or unwrapping and wrapping with. These are things that we had implemented in previous products and we've been able to really take a look at them, gather feedback and create much more usable flows. So now instead of having them as sort of individual clicks that a user needs to do,

they're baked into a greater flow and there's more guidance there. And then that's paired with a ton of technical innovation as well that I can rattle off. But if you want anything deeper than rattling, we'll have to do like a three-way call with one of our developers later. Well, so I'd like to tie that back into your background because I think of this panel, you're the one who's been in the space for the least amount of time, and you come from a more traditional Web 2 background and deeply in sort of the marketing of like user applications

around that sense. From entering the space, what are the sort of differences in building products that you've seen like between Web 3 and Web 2, specifically from a product perspective? How do you see that sort of shift? Yeah, for sure. I think for us, again, it's really been sort of a journey.

When I first started, we have a product that probably none of you know unless you're OTC traders, but it's called spaces. And basically when we were building this product, we had this really grand idea of this whole, like, social trading ecosystem. Like, it had everything from one-on-one chats to group chats, to like this activity feed, where you're seeing trades, to the actual trades themselves.

And I think that a lot of what we were doing there was sort of trying to take Web 2 and put it on top of Web 3. and we've really learned from that partly because adoption was a little slow there. And so we just released a new product, which is actually just one piece of that product that has been pulled out and sort of reimagined in a much more primitive way. And I think that our goal there is to just sort of let it live and see what kind of natural behavior comes from it, as opposed to trying to impose any kind of specific experience, but to wait and kind of see what experiences come about. Anything you want to add on that? I mean, I think you said Maril, so you came

from a more traditional Web 2 background, you know, building products in the Web 3 space. What are the differences, the fundamental differences in how one should approach product development? It's a good question. You didn't prepare us for that one. I think I don't know if it's that different. I mean, building a product people want to use is really hard, whether you're on Web 2, web 3. And I think my previous company, I mean, we were, our stack was AWS for infrastructure, and I don't think I was pitching to investors in AWS company. I mean, we were doing brain training games. And I think the same, it doesn't matter that you use Web 3. It's about what can you solve, what product can you build that user will want. And I think because we have that new

stack, we can do things we couldn't do before. But the problem is the same. It's about building something people want to use. And I think a lot of the friction with things there because of Web 3 can be moved away. Or at least, you can build layers that will hide a lot of that complexity. And for me, the main example was we arrive in the space, maybe a bit newer.

I think I arrived in the space two and a half years ago, three years ago. And just there was no way for me a billion people would have a seat phrase on a piece of paper. And I honestly don't believe anyone really believes a billion people will have a piece of paper with a sit phrase. And so we just spent probably a year just getting rid of that in a way that would still be non-custodial and decentralized. So it's really up to us to build what we think people will want to use.

So to add on that, on that idea of like a designer with no, a designer coming in, right? I've been here for a while. And when I started, there was how much. most no designers. I was one of the few ones. And then I'm very happy to see that they've started come. And there was this idea that there is like it's very impossible for a designer to get here because he needs to understand both blockchain and design. But I would argue that for a designer, this has always been the case. Right. If your designer, you don't understand like what's happening behind the sins, then you're just copying what other designers do. Like every single good web designer Like if you go back years would be like, oh, you're doing something different that nobody noticed that was possible before.

The first guy to use like a video as a background was someone that understood how much a video would wait and how much sort of impact that would have. The first person to use JavaScript as a design element was probably a designer who had understanding. Maybe if he wasn't a JavaScript developer, he had to have an understanding that JavaScript is something that I can use for some type of animation. So I think that has always been the case, right? And just a small ad there. I think that what's interesting about this space and something that our product manager sort of espouses constantly is that design really pushes development. And so in a way, it's helpful to come from outside to not totally understand the technical constraints. because for developers who have built most of the products that we're using,

they have those constraints in their head, and it's blocking them from getting outside of that into new experiences. And so I think that it's really important to bring designers into the space that have those new perspectives to push it forward. I think it's a great way point because in the end it's a conversation between the front end and the back end. And the conversation usually goes like this, like a designer creates. I want to do this and then someone says, you can do that that doesn't work that way and then you have to have some some sort of like

