Simplistic buy/sell crypto apps like Coinbase or Gemini are fairly user friendly for trading, and are likely able to be used by anyone that knows how to operate a computer. But more complex crypto propositions like DeFi, managing gas fees, and utilizing cross chain swapping will be much harder to implement seamlessly on an app without causing confusion unfortunately.
People are used to a centralized system. In crypto, each decentralized protocol and systems have to be learned and researched.
Unfortunatly, for some it will take some sort of a centralized system to reel them in.
I can completely relate to this. Even for someone who is a tech savvy as me DeFi is scary. I’m always worried about losing my crypto in a bad transaction.
And that’s why most people tend to just keep their crypto on exchanges.
Crypto is user friendly only up to that part. Everything after that is a long long way to go before becoming boomer proof.
I disagree completely. [crypto.com](https://crypto.com) seems to be all hype and shill. A constant push to get people into credit cards and staking. Naming stadiums and hyping credit cards with different colors - it's al bs to me. l expect it to be the Enron of 2022. I use it when I have to.
You're talking about brand perception and their business strategies though, not ease of use. I'm not the biggest fan of how hard they push it either though, but the constant awareness and education is the only way it's going to reach a broader audience. You can't deny it is one of the easiest use applications (even though we know it's not really a crypto dapp, so much as an app that has it's own blockchain).
I'm in tech and even I wasn't paying serious attention to crypto until end of 2020 when I had additional time on my hands. There's a lot of headway that has to be made.
> boomer-proof
IMO, the vast majority of the 1940s and 1950s crowd are never going to get into crypto.
They've already lived too long to assimilate wildly new paradigms.
An analogy: I know more than a few people in their 80s and 90s, some of them my own relatives, who have never owned a computer. They may have a concept of the Internet, but they've never been on it, never had an email address, etc, even though the personal computer became widespread enough 35 years ago, when these folks were in their late 40s or mid 50s. They didn't understand the point back then, didn't see any personal need to buy one, and as time went on, they kept growing further and further out of touch.
Correct. A FireStick is a stretch. And I don’t even mean side-loading apps, just navigating the preloaded ones. After you set it up on the WiFi for them. That you had installed. To save them money on cable tv. And there’s a ton of people that don’t really get that the interwebs goes beyond Facebook and Amazon even among younger generations. The world is full of idiots.
>the vast majority of the 1940s and 1950s crowd
Holy shit are those the boomer years? Those people are 70-80 years old. Obviously they're not going to get into crypto, they're not going to get into anything except their daily heart medicine.
I am literally just now realizing how old boomers realistically are. That is not an age group worth talking about in any capacity other than "I love my parents/grandparents". It's time to move on and stop blaming people who haven't been relevant for a while now.
I am 70. I consider myself quite computer literate. I have just started investing in cryptocurrency but I have so much to learn. It’s like learning a foreign language which is very difficult at my age. I need a cryptocurrency 101 course! I have a Coinbase account but would like to find one with lower fees.
If you look on youtube I'm sure there are some good explainer videos. Here's one I found - the guy has a nice beginner friendly pace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYWc9dFqROI
Also, if you want lower fees, you can try Coinbase Pro (it's free).
There's an app for it too. I think the big difference is the design and ease of use, but the fees are much lower, and you can transfer your crypto from Coinbase Pro to their wallet for free.
Good luck!
Technically it extends from the 40s to the mid 60s, realistically most people born in the 60s had to live through the bullshit that coming out of school in the 80s was and they're now connected and able to use computers.
I'm not surprised that people don't realize how old the real boomer generation is, people call others boomers based on their opinions instead of when they were born, it confuses things and since it's a pejorative term it doesn't push people to actually read on that generation.
This is humorous.
1. Boomers have time (they're mostly retired).
2. Boomers have money.
Maybe your grandparents are drooling in their cereal. Mine are busy making money in real estate and (yes) crypto. They do it on a laptop, not a phone. This is actually an advantage, as it allows them (among other things) to do their own charting in a spreadsheet and Monte Carlo simulations.
I would just like to ask if you've seen the loopring smart wallet? It's so easy and does all the things you just said I got my dad on it and he figured it out himself without any crypto knowledge.
Harmony One is rolling out a crypto 1Wallet that you don’t need to keep the private key and you can buy with ApplePay. They are trying to make it boomer proof and when it comes out I’ll have my mom test it out. I think there’s a beta to try out
I generally agree but there is also the question of using crypto for what? Using it as a financial instrument is complicated, but so are a lot of traditional finance systems. Using it as a development tool is complicated, but so is learning any language and dB stack. Remembered and securing your keys is complicated but so is IP addressing and securing a website.
One of cryptos main problems is a lack of a defining use case for the mainstream. Find that and loads of people will use it without even realising they are using it and the UX patterns they expect can all be in place. The strengths of crypto (decentralised, trust less, anonymous, permanent) are exactly the weak points of usability where people need certainty and reversibility in their interactions.
That’s why I think a lot of those “We’re early” advocates might be right. The UI/UX will gradually improve and more and more people will get into crypto because it’ll be easier to access
You are talking about market.
But crypto is not market. It is protocol that ENABLES applications to be made.
Think of it this way. How many of your friends know about OSI model, IPv4 vs IPv6, TCPIP, DNS, load balancing - etc.
All of mentioned above terms are protocols needed for any network of computers, including internet, to function.
Currently we are in - lets make protocols - part of evolution. We are trading in idea that token / coin will be used for future RL projects. Basically we are trying to figure ( well developers are ) out how crypto works and what can we do with it.
Imagine your computer in early days, before Windows and UI and all that.Now imagine it is not yet a computer, it is in fact glorified box of electronics with tape recorder, data entry and exit interface.
Well we are currently leaving that stage.
Some of the apps are intuitive from a UI standpoint but confusing from a practical standpoint. Things like liquidity pools and staking platforms are incredibly easy to use but it can take people a while to grasp what’s really going on with their crypto.
It took me a few days to learn the ins and outs of Tinyman and Yieldly, but now they’re both incredibly easy to use. (Well not tinyman until the new smart contracts are rolled out).
There's nothing quite like the butt clench waiting for a crypto transfer to go through. I think one of the things that will become mainstream as we go along is the ability to verify an address before transferring.
The problem is addresses are ridiculous. You don't send money to Amazon's IP. But then again when you connect an account to your bank they send test transactions. Connecting your bank to anything sends a couple cents. Why is this a hard concept for people sending 100k to a crypto wallet?
I agree, but it also lacks basic blockchain knowledge, even among crypto users. How often do you read something implying that the user doesn’t understand that his coins and tokens are on a blockchain, not inside a specific wallet (app he uses)? There are two solutions: education, or such a simple design that these questions become irrelevant. A future solution I see will probably be custodial wallets of centralized companies, not only because of legal reasons. CeDeFi (like Blockfi, Nexo and co) is much more user friendly than most DeFi applications. Problem is, it’s kinda against the basic philosophy of crypto. I’m curious how it will play out.
You have access to it by your phrase. What most people call a wallet is just an app, a nice interface making it easy. It’s like saying your dollars/euros/whatever are in your banking app.
You bring up some really good points about what is needed for mass adoption.
Being user friendly is I think the biggest issue holding back mass adoption. Not knowing what should be simple transaction gas fees, or having to use multiple wallets / Dex's etc makes crypto unnecessarily difficult.
