DAPPCON 2019: Designing for Humans, Crypto Insights from the Field - Vanessa Slavich (Celo)

Transcript

it's an example of best is last so I'm talking about designing for humans we've done research in seven countries mostly in emerging markets and I wanted to share some of the insights that we've had with all of you and with the hope that as you're going into building this weekend and my inspires new ideas an empathy and give some new perspective so globally about one in three adults don't have access to a bank account and because of this they don't have an easy way to send money across distances to store value or participate and kind of the global financial infrastructure that we're building and that exists around the world solo which most of you may not have heard it is an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to

anybody with a mobile phone and if you remember one thing about solo its mobile first so we've designed the whole system to be focused on the global use case to give you a quick preview of the technology there are three layers on the bottom and we are eat fully eevee eevee m compatible and so we're at work of a serial with certain features built for mobile again and then in the middle we have our own stable coin called solo dollars and selling gold and then we have a lightweight identity protocol as well that map's phone numbers to hashes on the protocol and then on the top we're building the first new scape which is a peer-to-peer social penis app focused on emerging markets and because

we're designing the whole stack and to end we actually have insights from the research that we're doing and the testing the piloting and then we build those features into the protocol I'm so very quickly iterating on this mobile use case with the hope that it can be more usable and delightful for users around the world and how we do this which is my background and is through design research has anyone heard of design researcher familiar that can fold people so the big thing here is that we're designing with communities around the world using this new approach and I'll give you an example so earlier this week I was drinking a lot of coffee so that was what I was doing how I was doing it I was buying it with my credit

cards they hadn't gotten yeah but why I was doing - because I'm extremely jet-lagged coming from California so if you might look at my behavior you might say ok what what is she doing she's buying coffee I'm gonna design a coffee up there better than the current one but my actual need is on jet lag some of the solution you may design might actually be around a better sleep system for the airplane and then maybe some medicine for me to take sleep better so once you understand my kind of corny you can design a solution that's rooted in that verse so it's kind of just what you're seeing or observing and so this is an approach that we take for every new kind of country or market that we're looking at we love research so much that we actually took our entire company into

Colombia and we did research with Venezuelan migrants and so we were studying people who were banked in Venezuela and now I'm veins in Colombia and then also the former land in formal remittances infrastructure between the two countries and in total in the last year and a half we've been to 18 cities and seven countries 39 of our team members have participated over 150 one-on-one interviews which last one to two hours each and six different methods that look like a whole toolkit of resource that you can use and then we in total how to run 90 insights that informed this kind of ecosystem that we're building today and we've actually shared all of our insights on medium on our blog but today I'm going to talk a

little bit about what we learned and since I imagine most of you are interested in gaps citizencon I thought I'd be interested to talk about crypto adoption along a journey and kind of look at the different steps and the first market that we went to is actually a pizza I mean can you know which is kind of the key study from Oban lending and adoption eighty-six percent of the population uses in Pisa in Kenya and so this is kind of the trend that we've seen in Kenya and other markets as well so it really starts in the awareness how do people hear about it do they because it kind of resonate and then do they understand it with blockchain imagine there's a lot of barriers to that can they actually trust it do they know the people behind it does it add value and kind of very quickly add value to the

situations that they're in and then it can kind of unlock all of these things they can get to a state of over time so first awareness so this was in Kenya I have not put into my head to know what Facebook is for and so from Facebook we also asked a lot about cryptocurrencies and all sorts of tech adoption and in general people and especially in emerging market don't really think about concepts in the same way that we might be at a conference thinking about the future even if they're familiar with the term so this woman we met actually at Facebook pre-installed on her phone and she'd never opened it she was like I've I have not spent the mental energy trying to understand it and this was direct

drastically different than when a Pisa was introduced in that same market where they said send and receive money in the air where the current mental model for that was sending money to a person and they take the envelope in a bus and then deliver it to their family and so it was a model that they already had so it's like send money like you do right now but now you'll send it in the air and then people saw the TV ads and immediately signed up like no delay and so the big takeaway here is like people won't pay attention unless you speak to their need which may be obvious that you have to actually understand what their heat is which research and ask the questions is a great way to do that and some things we've been testing is actually different messaging looking basically running ads and seeing what

people click on just to kind of see what the message resonate in different audiences and another thing around awareness is it's really common to do community based education and so people kind of go into these communities and run these like circle sessions where people kind of share and learn together and that's like a really big way to get awareness in the market as well so once you kind of get awareness now is like well what are you talking about doing even understand what the thing is and so in Argentina we heard I don't work with dollars this is actually feedback from our app and many people in Argentina check exchange rates like it's a hobby so they constantly are checking pesos per dollar piece of still are how can I save money we heard that you can send it like this is interesting so you

can pay and pay and send money but that that you only do that for work and that use buy things in a different context so so I didn't send that very well but basically like the terminology you think it makes a really big difference so pain receive you can do for work I might pay you for a job but you can send money to friends and so we actually changed the terminology in our app to kind of match them in to model the understanding that people currently had another thing in Argentina there was zero concept of investing the saving money was their form of investing and people didn't understand sell o gold which is art deflationary currency and gas like good luck and so the key takeaway here is that people put new concepts into their