arguments saying no no I think we can do that why can't we do that and then you have to understand why you can't then you have to think oh but maybe if we change this maybe we could right and you're not actually making a very technical thing or just doing hey I mean we doing those restraints are you giving me maybe if you push the push the envelope a little bit that way it's not going to be so hard to develop it and suddenly like the either experiences is so much better. I love my peers. I would like to work with them because the best designers are the ones who actually understand the concepts that you don't really need to code. You just need to know a very high level kind of like the capabilities and kind of work in this two-way communication

with the developer. And I think one of the things that kind of differentiates the work that I do is that I kind of try to like build software around the experience instead of the experience around the software. And it's the only reason like wallet connect is seen as like a usability tool because at the end of the day it's a developer tool. It's an end-to-end communication protocol. But it was built based on the experience of the user first and then kind of try to solve the technical problems.

And I think it's really good that like designers kind of grasped those concepts. That point you were just mentioning was it kind of reminded me of a, the sort of early days of Web 2, you know, as someone who worked on front-end development, designers would make these mock-ups, and I'd be like, well, I can't make these because, like, IE6 doesn't have the ability to do all this stuff that you would like to do. So, yeah, I think that conversation between the designer and the developer and the blockchain space perhaps has a little bit of that element where because conventions don't exist and because the technology is so new and we'd love to be able to do all these great

things, but maybe the building blocks aren't always there to do so, so you need to have that sort of close conversation between designers and developers, and designers like back then, sort of have to be a little technical-minded to know what's possible and what's impossible. Is that an experience that you guys have had? Yeah, basically, like you said, it's a national technology. This is all very new, and even at the beginning of the Internet, the concept of, like, connecting to a website or sending an email kind of had to be, like, you know, put the burden on the user.

But as we create different tools and components that we put together, we can abstract them because that's the challenge that we're all facing every day. It's kind of like without removing these kind of cryptoprimidus that still allow the consent of the users to approve and sign messages, but still kind of allow that smooth experience. We don't completely have to centralize technology. We just are having these beautiful challenges every day of like, how can I do this differently,

that the user are still aware. of like what is doing without having this friction of having extremely technical. And I have to compliment what you say. I'm very happy that that conversation between designers and the back end and engineers move beyond from, I really want this to be centered aligned on like on vertical line. Though that is important. Exactly. From like how much entropy does this process have that we will be able to like let's say hold $10, right?

Okay, yeah, it makes sense. Doing the center line was hard. One of the points that I wanted to bring up also has been brought up here is figuring out what users need, and that's really what building a product is all about. Is this product

going to be used because is it solving the needs of my users? I would argue that there's a couple of things there that don't always hold up. And one of those things is that crypto adoption for what I like to call the non-crypto nerds, consider all of us here to be crypto-nerds.

It's probably not on the rise, or the growth rate isn't as high as we would like. Where do you think that is in terms of our ability to really understand what people need and what non-crypto-nerds would be using this technology for? So I like that you're using the term non-crypto nerds, right? And I think like you can... I want to coin the, like,

I think a metric for growth in the space should be monthly active non-crypto nerds. No, it's interesting, right? because you can argue about what is a non-crypto nerd. I think you could say that everyone is a geek of something, right? Maybe you're not a gig of blockchain, but maybe you're a geek for gardening or maybe you're a geek for cooking. And that's important, right?

Your brain is already occupied with all of those complex things. You shouldn't have to worry about all those other things. All we want to do is, as he said, like you want a normal person, which is, I think it's a medical creature, like this normal average user doesn't exist, but you want to reach that mythical creature and just have, look, you can have a saving account, right? I can offer you something that you have a saving account

which is probably better than your current bank, right? And why don't you just try this out, right? I would like to fork this panel to now define what a nerd is. So basically, I think every time we kind of define like a nerd or a lazy user or a dumb user, it's just a lack of motivation. Like we just kind of have to like direct and kind of poke around and see where the motivations are that we can drive these audiences that are non-crypto nerds. Because the crypto nerds are just motivated by the technology itself, but users will be motivated by other motivations like a game or maybe a savings account.