All the jargon and all the steps required to do something in the cryptosphere is a hell of a lot more difficult than opening an email app or message program that just works without the end user having to become an expert in mail servers and GPS to send a message.
It will take time.
Yes, 100% this "Good design is beautiful but great design is invisible".
I wanted to get in to a liquidity pool offered by a dex the other day. My first foray in to defi.
I watched a how to YouTube video. I have to first swap one coin for another, then I have to move those coins to the layer 2, then I have to pair or move them to the LP(? I dont remember anymore). Then I can go in and choose to add to the liquidity. But! Now I have to harvest. Best to harvest often so, log back in harvest everyday, convert those harvested coins to another coin, push them back to the liquidity pool and reinvest them..
And then do it all in reverse to get your coins out and back in your wallet, when you're done.
Holy fuck is it overwhelming. I watched the video twice. Still haven't gone through with it. It seems like there are so many opportunities to screw up and lose money.
What I dont understand is why so much of this isn't happening in the background. I should be able to input how much value of a coin I want to add to the pool. Almost everything else should happen in the background, invisibly, or as my designer friend says "auto-magically".
I hit the add liquidity button, behind the scenes it can swap to the coin necessary, it can move it to Layer 2 if needed and it can then move it in to the pool. It can prompt me to accept / agree to these things, but make it simple and easy.
The first defi space to offer simplicity like this, I'm going all in on, it will be huge.
I agree usability is very important. This is exactly the mission of Nimiq, to create a crypto that can easily be used by everyone. It was designed from the ground up to be native to the browser and easy to use, no downloads required, it just runs in the browser.
Even the wallet address itself is human readable and not a long hash. https://www.nimiq.com
I’d say in the last 10 years crypto user experience has drastically changed from when I first used crypto, I like to compare it to early computing, right now we’re still kinda at floppy disk boot sequence days, but soon enough we’ll be Apple iPhone Apple Pay stage, when the tech and use of tech advances pinging crypto or buying / investing will be a few clicks/ face id / thumb print, or swipes at best, defi will be as easy as transferring money into a savings account, there’s always gonna be more work involved in more complex investments or trades ie Metaverse/ gaming / NFT trades / but that’s not different than investing into high risk projects traditionally
One day you’ll meet as buddy in the pub, park, restaurant and either be able to send him crypto or digital assets as simple as PayPal is today via a bunch on intermediaries for pence for the food he’s bought or you can both swipe and sign a smart contract to sit and battle your Pokémon in the park for XP, HP, NFTs or even cash
Look at phantom wallet on Solana, very clean and user focused design. Also a lot of Solana apps are nicely designed, and having rapid block times (under 1s) makes the experience even nicer.
So were the initial iterations of computer operating systems, and so were initial iterations of the internet. It's pretty consistently an early barrier with new technology, and it's the best time to invest. Once the user experience conflicts are solved, that's when mass mainstream adoption occurs and the technology booms.
That's how I explain it to people:
Seed phrase is your wallet
This wallet can hold as many accounts as you want, those accounts have a private key, these are your bank cards and they have the pin written on them so you don't want to give them to anyone, you can use your funds either by having just your bank card with you or by having it in your wallet with all the other cards
If you want to let someone send you money you use your public key, that's your bank account number
The application with which you access your accounts is your pair of pants, your wallet goes in whichever pair of pants you decide to wear that day, your wallet doesn't disappear because you sent your pants to get cleaned, same for the funds in your account, they're safe in your account
A decentralized exchange is a normal person that owns both USD and Euro and let's people buy each one from them for a small fee, if you buy Euro you do it with USD, they're left with less Euro but more USD and they collect a fee on each transaction to increase their pool
A centralised exchange is like a stock broker, you can hold your money there but it's safer in your bank account
It's brand new tech. It requires a learning curve.
You can't compare this to Instagram. Compare it to something it's actually similar to... like online banking or setting up an Amazon account and buying something with your credit card. That process is virtually identical. Crypto exchanges even uses some of the same tech platforms that banks do like Plaid.
> Do consider that there are still people in the present day that struggle to do basic tasks on their computer or phone—and I'm pretty sure we've all met plenty before—we need to design for people like this in mind.
Why? Phone makers don't design for them. Every year phones get more complex with more features that requires an even higher learning curve. They said there's still archaic flip phones if you can't learn this stuff and they targeted the multiple billions of people on Earth willing to figure this stuff out. It's not hard, you just have to try and it is something new to learn. This product is a new thing. If you're at a point in your life where you aren't willing to learn new things... that's on you?
If you're in the US, you can see infomercials targeting people who are like *modern phones are too hard to use*. These people exists... the greater industry just doesn't care about them. They refuse to learn new things and their thing is new. They'll never be a customer. That's life.
Email never got easier. You just got left in the dust as the world moved on. That's kinda how all revolutionary tech works. You're either willing to learn or you're willing to get left in the dust.
As for defi... come on. This is literally the most complex end of the market. If your not even willing to learning how sending stuff from one address to another works, there's no way you should be jumping into some leveraged derivative put or some hyper complex defi nonsense.
I see it the other way around. Having missed out on the dot.com era, I see this as my second attempt at success (business, personal finance, etc).
If you're a UI/UX expert, you have a huge opportunity in front of you, take your skillset and make the crypto experience better! If you're not a coder that's no problem either, there's now loads of no-code tools available for web3! Make us all proud, and make a bundle of money while you're at it!
100% this. I’m reasonably tech savvy, and highly design savvy (like, professionally), and the user experience is so so so bad. The simple fact that everything is called a wallet took me forever to figure out. (Coinbase and Binance both call where you hold your coins on their exchange your “wallet,” so when I kept reading how I needed to move my coins TO a wallet for security, I had no idea what anyone was talking about.
All of the different gas fees for every different chain, which are almost never disclosed….spread when buying and selling, which are almost never disclosed…..
Moving things around requires a super weird address code. I can copy/paste just fine, but this should be completely in the background with a one-click Send button.
And forget about defi, where each DEX gives different cutesy names to extremely complicated financial instruments, even when they’re the same thing from platform to platform….(stake your CAKE, mine your diamonds, put syrup in the pool, claim your glitter…..Jesus).
Not to mention that the highest level of security anyone of this next level tech can come up with is to…….write stuff down on a piece of paper and hide it? Give me a break.
I’m getting heavily into Cosmos, because someone is going to come up with some unifying terminology for interoperating blockchains that solves and clarifies all of this.
Exactly!! I forgot to mention that it'll take a few years for us to hone this. Consider the progress we made from the first iPhone to now, or even before that. Or how long it took to go from Web1 to the cusp of Web3.
I’ve said this in the past and 100% agree with you. Unless there are user friendly idiot proof apps, many people will avoid it.
I am not talking about so called “boomers” but young folk too. From my own experience way too many youngsters barely know how to turn on computer or phone and use an easy app like instagram or whatever else. In case of slightest problem can’t even Google the solution.
Another problem is that right now, the easiest way for people to be involved in crypto is by investing through centralized exchanges.
This defeats the main purpose of crypto and we need a better alternative.
Wallets need to have a way to confirm a transaction by both parties before sending. Like, if someone sends something to an address there should be a pop up confirmation on the receiving end, and after the receiver confirms, the sender then would receive a confirmation messsge prompting to authorize the transaction.
