Fixing the Permissionless UX Paradox

Transcript

Awesome. [Music] So, hey everyone. Uh, thanks for being here. Uh, welcome. It's a bright and early morning at ETC. I know mornings can be rough. So, uh, yeah, here's a little image to, uh, get us started. Imagine a nightclub with no bouncer, no velvet rope, no dress code. you'd expect to walk right in, right? But somehow with no obvious barriers, you still can't get in. The door feels locked. And that is the strange reality of uh many permissionless web 3 apps today.

So the promise of web 3 is that anyone can jump in. Uh there's no gatekeepers, there's no approvals required. Yet somehow it still feels like there's a secret password or or a hidden code that you need to dig into uh why this happens. And that is what I call the permissionless UX paradox. And uh today I want to dig into why this happens, why it matters, and most importantly, how we can fix it in the end. But first, a quick intro. I'm a product designer. Uh I've worked in contract with all sorts of web 3 projects over the last four years. So I built and designed in web3 since uh I was basically a teenager. So that meant also navigating the chaos of uh early crypto projects without a map or guide. So I know what it's like to be

on both sides of the spectrum building tools and also trying to use them. And this paradox is the barrier that uh keeps tripping us up. But first uh let's unpack the phrase permissionless UX paradox. So permissionless means anyone can build in, anyone can participate. There's no gatekeepers, there's no uh centralized approvals. And that is the promise of web 3. But the experience, the UX uh often feels permissioned. It's locked behind jargon, multiple confusing steps and uh mental models that only crypto insiders understand. The backend infrastructure sure is open everywhere, but the front door, the user interface, it feels locked and confusing. And it's a fundamental roadblock. So why we call

this a paradox? Because there's two truths that coexist. One, you can join in without permission, but it doesn't feel like it. And because it doesn't feel open, we lose the very users we want to welcome in. And that's the paradox we need to fix. So this paradox uh isn't confined in one area. It actually infects the whole web3 stack. At every touch point, the back end sure is very permissionless and open, but the front end and UX is complicated. It's intimidating and feels permission as well. So we've defined the problem, but why does it exist in the first place?

Why do uh systems built on openness and inclusion they end up feeling making us feel exclusive and closed? So to answer this we kind of have to uh zoom out and look at the bigger picture. So we need to understand the systematic forces and human factors at play. So from the very architecture of web3 protocols to the psychology of the users who interact with them. So this is not just a design problem, it's also a very complex ecosystem problem that uh we are solving here. And here's the first thing you encounter in web 3. Uh it's a wallet and already we've hit a wall. So you're greeted with words like custody. There's uh seed phrase EVM compatible and then you're casually asked to write down 12 random words that somehow control your

entire network. Think about how wild that is. And even worse, the first thing most web two users do, they screenshot the seat phrase. So we've created the most highstakes UX in the world and we've handed it to people who reuse their Netflix passwords. Now, let's say you made it through that. You're ready to ready to try a DAP. And here's what you get to begin. Tell us what type of account you'd like to open. You'll only need a basic understanding of asymmetric encryption, gas markets, and uh zika proofs. And this is real. This is actually someone's first impression. So, it reads less like a signing screen and uh more like SATs that you take. And it's like someone said, "Ah, let's take the best parts of DeFi and get them behind a pop quiz."

And the joke is all of this, it's not malicious. It's not done with malicious intent. It's just what happens when product teams audit their mental models and they optimize for protocol fluency instead of actual emotional safety for the users. Now then we have Dows the promise of decentralized governance except the UX here is choose between option A unclear jargon option B slightly different jargon now scroll nine pages of forum replies to figure out who's fighting with whom. And this stuff actually should be empowering in uh in in general, but instead it uh feels like stepping into a middle of a town hall and that you were not invited to and everyone speaking somehow multi-IC language there. So we somehow in the end replace corporate hierarchy with

governance PDFs and the result is there's 3% voter turnout and most of that is just whales in the end. Ah now you want to move your assets across chains. It's sounds simple right? except suddenly uh the UI sounds like mission control. You're about to initiate a cross-chain asset transa transfer. Any errors that you do are irreversible and bridging assets feels more like a diffusing bomb. Probably uh you got the tutorial off of Reddit. And most people see the screen and think ah you know what maybe I didn't need didn't need to move that ETH after all. So what we've seen it's this aesthetic of kind of mistrust that's plaguing the whole ecosystem right now. So every single one