So my experience so far in the last six months has been that I've had big trouble onboarding non-crypto people. But since Compon has been around, it's been pretty easy because now. the motivation is not about having a private key that you own and control your data, but having a better rate than your savings accounts. So the motivation was there for them to do the steps, even if the usability wasn't there. I think, from your perspective, I think the two of you just summarized it well. I think first, let's stop waiting for mass adoption. I think we all wait for mass adoption and we must be the most patient people in the world because it will never happen. There will never be a billion people using crypto the way we use it today.

Whether it's a sit-phrase, signing transaction, typing long, public address, it will not happen. I mean, it's a fact. I mean, I can bet everything I want to inaugur it will not happen. So it's about using the technology to start not building products they want. And we can be a bit opportunistic. So I think the savings account, we believe in it is a bit opportunistic. It won't last forever. You cannot match a billion people in companies.

on to the margin trader of today. But today, it's already amazing value of crypto. You are disintermediating a lot of people, and suddenly you match this margin trader, who are ready to pay 15, 16% interest rate to borrow

die, and suddenly you can put retail, normal, non-crypto nerd users who just wants a non-risk, relatively non-risk savings account, and suddenly they can get great interest rate. It's a great proposition. It might last a year to years, but you are suddenly bringing people in this parallel universe, and there will be new

opportunities. In six months, in one year, there will be another compound, and new opportunities that can only be possible in this space. So we were arguing about this a little bit earlier, but it's not that I disagree. I think definitely we need to build products that these users actually want, but I think that there is also an optimistic kind of option where we're sort of preparing the ground now. And so I think of it, this is a very weird metaphor and just track with me for a second. But I was talking to a friend who comes from the Christian tradition. And there's this phrase, it's called the already but not yet. And so within Christianity, apparently, it refers to the son of God already having been

crucified, but has not yet made the world perfect. And so the life of this Christian person is one of going through a life where they've been sacrificed for, but it's still so. sucks. So I kind of think of, I kind of think of the Ethereum ecosystem in the same way that we're in this weird kind of in between of like already, but not yet. We already have this technology. We already have apps that are being built upon it, but we don't yet have a number of things. In some ways we're waiting for the tech to catch up. In some ways, we're waiting for the users to catch up. But I think there is an interesting opportunity to lean into that tension and be able to both design for the users that you do have. I mean, there are developers out there.

Our decks, for example, we have loyal users that we are optimizing for. But there's also this opportunity to kind of experiment, like I was saying earlier in our primitive approach, where we can try some things. And we can start to play a little bit with these experiences. and start to add small things that would apply to those yet-to-come users or yet-to-come experiences. So, you know, for a little optimism where we are. You're saying we're waiting for the crypto rapture. Yeah. You're saying that like Satoshi died for our sins and we need to let blockchain into our...

Yeah, there is an underlying message here of that, definitely. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like building an airport when there's no attractions, but waiting for the attractions to come, you know, you don't build an airport so people can visit at the airport, you build an airport because there are things to see and places to go and businesses to go to. And I feel like we built... Tell that to Dubai. We're building huge airports, sorry? Tell that to Dubai, people.

I don't know. I haven't been there. I feel like when I look at the space, it looks like we're building huge airports, but there's still not a whole lot of attractions and like, you know, water parks and things like that that people can actually come and visit in this city, proverbial city where the airport is. But, yeah, I'm confident that we'll get there, right? that those things will get built and things that people actually use and have value. And like the use cases that all of us have been routing for all these years, whether it's cross-border payments or permissionless finance or all the stuff on sort of like traceability side.

I'm confident that those things will. So to go on your airport metaphor, I think it's good because what we are doing is sort of like compound existed because like metamess exists, right? So Metamask sort of opens the, enable like a crypto community to use something as compound. And compound is quite easy to use if you already have Metamask. And then compounds create a new use case. And then you can use that new case to attract new users that are not going to Metamask that are going to an easier way.