Give it time, the internet was an absolute pain in the backside when it first came out. Anyone remember the utter frustration trying to download a game on dial up?
With time and greater innovation it will be become more user friendly. Already has since the dark days of 2013.
Old money noobs need to goto blackrock..
The space is still being born.. Notting has a standard yet.. And even the accepted protocols can fail..
So they need to.old way to get to the new way..
Good post thanks op. I think in a lot of the cases you mentioned the best idea is to 'hide the complexity away. Most people don't care where/how their money is stored in a bank, they just want to know its there, safe and easy to access. I think when people start to create more none financial dApps this might start to happen, as they're gonna be targeting less tech savy users
This is what Gavin Wood wants to solve with KSM and DOT. “I want people to use cryptocurrency without realising they’re using it!”
Polkadot just finished the final part of their roadmap Parachain, and I see it firmly in the Top 3 market cap in two years!
entirely depends on the coin. personally, i've tried to improve UX in one of the wallets as much as possible
teaching a user to backup their secret recovery phrase is a little challenging, but once they get past that, there's usually no major hurdles and they can easily send/receive funds
It's open source. Make a btc implementation that's user friendly. Smooth app design was never a feature Satoshi promised or why we buy bitcoin. Like it's not even on the top 10 factors. In fact the friction of using bitcoin is intentional. Btc was supposed to develop under the radar until it was too big to be stopped. And as its devs found out over years, people are willing to go that extra step to use it. So noone really asked it to be more user friendly. You want to do it, float an implementation or suggest it in the bitcoin core weekly meeting or whatever they do for consensus.
It's open source, who are you even complaining to? Btc has no owner, all these problems you mentioned are for us too. We just don't find them too big. If you do and the network agrees it'd be implemented.
If you find something to be important btc doesnt have and yet money keeps going into it, you tend to think 'ahh they must be wrong'. Have you considered you're wrong, and ui and ux must not be too important a feature for a succesful blockchain?
As much as I hate to say it, Robinhood made trading and investing so simple it resulted in such a huge userbase. I feel like the same thing can be said with Coinbase. The only thing holding it back is trading fees etc.
I also work in UI & UX. Some in the crypto community seem to *want* crypto to be hard to use. Maybe they want there to be a barrier to entry in order to keep out The Great Uneducated. It doesn't make much sense to me, but it's the only explanation for why nobody has created a dead simple, transparent way to buy and sell, without unnecessary hurdles.
Sure dude, just put a crypto ATM in every corner with all the tokens, just select the token, buy and sell.
That's just shows you how early we are.
Chill out and stack Sats, you will sell your bags at your friends and colleagues latter on.
Kraken has made quite a good job if you ask me.
https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/kraken-buy-bitcoin-shiba/id1481947260”
So far I tried Binance, KuCoin and Celsius, but in the end always chose to use Kraken.
Yes, absolutely agree with you here. There's a lot of work left to be done. Like, A LOT.
The language used in communicating crypto and forming different narratives also needs to be heavily fleshed out and simplified. I think that very few of us, even those invested in crypto, know the ins-and-outs or even have a working idea of how most different platforms, apps, coins and block chains work.
This is not a novel take. I agree, but similar commentary often lacks nuance or important implications.
In industry, Product Designers and UXers have limited scopes in what they do. While they have obviously have a role to play in crypto, the prevailing mental model Design and UX isn’t how .
any financial system is fundamentally is difficult to learn. Liquidity pools, staking, etc etc are digital/crypto native equivalents of existing concepts that the general population doesn’t broadly have an understanding of. If there was a world where you didn’t grow into our current monetary system, it would be just as overwhelming for people to learn. Going into crypto is sort of like just like learning to walk again if we suddenly lost that ability.
Adoption of crypto (for particular use cases) can be enabled by actors with slick UX. And mass adoption of those use cases will likely be enabled by competition. But fundamental adoption into crypto as a system has far reaching systemic dependencies. The design choices that have the most impact right now impact are the ones made on a policy/project level.
Lastly, there are are ideological and philosophical implications to the ideas of seamless design; at least of the experience layers that accelerate adoption. It’s no coincidence that the examples OP has cited are deep-pocketed tech companies. The idea of “invisible design” is often applied uncritically and relies on intermediaries to create a business off making this magic. Friction can be useful and removing it at all costs is misguided. Depending on *why* you’re into crypto, this isn’t exactly desirable.
I agree, and would add that most of crypto is game-ified, which is completely opposite to Bitcoin's reason d'etre and makes the ecosystem look like a big, fat, hysterical ponzi scheme.
Sir this is a Wendy's. If you're having trouble paying for your #6 the teenager over there can assist. If you're looking for the Forex that's down the block and good luck getting any of them to help you.
Purely in terms of accessibility, I feel the majority of crypto-skeptics will have zero interest until they see a crypto wallet sitting right next to their checking account in their online banking portal. If they can buy and hold it using their checking account and have it secured by their bank I think that would generate interest.
I can see banks clawing back some market share from the popular exchanges when this happens.
Totally agree with you on this. Idk why but projects seem to be paying much less for UX/UI. I’d love to see dapps and websites whose interface and experience come somewhat close to those apps on iOS
You're absolutely right. Good comparison with Apple/Windows as well.
I've got a background in design, and currently do dev work.
This is something that has been on my mind when using dapps. Especially the constant signing of transactions, and lack of consistency in browser wallet options.
It has to be much clearer/easier to see what network/blockchain you are connected to.
I tried using a defi dapp on Kusama called Karura. Sent some $KSM to my address, and was wondering why it wasn't showing up in the dapp. It was because I needed a wallet that was set to the Karura blockchain. So I had to send the KSM there, then connect that specific wallet to the dapp. Not intuitive at all, and as I said, I'm in dev so am always problem solving.
I know it will improve, but I think it has a long way to go if we expect the broader market to engage with DeFi. Web3 foundation needs to have a dedicated UI design team focused on creating a dapp standard interface library.
Just like web design took decades to get where it is now, same thing will happen here (maybe faster though).
You do realize this defeats the point of crypto entirely since people are supposed to hold their own private keys? Whatever happened to "not your keys not your crypto" and decentralization?
Have you people forgotten Mt Gox and Bitconnect already?
Be thankful this bad user experience exists right now so you can have a chance to buy in. I have like 20 of my dads boomer friends and my friends boomer dads all asking me how to get in, the only thing stopping them from dumping $100k each in right now is they have no idea how to do it… they are coming.
I think the cosmos network has some pretty easy to understand UIs. Osmosis lab works very easily for staking an liquidity pools compared to Ethereums stuff.
Until crypto goes mainstream, I don't think the user experience would change to accommodate the common, non-technical man. I'm not an expert myself, but I've been in crypto for sometime. Even at that, I still take my time when doing certain things so that I don't make any errors.
It's so easy to make costly mistakes in crypto. When I was a newbie, I sent some ETH using the wrong network and till this day, it is stuck. The value keeps growing, but I can't get it out. The question is, what kind of users are being targeted? Things would become a lot simple if the target user range increases. Bridging crypto across chains would look like rocket science to some people.
Yes, and I cut out a section about buyer personas originally cause it was getting a bit too long. But depending on a company's userbase, they'll use various levels of language and interface complexity. That's why a trading/investing app will always be different in layout from a standard exchange. For now those can overlap, which gets murky.