existing framework so it kind of similar to the first one but but step further it says something that we're looking at is adding the local currencies into the app so for in Tanzania we need to have the shillings and the app even if they're not transaction initially they need to actually have the reference currency is day to day they don't buy things in dollars the same in Argentina the same way comes via kind of every market that we've looked at in the future sell it will support multiple currencies so we could pay to the euro to the showing to the yen and also from a tech technology standpoint we made it possible for gas to be in celle dollars this is like a new innovation so with maker and die you kind of transact and die and then you pay gap smith here yeah I wish my users

experienced a point like how am going to get a theory on so with our system everything is in fellow dollars which makes a lot more usable I'm the third is trust I'm so in Colombia um my guy just had a table out front of his house he had a Venezuelan flag flying a traditional a or no music playing he was always off he was always offering me a cup of coffee while we chat and you can get just kind of sense this spirit of trust and community here and it's much harder for people to trust organizations than real people and he said was the most interesting thing where people loved him paisa but they hated Safaricom and that was almost universal but if you know Safaricom owns Aziza and it's because M Pisa

represented their neighbor who operated a kind of small agent business and they knew them they trusted them where Safaricom was like the person taking the fees like the person I don't really trust and so like the importance of like a person and a face to go to which when you think about scale is obviously hard but it makes a big difference when you're entering a new community with new technology like how do you actually scale that with people in this chest we also found like massive distrust of banks all feel Latin America and Mexico minutes away in Argentina they're like new personal you're not surprising and so the takeaway is people trust people not organizations and so how do you

actually kind of create more faces when we came back from our first trip we completely redesigned our website it was a very illustration based and now it's mostly photo based for the same reason that now they can see the people behind the technology we also kind of amped up some of the photos and the app keeping in mind also data usage but trying to create a more like personable experience there and then we're really focused on cash and cash out solutions and market using things like agent networks we don't expect people to go to exchange and cash out for most people in the world that's not realistic at least today and the first one for value those who aren't able to buy GPS they have robbed Wi-Fi from UNICEF office this is actually in a refugee camp in Tanzania

this is a Congolese refugee that lived there for 22 years and every time the Wi-Fi every time it rains the Wi-Fi goes out not only in the camps but actually in the local communities in almost all the research we did people keep their phones on low brightness to conserve battery charging is a huge issue connectivity is an issue we just did a pilot in the Philippines and connectivity throughout the day would also fluctuate quite a bit and so there's all these kind of core usability challenges to overcome no matter what market you're looking at and so it's really important just to understand what those considerations are and design for them some things where we kind of after our first few trips really focused on

building a light client and so we have a lot of technology innovations that don't download all the headers onto the app so that you can actually use the blockchain a lot quicker on your phone and we're also looking in top-line payments as an option so to kind of recap the four phases to adoption is you can kind of unlock each one of youth eventually over time you get to love where people start trusting you and then you become like integral to their life and if I could give you a few takeaways for you fill in this weekend I have two connection plate those into action so the first is to kind of understand and also speak to the language people are using whether that's the currency or the kind of mental

models they have or the kind of everyday interaction so spending a second trying to put yourself in their shoes and kind of think about what language they use to communicate and how can I put that in the app that I'm building or the messaging that I'm sitting around it the second one is as much as possible whether in the digital experience or be thinking about physical experience can you actually put a face to it you probably trust ello more than you did before I though you didn't care about that for now you know me so maybe you trust it so just think about how you can put a face to the experiences that you're designing and then last is just spend some time trying to understand usability considerations I'm talking about emerging markets which there's probably a lot more challenges than in Berlin but think about whatever

challenges are and then in the earlier stages of your design and building process kind of build some of those so that you can kind of design a technology that actually work for the solution that you're seeking and then I wanted to give you some tips on how to get started with research today so how many of you actually going to eat Berlin okay about half so this is like the quick and dirty if you wanted to do some testing this weekend so let's say you wanted to build a speaking gap and you could actually do this with cells SDK which you launched this week and so you wanted to think about governance and kind of how changes are made into the protocol for example so the first thing you could do is you

can write down your assumptions so spend 10 minutes what do I seem about speaking and just think about maybe you're thinking okay what information just takers need to have and so I assume that they need to know what people want to talk about so that they want to read a forum quickly lastly your assumption and then you turn that assumption into a question so I want to understand what information people are using talk to a few people you could just take your question list it's called intercept so just go find a few people ask a few questions so this is like your super likely form of research but you're cool just ask the questions at the hackathon and kind of learn more as you're building but if you don't want to do that I also created an insulation @e thrillin and so we actually have audio

from some of our interviews I'm set up in the courtyard and so you can actually put headphones on and kind of put yourself in different situations and hopefully learn from some different life experiences and be inspired to build for people around the world as I mentioned we launched the SDK the C and so we actually have two workshops that you drill in at 12:00 and 3:00 p.m. on Saturday I also be there if you have any research questions that you want to talk about research I love it and then probably chain in addition within Jason and fellow launched ecosystem fund this week and so we actually do have funds to support long-term development in the cellar ecosystem lastly um we really value your type and my trigger to be stylish though

it's also my telegram and so we haven't had research questions feel free to each other thank you so much thanks [Applause]