And it's sort of like you build a small airport and then there's more attractions because there's an airport and then because of that attraction where people come and then you expand the airport. So I think that that is, like, disability and the use cases are, like, are like a dance. Let's talk about use cases a little bit. So we talked about the building blocks that have permitted us to build really cool things today, like things like Argent and AirSwap. And what are the building blocks do you think that will really allow for, you know,

the quote-unquote, unbanked use case to really come to fruition? and for those monthly users to come to that kind of use case, for people in Venezuela to really start using crypto at a scale that we haven't seen before, or for the Gillesjeune guy in France who doesn't want to use the banking system anymore and prefers to put his money in crypto and invests in this sort of thing. Where do you see those building blocks and those use cases colliding and making that emerge? So crypto is really good at doing parallel economies. So basically the way it works is that you kind of just have like these assets running on a trustless chain.

But it doesn't require any of the existing infrastructure that we have with like courts and banks and traditional regulators. So basically you will see a much bigger adoption right now in places where parallel economies are more common because people feel more comfortable in not relying on governments. and kind of like just self-regulate themselves. But for the Gillesjeune in France, they are too tied to the current systems. So the onboarding for them will be much bigger friction because they can't just acquire assets within the parallel economy. Well, for example, in South America,

people would be more willing to kind of like create like a shop and pay themselves in like in crypto because they would be doing that anyway because they don't trust the government as much. They wouldn't put their money in the bank anyway, while the people in Europe have a very stable system where they can actually trust their governments and institutions. So leaving the pension fund, they're going to need a new pension fund. Yeah, exactly. It's more a matter of how can they earn within the parallel economy. We need to kind of recreate everything on this side

for them to actually, because this transition is already kind of gatewayed by the institutions. I mean, if I think really for Arjun, who's clearly vision long term is to be in these markets, if I look at what we have today and what we miss today, I mean, we always have things like gas abstraction, so you don't need ease, so we simplify a lot of things. So you can make free payment, basically, that's there. I think what we are missing, some stuff we can solve. So, for example, I don't think Arjun is ready yet in terms of running on low-power device, slow-powered and rate device. So it's not rocket science, it will happen. There's no, I would say,

big technological challenge, but we are not there yet. Think tax scalability and layer two and payment. I'm not too worried. We could deploy, the building blocks are there for us to deploy layer two at scale. I think we would have an issue on onboarding, on ramp. So how do you bootstrap an economy? So, Penro, your point is interesting. Maybe you don't need people to pull poor, actual dollar or their money in, and maybe you create the economy from nothing almost. But I think that would be probably the biggest challenge for us, for us to break out of this community. It's really on RAM that is probably the thing we're not yet fully happy about. Yeah, I agree with both of those. And actually something that Pager said yesterday at a

panel that I saw, I think marketing is like a huge part of this. Like there just isn't visibility into these things. I mean, these daps need to be able to deal with the people coming, so they need to be easy to use. We need on ramps, but also, like, it just needs to be talked about for people to know it's even there.

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I'd like to bring it back to the product aspect as we wrap this up and we'll open up for questions in a moment. As product developers, how do you deal with the challenge of

getting data from your users and usage data, for example, like doing user testing and surveys and this sort of thing, in an ecosystem where I think a lot of users are probably very concerned about their data and staying anonymous. And yeah. Yeah, so we talked about this a little bit earlier. And for us, and specifically for the products that we were building, which, again, was an OTC trading app. And if you don't know what that is, basically, it's peer-to-peer.

anonymous trading. So this is for traders who want to trade off exchange. They're trading large sums of money or large sums of assets, and they don't want the market to shift by trading on exchange. So it's an alternate form of trading. And obviously the key piece of that is anonymity. So trying to track down users for any kind of research was really, you know, a challenge, a fun challenge. And like coming from traditional U.X, there are pretty formal systems in place as is user research, you make a user survey, you send it out to a ton of people, a few of those people respond, you bring them in for interviews, et cetera, et cetera. So we tried some of these kinds of methods. It was laughable. I mean, the responses we got and the lack of responses we got,

I think three people of like 300 people responded to our survey, and most of them had profanities in it. We did an ad on Craigslist to try and get crypto folks. They actually came into the office. One of them was literally drunk. One of them was like a dark web criminal. And one of them was just useless. Like absolutely knew nothing about it. And, you know, so obviously we had something was wrong in our nets there.