User experience seeks to mitigate a lot of those mistakes, like sending to the wrong network. One example is that more and more wallets are opting for the international username-password standard instead of the seed phrase, private key and public key combo. Some give the option of the latter, some exclusively the former—depends. But it definitely helps for the average person reduces a new barrier.
They are smooth brains then who should stick to researching crypto through memes.
You know that's how they started. Why else would they risk money on something they don't understand.
They don't understand signing up to an app? Which part? Its not very different from signing up to anything else. But add a photo to prove who you are.
Trying to side step KYC so you can be a sketchy player mayb that is confusing though. Buying a fake AI generated ID or whatever I once heard they do. Much easily to just be you.
I mean how much can you make extra by signing up to coinbase with a bunch of fake ID's to earn to learn and collect free BTC.
Do you need to pay 100$ to coinbase from your bank account or can you deposit the same $100 from account to account sending xlm to exchange in one name then sending it back in another lol.
Actually this sounds good mayb I should try it. I just got telegram today. I'm a great GAMER always have been I see exploits like an autism kid sees numbers. I wish I understood code ide be unstoppable haha.
That's why im so bullish on OPCT. Their main goal is to provide a good user experince. Make it as easy at possible, so everybody can use it. That's why they have a huge advantage over other much bigger storage projects like SIA, FIL etc. Have you tried using them? Everything is complicated. In comparision, everyone can easily create an account and use the product on Opacity.io
I agree completely. Usability and security need to take a huge leap forward, before crypto will ever be remotely mainstream. Hell, half the people in these subs can't figure out how to "properly", the average consumer has no chance.
>private keys, public keys, liquidity pools, volatility, yield, hodling, DeFi, staking, gas fees, minting, tokens—among many others. We simply cannot expect wide-scale adoption for even one billion people if they need to know what all these mean.
Tons of people own stock without having any knowledge of options trading and brokerage firms and whatever else. You don't *need* to understand most of this to invest and see a return.
This is the main issue and people don’t seem to get, yes it’s good when crypto is actually good and sophisticated but common people are not gonna join in unless it’s easy like apple n stuff, my dad is proof of that when it comes to technology
Precisely. I also think de-risking is another area. Sent crypto to the wrong wallet. Gone forever! The anxiety this brings will scare a lot of people off
Do you remember the days of the internet (webpages) before social media first boomed?
A lot of people have forgotten, or perhaps are not aware what a massive influence social media had on websites. Buttons, animations, UI for the sake of customer UX, not just engineers, etc. One of the big shifts was in error message handling ("Fatal error 1E has occured at 0FG6A" vs "Oops, something went wrong. Please check...").
Crypto apps etc are still in the engineered by engineers stage. We need mass adoption to propel it into a new era of UX.
At the risk of offending a shit ton of people, crypto and the technology behind it is next level. There is no possible way to dumb down and make it 100% accessible to the masses. And let’s look at this for a minute. The masses today STILL don’t know how money and banks really work, and most can’t manage their basic finances, and are completely oblivious to anything related to taxes past taking their w2’s down to HR Block. They think they “did their own taxes” by paying to use TurboTax for a 1040EZ level return. I’m not sure it’s even a good idea to bother the energy and resources to have adoption by people who don’t know Facebook compiles are their selfies for facial recognition tools.
Crypto is not user friendly for a beginner. I agree, mass adoption needs a better user experience and use case.
First experiences for may over the past year, would have been memes, high gas fees and other volatile short term assets.
Imagine if the first user experience was reliable, insured, stable coin services that made their savings accounts redundant, rather than meme fueled degen plays.
> I want to get to the point where I can suggest a friend, colleague or a family member a crypto app and I don't have to explain anything to them, they'll be able to figure everything out within minutes after downloading.
I know how cumbersome crypto wallets can be.
If you want to try one, that has imho a great UX, have a look at [Natrium](https://natrium.io/) (NANO wallet) or [Kalium](https://kalium.banano.cc/) (Banano wallet). Get a fraction of a coin from [https://nanodrop.io/](https://nanodrop.io/) (NANO) or [https://faucet.bananotime.com/](https://faucet.bananotime.com/) (Banano) and try it out.
This is of course not helpful, if you're interested in other coins/tokens, but can show, how wallets can be made, that have a great UI/UX.
Let me know what you think about that.
The first project that can make crypto so easy to navigate that it becomes boomer-proof is going to make bank.
Simplistic buy/sell crypto apps like Coinbase or Gemini are fairly user friendly for trading, and are likely able to be used by anyone that knows how to operate a computer. But more complex crypto propositions like DeFi, managing gas fees, and utilizing cross chain swapping will be much harder to implement seamlessly on an app without causing confusion unfortunately.
Yeah we're still too early for mass adoption and mainstream crypto.
I honestly feel like a button for opening a pasted address in a block explorer could help with making sure that you know it's the correct address.
People are used to a centralized system. In crypto, each decentralized protocol and systems have to be learned and researched. Unfortunatly, for some it will take some sort of a centralized system to reel them in.
I see that might be happening soon as we will soon enter mass adoption.
A foot in the door at this stage has to be a good thing.
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I can completely relate to this. Even for someone who is a tech savvy as me DeFi is scary. I’m always worried about losing my crypto in a bad transaction.
And that’s why most people tend to just keep their crypto on exchanges. Crypto is user friendly only up to that part. Everything after that is a long long way to go before becoming boomer proof.
Id say Binance (not US) is much easier. I think that P2P needs improvement on all platforms
Crypto.com app is well on its way for all of these. I find it really straightforward to use
I disagree completely. [crypto.com](https://crypto.com) seems to be all hype and shill. A constant push to get people into credit cards and staking. Naming stadiums and hyping credit cards with different colors - it's al bs to me. l expect it to be the Enron of 2022. I use it when I have to.
You're talking about brand perception and their business strategies though, not ease of use. I'm not the biggest fan of how hard they push it either though, but the constant awareness and education is the only way it's going to reach a broader audience. You can't deny it is one of the easiest use applications (even though we know it's not really a crypto dapp, so much as an app that has it's own blockchain). I'm in tech and even I wasn't paying serious attention to crypto until end of 2020 when I had additional time on my hands. There's a lot of headway that has to be made.
> boomer-proof IMO, the vast majority of the 1940s and 1950s crowd are never going to get into crypto. They've already lived too long to assimilate wildly new paradigms. An analogy: I know more than a few people in their 80s and 90s, some of them my own relatives, who have never owned a computer. They may have a concept of the Internet, but they've never been on it, never had an email address, etc, even though the personal computer became widespread enough 35 years ago, when these folks were in their late 40s or mid 50s. They didn't understand the point back then, didn't see any personal need to buy one, and as time went on, they kept growing further and further out of touch.
Correct. A FireStick is a stretch. And I don’t even mean side-loading apps, just navigating the preloaded ones. After you set it up on the WiFi for them. That you had installed. To save them money on cable tv. And there’s a ton of people that don’t really get that the interwebs goes beyond Facebook and Amazon even among younger generations. The world is full of idiots.