And so what we ended up doing and, you know, this is again like an iterative process and learning the industry and sort of redefining all of these methods. We just like went on telegram and one by one. asked traders if they would talk to us. Like, I personally was on Telegram, just, like, trolling traders and sending them designs, and some of them, like, would actually mock them up

and, like, do little designs back. I mean, it was amazing, and they were incredibly generous, but, you know, it's really just, like, guerrilla user research starting over in a way. I, maybe your product is made for useless, drunk, dark criminals. Maybe that's your user base. That's your... So I think it's a great question because we should encourage,

I think that if you're doing a crypto app and you have like Google Analytics, you probably are doing something wrong, right? Even if you're not doing like an animal over the trade counter. And I think it comes down to that. It comes down to like try to do metups, try to connect them. But it also comes down to, I think, two things, right? And I think first of all, you need to build a product that you want to use yourself, right? I think you are the first user.

And if you're not excited about building the product, if you're not using it every day, you're probably building the wrong product because you must be excited about using your own products. And second, and I think that's, especially if you're talking back to this idea of, like, anyone should be able to use it. Like, when I used to work in a,

like one of the things that I miss most about working in a normal company, not just working remotely with teams, is that when I was working on a company, I would often just show designs to random people that I met up on the corridor or they were on a desk job. And I just showed you design and asked them, hey, if you see this,

do you think you're going to click here or here or there, right? And I think that's useful because sometimes just show your product someone who has no idea what it is, is also useful. So, yeah, I don't think it's been too different from typical product development. So Arjan is a wait list. I'm sure everybody loves our wait list.

But that means that for every new big release, so of course we wait a bunch of people, but also we make sure we have 10, 20 people, that literally often we find enough, like physically in London. We are across Europe, but our designer come to London, and then we would really do the onboarding next to people. And then every time someone in a conference use it, we check, so we do a lot of live testing, and that's been important.

So every new release, we start. fresh with a new group of people. I mean, as you say, Alex, I mean, analytics, you don't need to know the name, the ENS, the other. You don't need to know anything to know that 50% of your users don't tap on a button.

So it's okay to run some analytics. We haven't had an issue there. It's much more annoying for us for customer support. I have no way to know that you specifically were stuck there on that screen. So we built some tools through analyze on chain data because obviously it's public. It's there.

It's on chain. But for user research, it's really the same. It's also about not... Okay, one thing has been different. I think our early adopters are not really our early adopters. So we're building a product with people here, the crypto nerds, as you say it, or just, I would say, crypto-savvy people. I think it's nicer.

But if I want to get the next billion users, you don't represent at all these next billion users. So we always test, we want to make sure it works well with the crypto-savvy people, but at the same time we would have completely random people who have no idea about crypto and bit by bit, we're not yet there, but bit by bit, making them capable of using that. And in six months, I think I'll be a stage

where it's my mom that will be testing it and that will be really the validation point. That's a good validation point for... If you knew my mom, yeah. Yeah, basically, I think when we come to analytics, we always think about Web2 Analytics. Like, they've lived in a close source world, so they've kind of like delved into the details and really had no limits.

And now with open source, we're kind of like really transparent. But we also have like, like you said, blockchain is public. So we can study like the data that's on chain very easily. And even if we have some analytics on the client side app, we don't really need to kind of create identities around it. We just need to kind of study like the patterns around it. And we can even be playful about it. We can have like maybe a statistics page that shows the graphics page

going up and we see that with example the Uniswap for example that's analytics of a decentralized platform and even compound has like a graph of going up with all the finances things so there's a lot of data there that doesn't need to be

anonymized and it will still be GDPR compliance I think where we need to be more careful I mean designing and building a product with analytics I think it can be done it's once we start thinking once company will be at scale and marketers will start to kick in with I mean, if I think we had 60 million users in my previous company.

We knew everything and you would get a new email. If you almost made the purchase, but then you didn't complete it. And if you start thinking what that means in crypto, I mean, but you do an awesome compound. So you started, you did you approve, but you didn't complete. It starts to be, that's where I think we need to be very careful in not making the same mistake of the past, because people will be tempted to start tracking everything because there's so much you could do. and I think that's where at some point you need to draw the line.

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, as someone who's very concerned about his own privacy on just Web 2 apps sort of thing. I mean, I couldn't imagine a wallet or something like tracking every click and finding out that I went through like the checkout, right, and stopped at some point. And then like notifying me. I'm like, well, okay, it's a bit too much. Okay, I mean, we've got five minutes left. So I'd like to open up for questions.

And if there are any questions in the audience. But so just like why we wait for questions, another compliment also is like I've been, I use Google Analytics a lot, right? And I would say that they are like the other end of the spectrum in which like the gate there is just too much data, right? I would say like if you like probably the amount of data you really need is so much less than that.

You probably want some sort of funnel data to know like where you're losing users. You probably want something to understand how many users are inviting other users. Some very basic things like that. And like good analytics will tell you like how many seconds for every page and where they click, where they mouse over. And in the end, those are like very cool things and graphs to see. But I would argue that they are probably, they even distract you.

I would say like if I think having less data can be good in a sense for you to focus on only the bits are important. Plus having like all the code open source provides like a high level of accountability so you're being way more thoughtful about the data you're actually consuming. Even if users don't look at open source let's be honest most of us don't we have like some savvy users who look into it and we kind of take their word for it and there will always be this kind of like monitoring of what's actually going on behind so. Any questions from the audience?

I think we have one question. How does Web 2 look like? We all know how Web 2 looks like, right? Maybe a thumbnail around it, maybe a like button. We know how it looks like. So a really hard question is, how is in six to eight years, Web 3 is going to look like? How does privacy, accountability look like?

Fleshy colors around the corners? So I think it's a fantastic question because the exciting part is we don't know, right? And I think a lot of what things look like depend on the platform they are on, the sort of things they do. I think just take a look at the move from like a mouse cursor to touchable things.

In the beginning, like every, a lot of companies thought that like the touching things is just a mouse cursor, right? You just have mouse cursor here and you have buttons for everything and everything you can do. I'm also cursory or just clicking things around. Even like the cursor itself looks like a finger, right?

But in the end, if you look at where apps are going, today most app interactions are actually just interactions that you do with your fingers, like left swipe, swipe here, swipe there, like bring it down, bring it up, like turn it down. So you're pushing things around. It just means that how things look into an app today and the reason that you have a lot less like buttons, and shadows and things that are glossy

is also because you're moving things around. So if you apply that to crypto, so what happens is that, naturally the first apps and crypto, just like Web3 apps, just look like Web2 apps, right? They are just like the best-looking apps look just like Facebook,

just look like Twitter, and we'll end up figuring out what should they actually look like. And I think that's a exciting part. They are sort of copying the old model and then from that figuring out what can look better. When you think about it,

the biggest difference between Web 2 and Web 3 is that if you have a Web 2 app, there's still cryptography there. It's just an authentication at the beginning, and every consequent action has not been authenticated.

But with Web3 apps, we're authenticating every single action. Every single action has the consent of the user, and that's basically what Web3 means. That's basically that. And we're kind of just probing how much consent do we need? Do we need a consent for like token allowance every time?

Maybe we don't. For example, with Arjun, they kind of abstracted that. We're just allowing the token allowance and the borrowing on the same point of depositing. So maybe that's good enough for a user to feel comfortable of interacting with these Web3 apps. Maybe for other apps you require a bigger level of consent. Maybe some apps you need less consent. So we're just measuring how much consent is comfortable for the use cases. There's another question.

I am a designer, not specifically on a mobile app or web app, but a designer in general, a user-centered thinker. A designer is not only developing upon user experience only. He is supposed to have a vision of what could be a product in five years or in ten years. And actually, I'm not talking specifically on crypto, but I'm talking about in technology in general. Today we see just a replication of little plus product, a little plus design of the same interface. So what will be the characteristics that actually a wallet or crypto is different from a wallet? Because this is different currency and different interaction with the currency. And this is not happening.

And we will have not this interaction specific to that, which is not related to the technology, but the understanding of this product. It doesn't mean that the user have to understand it, but the vision of this product, the potential of this product, have to be transcripted through the interface, through the user experience. Where is it?