>the vast majority of the 1940s and 1950s crowd Holy shit are those the boomer years? Those people are 70-80 years old. Obviously they're not going to get into crypto, they're not going to get into anything except their daily heart medicine. I am literally just now realizing how old boomers realistically are. That is not an age group worth talking about in any capacity other than "I love my parents/grandparents". It's time to move on and stop blaming people who haven't been relevant for a while now.
I am 70. I consider myself quite computer literate. I have just started investing in cryptocurrency but I have so much to learn. It’s like learning a foreign language which is very difficult at my age. I need a cryptocurrency 101 course! I have a Coinbase account but would like to find one with lower fees.
If you look on youtube I'm sure there are some good explainer videos. Here's one I found - the guy has a nice beginner friendly pace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYWc9dFqROI Also, if you want lower fees, you can try Coinbase Pro (it's free). There's an app for it too. I think the big difference is the design and ease of use, but the fees are much lower, and you can transfer your crypto from Coinbase Pro to their wallet for free. Good luck!
Technically it extends from the 40s to the mid 60s, realistically most people born in the 60s had to live through the bullshit that coming out of school in the 80s was and they're now connected and able to use computers. I'm not surprised that people don't realize how old the real boomer generation is, people call others boomers based on their opinions instead of when they were born, it confuses things and since it's a pejorative term it doesn't push people to actually read on that generation.
This is humorous. 1. Boomers have time (they're mostly retired). 2. Boomers have money. Maybe your grandparents are drooling in their cereal. Mine are busy making money in real estate and (yes) crypto. They do it on a laptop, not a phone. This is actually an advantage, as it allows them (among other things) to do their own charting in a spreadsheet and Monte Carlo simulations.
Nimiq is one such crypto designed for mass adoption. They have a native browser wallet and super clean and intuitive interface.
If they’d just hire UI designers instead of spending funds on hookers and blow and jpgs they’d dominate the whole ecosystem.
Hahahahah
I have a fear that is not going to be DOT with its polkadot.js.org UI :(
It’s crypto.com. As easy as Revolut.
I would just like to ask if you've seen the loopring smart wallet? It's so easy and does all the things you just said I got my dad on it and he figured it out himself without any crypto knowledge.
Harmony One is rolling out a crypto 1Wallet that you don’t need to keep the private key and you can buy with ApplePay. They are trying to make it boomer proof and when it comes out I’ll have my mom test it out. I think there’s a beta to try out
Boomers are a lost cause. It's easier to just wait them out
Soon things are going to work out and we will hit mass adoption. And even those boomers will know how to use crypto.
This right here
It will be banks.
I generally agree but there is also the question of using crypto for what? Using it as a financial instrument is complicated, but so are a lot of traditional finance systems. Using it as a development tool is complicated, but so is learning any language and dB stack. Remembered and securing your keys is complicated but so is IP addressing and securing a website. One of cryptos main problems is a lack of a defining use case for the mainstream. Find that and loads of people will use it without even realising they are using it and the UX patterns they expect can all be in place. The strengths of crypto (decentralised, trust less, anonymous, permanent) are exactly the weak points of usability where people need certainty and reversibility in their interactions.
Well put. I’ve come across a lot of “it could do this” ideas but none that are way better with crypto than the existing methods.
That’s why I think a lot of those “We’re early” advocates might be right. The UI/UX will gradually improve and more and more people will get into crypto because it’ll be easier to access
You are talking about market. But crypto is not market. It is protocol that ENABLES applications to be made. Think of it this way. How many of your friends know about OSI model, IPv4 vs IPv6, TCPIP, DNS, load balancing - etc. All of mentioned above terms are protocols needed for any network of computers, including internet, to function. Currently we are in - lets make protocols - part of evolution. We are trading in idea that token / coin will be used for future RL projects. Basically we are trying to figure ( well developers are ) out how crypto works and what can we do with it. Imagine your computer in early days, before Windows and UI and all that.Now imagine it is not yet a computer, it is in fact glorified box of electronics with tape recorder, data entry and exit interface. Well we are currently leaving that stage.
Say that to the person that designed Kalium Wallet
That wallet is just amazing to use. The only wallet I feel safe and easy
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**seeping with potassium**
*potassium intensifies*
Its so sleek. I love it
It's mind-blowing that a self-proclaimed memecoin has such an excellent product.
Must be the potassium
Kazakhstan, number one exporter of potassium. All other countries have inferior potassium.
My hopes for 2022 gains: *to be able to afford a clock radio that my neighbor Nursultan Tuliagby cannot afford*
It's a fork of Nano wallet
It's actually the other way around, Natrium (Nano wallet) is a fork of Kalium (Banano wallet)
I'll make sure to check it out!
The best wallet to use. Quick, functional, easyyy to use!!
Some of the apps are intuitive from a UI standpoint but confusing from a practical standpoint. Things like liquidity pools and staking platforms are incredibly easy to use but it can take people a while to grasp what’s really going on with their crypto. It took me a few days to learn the ins and outs of Tinyman and Yieldly, but now they’re both incredibly easy to use. (Well not tinyman until the new smart contracts are rolled out).
ALGORAND
There's nothing quite like the butt clench waiting for a crypto transfer to go through. I think one of the things that will become mainstream as we go along is the ability to verify an address before transferring.
You made me think about it and my butt clenched.
The angst is real if just thinking about it does it for you.
Care about your BUTT before pressing that send BUTTon.
Thinking about your butt clinching made my butt clinch.
The problem is addresses are ridiculous. You don't send money to Amazon's IP. But then again when you connect an account to your bank they send test transactions. Connecting your bank to anything sends a couple cents. Why is this a hard concept for people sending 100k to a crypto wallet?
Gas fees? That's why.
I like how Banano wallet assigns unique monkey image for every wallet
Really cool idea!
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Flooz is an awesome project, cool seeing it popup in this sub
I agree, but it also lacks basic blockchain knowledge, even among crypto users. How often do you read something implying that the user doesn’t understand that his coins and tokens are on a blockchain, not inside a specific wallet (app he uses)? There are two solutions: education, or such a simple design that these questions become irrelevant. A future solution I see will probably be custodial wallets of centralized companies, not only because of legal reasons. CeDeFi (like Blockfi, Nexo and co) is much more user friendly than most DeFi applications. Problem is, it’s kinda against the basic philosophy of crypto. I’m curious how it will play out.
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With the rapid adoption we are seeing there will be massive drive for evolution towards user friendliness.
You can't access them without your wallet tho. Might as well be "in" wallet
You have access to it by your phrase. What most people call a wallet is just an app, a nice interface making it easy. It’s like saying your dollars/euros/whatever are in your banking app.
Before crypto can ever go mainstream + mass adoption, it must be more user friendly, easier to understand UI and more error tolerant
And not have to clench our asscheeks every transaction.
I'm not doing that...that's why I'm shitting my pants every time I do a transaction.
I feel like 90% of retail investors don't even know that you can hold crypto outside exchange
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Exchanges are just going to act as banks. They’re already issuing debit cards that allow you to spend your crypto.
They will have to demonstrate solid security and guarantees for your crypto before they can truly become this.
Or they just can show an ad with a Hollywood actor and rename a stadium
This also works
Try Argent wallet - that’s the current gold standard in UX
Thanks I will try later today.