It's not there. And that's why actually your product is hard to be attractive and hard to be understood because it's still sticking to the technology. Not on the behaviors, but actually you actually, expect from the user. To make a concrete example of what could be an interface,

let's stay on the dating application and what Tinder change just by making one interaction which define the way of dating in a complete different way. It was not a gimmick of swiping. It was just one element, which was like this swipe and write left through a catalog of photos, but then it was people, right? But that's exactly what actually a wallet, a crypto wallet, could be. But we still have a replication of the same tool.

That was not a question, but this is kind of revolution in what's like, where is the design today? And this question is like, look at my flashy colors and rounded corners. This is sarcasm. And we are still doing that, even though you explain that you're designers or you're like understanding the user, we are still not connecting the advance or the revolution that actually you want to show to your user,

but is still frozen or missing the point. Yeah, so basically I think that we're kind of like, there's like this communication within design because design is communicating like, way we position, there's a hierarchy where we focus attention, right? So we're kind of like trying to feel like what is the wallet for a user? Like we try to kind of communicate that through the design that there's this kind of like access control to the application that's kind of built in into the infrastructure. And we haven't found out what is the most commonly

accepted for users because we have very little users, right? There's very little people using crypto. And as we get more adoption, we're going to understand more how people feel about a lot of people have told me that wallets are just two f a way why did they say that because that was the only like concept they've had prior on web two of something that was required for them to give consent for an app to proceed forward so basically we're just kind of feeling where where's the analogy from existing infrastructure where wallet fits in and we kind of have to kind of build the experience because even like you said with tinder Like the swiping has kind of evolved.

Like the swiping didn't exist. It's something that we kind of found through like different experiences. Even with Web 2, we kind of see Web nowadays looking all the same, right? So we kind of evolved and had like more adoption on some gestures or some position of buttons. And we're kind of just like, where do the most people feel the okay or the cancel button should be? And now we're going to find where do most people feel that the wallet, should approve or not approve, should the wallet approve everything or not?

Should the wallet be in a separate app or just inside the app? We're still finding that out because the one who actually picks up is going to kind of determine the direction of the industry. I think we can take one final question. I'm Adrian and I would like to ask a question about wallets. And wallets are basically something for our finance like the crypto itself for our intellectual property,

which we see with NFTs, as well as for our identity, with the self-sover identity. So my question is, do you think we have, like, one big wallet as a platform which has this kind of multi-purpose environment, or do we see, like, or will we see a very specialized wallet on a smart contract platform? Or, yeah, how do this, is the interaction between them? Yeah. So great question.

So here's the thing, right? I've, when I start, I've been building a browser with a wallet for like years in a year. Like we started, when we started with MIST, we had this idea where you have a browser and you have a special app, which is the wallet, right, because the wallet is special. And I think that made sense back then, but I think that was a mistake in a sense. What I would say is a wallet is just another app. And what you actually have, which is special, which you can. goes across every app should be your identity, right? I think your identity and maybe, like,

maybe your collectibles are part of your identity, maybe how much money you have are part of identity, but that is not a wallet. That is your identity. That goes across all apps and you can have an app as a wallet, right? Maybe you have a specialized wallet for trading quickly or maybe you have a wallet for savings, but I think what's the common core is your identity. So I'll connect that to the previous question. So first, whoever came out with the word wallet should burn in hell. I know normally we said that for Centralized Exchange, but who was it? I don't have a better name.

We talk about that every week because it's not a wallet. It's also not a bank because bank you think it's custodial. So I'm starting to think, is it a non-custodial bank because we're there to secure your assets, to store them, to move them. that's a lot of what you do with your bank. And I think it's a bank that also store other very important stuff. So your crypto kit is. It's not money, but it's something very important.

And your identity. I think your identity is equally as important. It needs to be secured because identity is all the data. It's your purchase history on Amazon. It's everything that should be in that save that you control. And you decide who has access to what. So I don't think people will have their funds spread across 10 different apps. So I think, yes,

you need one product. I don't know if I would call it an app because it can be a smart contract, get your access from a different point, that helps you control that entire digital life. So it's as much logging in on two websites, web three websites, approving payment,

approving any change basically on the blockchain. So it's an authorizer plus a bank, so yeah, I believe in that vision. I agree that the identity spread across everything and should be able to move if needed and to be recovered. I believe our time is up, ladies gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.

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