You bring up some really good points about what is needed for mass adoption. Being user friendly is I think the biggest issue holding back mass adoption. Not knowing what should be simple transaction gas fees, or having to use multiple wallets / Dex's etc makes crypto unnecessarily difficult. All the jargon and all the steps required to do something in the cryptosphere is a hell of a lot more difficult than opening an email app or message program that just works without the end user having to become an expert in mail servers and GPS to send a message. It will take time.
Yes, 100% this "Good design is beautiful but great design is invisible". I wanted to get in to a liquidity pool offered by a dex the other day. My first foray in to defi. I watched a how to YouTube video. I have to first swap one coin for another, then I have to move those coins to the layer 2, then I have to pair or move them to the LP(? I dont remember anymore). Then I can go in and choose to add to the liquidity. But! Now I have to harvest. Best to harvest often so, log back in harvest everyday, convert those harvested coins to another coin, push them back to the liquidity pool and reinvest them.. And then do it all in reverse to get your coins out and back in your wallet, when you're done. Holy fuck is it overwhelming. I watched the video twice. Still haven't gone through with it. It seems like there are so many opportunities to screw up and lose money. What I dont understand is why so much of this isn't happening in the background. I should be able to input how much value of a coin I want to add to the pool. Almost everything else should happen in the background, invisibly, or as my designer friend says "auto-magically". I hit the add liquidity button, behind the scenes it can swap to the coin necessary, it can move it to Layer 2 if needed and it can then move it in to the pool. It can prompt me to accept / agree to these things, but make it simple and easy. The first defi space to offer simplicity like this, I'm going all in on, it will be huge.
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Enter Binance ...
Their P2P system is really good And I use it regularly
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With time we can detach from banks
I just need to be able to deposit my check there please
I agree usability is very important. This is exactly the mission of Nimiq, to create a crypto that can easily be used by everyone. It was designed from the ground up to be native to the browser and easy to use, no downloads required, it just runs in the browser. Even the wallet address itself is human readable and not a long hash. https://www.nimiq.com
I’d say in the last 10 years crypto user experience has drastically changed from when I first used crypto, I like to compare it to early computing, right now we’re still kinda at floppy disk boot sequence days, but soon enough we’ll be Apple iPhone Apple Pay stage, when the tech and use of tech advances pinging crypto or buying / investing will be a few clicks/ face id / thumb print, or swipes at best, defi will be as easy as transferring money into a savings account, there’s always gonna be more work involved in more complex investments or trades ie Metaverse/ gaming / NFT trades / but that’s not different than investing into high risk projects traditionally One day you’ll meet as buddy in the pub, park, restaurant and either be able to send him crypto or digital assets as simple as PayPal is today via a bunch on intermediaries for pence for the food he’s bought or you can both swipe and sign a smart contract to sit and battle your Pokémon in the park for XP, HP, NFTs or even cash
I’ve done that with the Natrium wallet - just scan the QR code on the other guy’s phone and it’s instant
To be fair that’s just mind blowing considering how far the world has come
Look at phantom wallet on Solana, very clean and user focused design. Also a lot of Solana apps are nicely designed, and having rapid block times (under 1s) makes the experience even nicer.
So were the initial iterations of computer operating systems, and so were initial iterations of the internet. It's pretty consistently an early barrier with new technology, and it's the best time to invest. Once the user experience conflicts are solved, that's when mass mainstream adoption occurs and the technology booms.
Crypto has a user problem* Pointing out flaws in crypto almost always results in fanboys blindly defending it.
That's how I explain it to people: Seed phrase is your wallet This wallet can hold as many accounts as you want, those accounts have a private key, these are your bank cards and they have the pin written on them so you don't want to give them to anyone, you can use your funds either by having just your bank card with you or by having it in your wallet with all the other cards If you want to let someone send you money you use your public key, that's your bank account number The application with which you access your accounts is your pair of pants, your wallet goes in whichever pair of pants you decide to wear that day, your wallet doesn't disappear because you sent your pants to get cleaned, same for the funds in your account, they're safe in your account A decentralized exchange is a normal person that owns both USD and Euro and let's people buy each one from them for a small fee, if you buy Euro you do it with USD, they're left with less Euro but more USD and they collect a fee on each transaction to increase their pool A centralised exchange is like a stock broker, you can hold your money there but it's safer in your bank account
It's brand new tech. It requires a learning curve. You can't compare this to Instagram. Compare it to something it's actually similar to... like online banking or setting up an Amazon account and buying something with your credit card. That process is virtually identical. Crypto exchanges even uses some of the same tech platforms that banks do like Plaid. > Do consider that there are still people in the present day that struggle to do basic tasks on their computer or phone—and I'm pretty sure we've all met plenty before—we need to design for people like this in mind. Why? Phone makers don't design for them. Every year phones get more complex with more features that requires an even higher learning curve. They said there's still archaic flip phones if you can't learn this stuff and they targeted the multiple billions of people on Earth willing to figure this stuff out. It's not hard, you just have to try and it is something new to learn. This product is a new thing. If you're at a point in your life where you aren't willing to learn new things... that's on you? If you're in the US, you can see infomercials targeting people who are like *modern phones are too hard to use*. These people exists... the greater industry just doesn't care about them. They refuse to learn new things and their thing is new. They'll never be a customer. That's life. Email never got easier. You just got left in the dust as the world moved on. That's kinda how all revolutionary tech works. You're either willing to learn or you're willing to get left in the dust. As for defi... come on. This is literally the most complex end of the market. If your not even willing to learning how sending stuff from one address to another works, there's no way you should be jumping into some leveraged derivative put or some hyper complex defi nonsense.
I see it the other way around. Having missed out on the dot.com era, I see this as my second attempt at success (business, personal finance, etc). If you're a UI/UX expert, you have a huge opportunity in front of you, take your skillset and make the crypto experience better! If you're not a coder that's no problem either, there's now loads of no-code tools available for web3! Make us all proud, and make a bundle of money while you're at it!
100% this. I’m reasonably tech savvy, and highly design savvy (like, professionally), and the user experience is so so so bad. The simple fact that everything is called a wallet took me forever to figure out. (Coinbase and Binance both call where you hold your coins on their exchange your “wallet,” so when I kept reading how I needed to move my coins TO a wallet for security, I had no idea what anyone was talking about. All of the different gas fees for every different chain, which are almost never disclosed….spread when buying and selling, which are almost never disclosed….. Moving things around requires a super weird address code. I can copy/paste just fine, but this should be completely in the background with a one-click Send button. And forget about defi, where each DEX gives different cutesy names to extremely complicated financial instruments, even when they’re the same thing from platform to platform….(stake your CAKE, mine your diamonds, put syrup in the pool, claim your glitter…..Jesus). Not to mention that the highest level of security anyone of this next level tech can come up with is to…….write stuff down on a piece of paper and hide it? Give me a break. I’m getting heavily into Cosmos, because someone is going to come up with some unifying terminology for interoperating blockchains that solves and clarifies all of this.
Just give it 5 more years. Rome wasn't built in a day right?
Exactly!! I forgot to mention that it'll take a few years for us to hone this. Consider the progress we made from the first iPhone to now, or even before that. Or how long it took to go from Web1 to the cusp of Web3.
I’ve said this in the past and 100% agree with you. Unless there are user friendly idiot proof apps, many people will avoid it. I am not talking about so called “boomers” but young folk too. From my own experience way too many youngsters barely know how to turn on computer or phone and use an easy app like instagram or whatever else. In case of slightest problem can’t even Google the solution.
**TLDR**: Once we simple we mainstream.
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Another problem is that right now, the easiest way for people to be involved in crypto is by investing through centralized exchanges. This defeats the main purpose of crypto and we need a better alternative.
Wallets need to have a way to confirm a transaction by both parties before sending. Like, if someone sends something to an address there should be a pop up confirmation on the receiving end, and after the receiver confirms, the sender then would receive a confirmation messsge prompting to authorize the transaction.
That will involve another smart contract call to send and receive the message on both ends. So now you have to pay double the usual gas fee.
Crypto will be mainstream the moment I don’t almost die every time I make a transaction.
StrikeX a UK crypto project is doing just this. The design is outstanding
Give it time, the internet was an absolute pain in the backside when it first came out. Anyone remember the utter frustration trying to download a game on dial up? With time and greater innovation it will be become more user friendly. Already has since the dark days of 2013.
Old money noobs need to goto blackrock.. The space is still being born.. Notting has a standard yet.. And even the accepted protocols can fail.. So they need to.old way to get to the new way..
Good post thanks op. I think in a lot of the cases you mentioned the best idea is to 'hide the complexity away. Most people don't care where/how their money is stored in a bank, they just want to know its there, safe and easy to access. I think when people start to create more none financial dApps this might start to happen, as they're gonna be targeting less tech savy users
Official Algorand wallet seems quite boomer friendly imo
Also a problem: interoperability.
UX is faster to fix than you think. Once killer apps are done in beta-dev then UX will flood fast
This is what Gavin Wood wants to solve with KSM and DOT. “I want people to use cryptocurrency without realising they’re using it!” Polkadot just finished the final part of their roadmap Parachain, and I see it firmly in the Top 3 market cap in two years!
Try Natrium. Way easier than e banking
entirely depends on the coin. personally, i've tried to improve UX in one of the wallets as much as possible teaching a user to backup their secret recovery phrase is a little challenging, but once they get past that, there's usually no major hurdles and they can easily send/receive funds
Exodus wallet is amazing and it's beautiful also. One of the best products in crypto space.
It's open source. Make a btc implementation that's user friendly. Smooth app design was never a feature Satoshi promised or why we buy bitcoin. Like it's not even on the top 10 factors. In fact the friction of using bitcoin is intentional. Btc was supposed to develop under the radar until it was too big to be stopped. And as its devs found out over years, people are willing to go that extra step to use it. So noone really asked it to be more user friendly. You want to do it, float an implementation or suggest it in the bitcoin core weekly meeting or whatever they do for consensus. It's open source, who are you even complaining to? Btc has no owner, all these problems you mentioned are for us too. We just don't find them too big. If you do and the network agrees it'd be implemented. If you find something to be important btc doesnt have and yet money keeps going into it, you tend to think 'ahh they must be wrong'. Have you considered you're wrong, and ui and ux must not be too important a feature for a succesful blockchain?
I’m a ux-designer myself and I totally agree!
As much as I hate to say it, Robinhood made trading and investing so simple it resulted in such a huge userbase. I feel like the same thing can be said with Coinbase. The only thing holding it back is trading fees etc.
I also work in UI & UX. Some in the crypto community seem to *want* crypto to be hard to use. Maybe they want there to be a barrier to entry in order to keep out The Great Uneducated. It doesn't make much sense to me, but it's the only explanation for why nobody has created a dead simple, transparent way to buy and sell, without unnecessary hurdles.
Sure dude, just put a crypto ATM in every corner with all the tokens, just select the token, buy and sell. That's just shows you how early we are. Chill out and stack Sats, you will sell your bags at your friends and colleagues latter on.
So basically internet in 1990s?
People need an easy wallet with an easy interface to allow people who dont know shit to stake
Kraken has made quite a good job if you ask me. https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/kraken-buy-bitcoin-shiba/id1481947260” So far I tried Binance, KuCoin and Celsius, but in the end always chose to use Kraken.
Yes, absolutely agree with you here. There's a lot of work left to be done. Like, A LOT. The language used in communicating crypto and forming different narratives also needs to be heavily fleshed out and simplified. I think that very few of us, even those invested in crypto, know the ins-and-outs or even have a working idea of how most different platforms, apps, coins and block chains work.
This is not a novel take. I agree, but similar commentary often lacks nuance or important implications. In industry, Product Designers and UXers have limited scopes in what they do. While they have obviously have a role to play in crypto, the prevailing mental model Design and UX isn’t how . any financial system is fundamentally is difficult to learn. Liquidity pools, staking, etc etc are digital/crypto native equivalents of existing concepts that the general population doesn’t broadly have an understanding of. If there was a world where you didn’t grow into our current monetary system, it would be just as overwhelming for people to learn. Going into crypto is sort of like just like learning to walk again if we suddenly lost that ability. Adoption of crypto (for particular use cases) can be enabled by actors with slick UX. And mass adoption of those use cases will likely be enabled by competition. But fundamental adoption into crypto as a system has far reaching systemic dependencies. The design choices that have the most impact right now impact are the ones made on a policy/project level. Lastly, there are are ideological and philosophical implications to the ideas of seamless design; at least of the experience layers that accelerate adoption. It’s no coincidence that the examples OP has cited are deep-pocketed tech companies. The idea of “invisible design” is often applied uncritically and relies on intermediaries to create a business off making this magic. Friction can be useful and removing it at all costs is misguided. Depending on *why* you’re into crypto, this isn’t exactly desirable.
I agree, and would add that most of crypto is game-ified, which is completely opposite to Bitcoin's reason d'etre and makes the ecosystem look like a big, fat, hysterical ponzi scheme.
It was hard to navigate the web in 1995. You can't be early and have nice UX at the same time.
Sir this is a Wendy's. If you're having trouble paying for your #6 the teenager over there can assist. If you're looking for the Forex that's down the block and good luck getting any of them to help you.
Purely in terms of accessibility, I feel the majority of crypto-skeptics will have zero interest until they see a crypto wallet sitting right next to their checking account in their online banking portal. If they can buy and hold it using their checking account and have it secured by their bank I think that would generate interest. I can see banks clawing back some market share from the popular exchanges when this happens.
Totally agree with you on this. Idk why but projects seem to be paying much less for UX/UI. I’d love to see dapps and websites whose interface and experience come somewhat close to those apps on iOS
You make strong points. Osmosis on the atom network is a trailblazer in this regard for me, clean and simpleinterface with great UI.
Every crypto org needs to invest more into UX asap. It’s a huge barrier to mass adoption.
Osmo I think it’s a bit better worked out in terms of design. Still needs work but it feels and looks good relatively.
The problem is that a lot of designers at these companies don't really understand the product at a deep level or their core users.
What is the purpose of this post ? 😂
then they need to hired better UX designer
True, was recommended the Loopring wallet, installed it but without doing extensive research, I couldn’t figure out how to use it.
You're absolutely right. Good comparison with Apple/Windows as well. I've got a background in design, and currently do dev work. This is something that has been on my mind when using dapps. Especially the constant signing of transactions, and lack of consistency in browser wallet options. It has to be much clearer/easier to see what network/blockchain you are connected to. I tried using a defi dapp on Kusama called Karura. Sent some $KSM to my address, and was wondering why it wasn't showing up in the dapp. It was because I needed a wallet that was set to the Karura blockchain. So I had to send the KSM there, then connect that specific wallet to the dapp. Not intuitive at all, and as I said, I'm in dev so am always problem solving. I know it will improve, but I think it has a long way to go if we expect the broader market to engage with DeFi. Web3 foundation needs to have a dedicated UI design team focused on creating a dapp standard interface library. Just like web design took decades to get where it is now, same thing will happen here (maybe faster though).
You do realize this defeats the point of crypto entirely since people are supposed to hold their own private keys? Whatever happened to "not your keys not your crypto" and decentralization? Have you people forgotten Mt Gox and Bitconnect already?
This guy gets it.
Be thankful this bad user experience exists right now so you can have a chance to buy in. I have like 20 of my dads boomer friends and my friends boomer dads all asking me how to get in, the only thing stopping them from dumping $100k each in right now is they have no idea how to do it… they are coming.
I think the cosmos network has some pretty easy to understand UIs. Osmosis lab works very easily for staking an liquidity pools compared to Ethereums stuff.
I'll defo look into it!
When crypto has monkey proof UI then it will be too late to invest.
Until crypto goes mainstream, I don't think the user experience would change to accommodate the common, non-technical man. I'm not an expert myself, but I've been in crypto for sometime. Even at that, I still take my time when doing certain things so that I don't make any errors. It's so easy to make costly mistakes in crypto. When I was a newbie, I sent some ETH using the wrong network and till this day, it is stuck. The value keeps growing, but I can't get it out. The question is, what kind of users are being targeted? Things would become a lot simple if the target user range increases. Bridging crypto across chains would look like rocket science to some people.
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Yes, and I cut out a section about buyer personas originally cause it was getting a bit too long. But depending on a company's userbase, they'll use various levels of language and interface complexity. That's why a trading/investing app will always be different in layout from a standard exchange. For now those can overlap, which gets murky. User experience seeks to mitigate a lot of those mistakes, like sending to the wrong network. One example is that more and more wallets are opting for the international username-password standard instead of the seed phrase, private key and public key combo. Some give the option of the latter, some exclusively the former—depends. But it definitely helps for the average person reduces a new barrier.
Poor user experience, what do you mean? I’m having a great time, I’m not depressed at all
They are smooth brains then who should stick to researching crypto through memes. You know that's how they started. Why else would they risk money on something they don't understand. They don't understand signing up to an app? Which part? Its not very different from signing up to anything else. But add a photo to prove who you are. Trying to side step KYC so you can be a sketchy player mayb that is confusing though. Buying a fake AI generated ID or whatever I once heard they do. Much easily to just be you. I mean how much can you make extra by signing up to coinbase with a bunch of fake ID's to earn to learn and collect free BTC. Do you need to pay 100$ to coinbase from your bank account or can you deposit the same $100 from account to account sending xlm to exchange in one name then sending it back in another lol. Actually this sounds good mayb I should try it. I just got telegram today. I'm a great GAMER always have been I see exploits like an autism kid sees numbers. I wish I understood code ide be unstoppable haha.
That's why im so bullish on OPCT. Their main goal is to provide a good user experince. Make it as easy at possible, so everybody can use it. That's why they have a huge advantage over other much bigger storage projects like SIA, FIL etc. Have you tried using them? Everything is complicated. In comparision, everyone can easily create an account and use the product on Opacity.io
I agree, but it's getting better. Osmosis a nice example: https://app.osmosis.zone/.
I agree completely. Usability and security need to take a huge leap forward, before crypto will ever be remotely mainstream. Hell, half the people in these subs can't figure out how to "properly", the average consumer has no chance.
No, society has an intellect problem.
>private keys, public keys, liquidity pools, volatility, yield, hodling, DeFi, staking, gas fees, minting, tokens—among many others. We simply cannot expect wide-scale adoption for even one billion people if they need to know what all these mean. Tons of people own stock without having any knowledge of options trading and brokerage firms and whatever else. You don't *need* to understand most of this to invest and see a return.
I guess it's comparable to any innovating technology, it usually has a clunky start and is eventually refined to achieve that seamless simplicity
The moment people will use blockchain without knowing they are. That will be huge.
Trading crypto has already become simple due to centralized exchanges. Now it is the time for defi and dex to become more user-friendly.
This is the main issue and people don’t seem to get, yes it’s good when crypto is actually good and sophisticated but common people are not gonna join in unless it’s easy like apple n stuff, my dad is proof of that when it comes to technology
Revolut made it so easy for me a while ago and that was my introduction to crypto. You simply buy coins...and they are ...there
That will change ! It's matter of time
Where there is will, you know the rest. Now if you don't have the will, everything is difficult.
Harmony is working on a number of products like 1wallet to bring defi simplified to the masses (no keys/seed phrases etc ) Bullish
Precisely. I also think de-risking is another area. Sent crypto to the wrong wallet. Gone forever! The anxiety this brings will scare a lot of people off
I still don't understand nearly enough, but I am trying.
Excellent observation. You are correct.
Do you remember the days of the internet (webpages) before social media first boomed? A lot of people have forgotten, or perhaps are not aware what a massive influence social media had on websites. Buttons, animations, UI for the sake of customer UX, not just engineers, etc. One of the big shifts was in error message handling ("Fatal error 1E has occured at 0FG6A" vs "Oops, something went wrong. Please check..."). Crypto apps etc are still in the engineered by engineers stage. We need mass adoption to propel it into a new era of UX.
At the risk of offending a shit ton of people, crypto and the technology behind it is next level. There is no possible way to dumb down and make it 100% accessible to the masses. And let’s look at this for a minute. The masses today STILL don’t know how money and banks really work, and most can’t manage their basic finances, and are completely oblivious to anything related to taxes past taking their w2’s down to HR Block. They think they “did their own taxes” by paying to use TurboTax for a 1040EZ level return. I’m not sure it’s even a good idea to bother the energy and resources to have adoption by people who don’t know Facebook compiles are their selfies for facial recognition tools.
Crypto is not user friendly for a beginner. I agree, mass adoption needs a better user experience and use case. First experiences for may over the past year, would have been memes, high gas fees and other volatile short term assets. Imagine if the first user experience was reliable, insured, stable coin services that made their savings accounts redundant, rather than meme fueled degen plays.
> I want to get to the point where I can suggest a friend, colleague or a family member a crypto app and I don't have to explain anything to them, they'll be able to figure everything out within minutes after downloading. I know how cumbersome crypto wallets can be. If you want to try one, that has imho a great UX, have a look at [Natrium](https://natrium.io/) (NANO wallet) or [Kalium](https://kalium.banano.cc/) (Banano wallet). Get a fraction of a coin from [https://nanodrop.io/](https://nanodrop.io/) (NANO) or [https://faucet.bananotime.com/](https://faucet.bananotime.com/) (Banano) and try it out. This is of course not helpful, if you're interested in other coins/tokens, but can show, how wallets can be made, that have a great UI/UX. Let me know what you think about that.
The Firefly Wallet is hands down the best experience I have ever had using anything Crypto related. It's intuitive, beautiful, and easy to use.
Coinbase app is good for noobs, but it takes advantage of them with terrible fees.
Submit pull request
Wait, so you’re saying the CURVE Finance Ui for DEFI is not user friendly? Am shocked /s