of these layers that we looked at, the wallets, the Dows, the DAPs, the bridges, they show us the same thing. We've made UX reflect our anxiety, not our intent. And we want safety, but we somehow express it in paranoia. We want community, but we wrap it in bureaucracy. We want ease, but we offer entropy. And this is isn't about uh pointing fingers at anyone. It's rather about realizing that when you don't design with empathy in mind, the system reflects its creator's fears, not the user's needs. And yeah, let's fix that. So, we we also know that uh web 3 is built on composibility. It's the idea that protocols, the layers, the tools that can be stacked and connected to

each other to create uh new products quickly. And it's awesome. It's a incredible future for uh builders. It allows rapid innovation. But from a user's p perspective, it also means layers of complexity. Every new protocol or integration adds jargon steps and choices. This complexity accumulates into what we call the UX debt. It's a kind of invisible cost uh the user pays as system grows. So while the tech sure is permissionless, the complexity generates unintentionally raises barriers for users as well.

And we all know that fragmentation as well, it's uh baked into the DNA of web 3 and that's intentional. It gives builders freedom and uh users more control over their assets. But here's the catch. Again, the users bear the cost. They have to juggle multiple wallets, manage different keys, switch networks, decode technical error messages that no app fully explains. The system is permissionless everywhere, but the user experience still feels like jumping through hoops. And this is the cost that slows adoption and leads to frustration and churn in the end. Let's talk uh human psychology for a moment.

Users don't want complexity or chaos. We all know that. They want certaintity, flow, and trust. We all as humans crave interfaces that feel safe and predictable. But web 3, how we see it, often delivers the opposite. There's volatile fees. There's unpredictable transactions and no clear feedbacks. Permissionless sure means freedom as well, but freedom without guidance or safety makes it feel like chaos to most people. And this paradox deepens because the very openness that makes web three powerful also makes it hard to trust for non-experts.

So let's drill down to wallets for a moment. The gateway to web 3. So wallet developer thinks in technical terms there's addresses, there's seed phrases, there's gas fees. But users thinks am I safe? Will I lose my money? What is gas? And this is a massive mental model gap here. And most wallets don't even try to close it. So they throw complexity at users and expect them to well just get it. So people get scared, they hesitate, they walk away and you never even know they were here in the first place. And think about what how wild that is. Your entire user funnel can just collapse because someone didn't know what a signature request meant.

So this stuff all we saw it's not just theoretical. The cost of the paradox is very real and you feel it in your metrics even if you don't know it. For example, wallet onboarding drop off, they're brutal. People open the flow, they hit the seed phrase screen and they know about. And I actually established this doing multiple user tests for uh some wallet uh redesigns I did last year. Dows also can get corum because people don't understand how to vote. Bridges get abandoned halfway through because of scary red warnings and there's unclear outcomes in the end. And the worst part is if someone gets burned even once, they don't leave your product. They just leave the whole ecosystem. They're like, "Ah, I tried crypto again. Never, never again, never

going back." So, let's take a moment to uh really separate these two ideas that we often get confused with. There's per permissionless and intuitive. So, just because something is technically open, it doesn't mean it's also easy to understand or even feels like it's open in the first place. So take for instance uh the command line anyone can use it right there's no permission required but how many people actually apart from devs that do very few because it's not intuitive it's intimidating to an average average job so web 3 I think has the same issue honestly signing a transaction or approving a token transfer it might be one click sure but what does that click mean in the end what is the user giving

up what happens next is the real question so all we saw it's not just UX side notes I think they're trust points and when people don't feel in control or worse they don't even know what just happens we actually lose them and that's why I think permissionless is just not enough if it's not intuitive well it might as well be locked so in traditional tech when you ship something with mediocre UX users might get a bit annoyed probably they bounce maybe they leave a bad review that's annoying but it's actually not catastrophic but in web 3 the consequences are actually a lot lot bigger there's real financial losses. There's irreversible mistakes.

There's people getting burned. Sometimes literally losing hundreds and thousands of dollars from a single UX misstep. So that's why the UX debt in web 3, it's hitting way too high. The stakes are much more high. And worse, when people have a bad first experience, yeah, they leave the whole ecosystem. They go back to web two and say, "Ah, I tried crypto once, never again." And that's actually very real the biggest problem I think we're solving with the ecosystem right now. And I think that is what also makes web3 a lot different. The cost of a UX mistake is of course not just abandonment. It's whole exit for everything.

So to solve that I think we always look at the learning curve in web 3. But I think that's literally only half the story. What we also need to think about is trust curve. So users don't need to understand everything to try something new but they need to trust it as well. They need to feel enough feel safe enough to take the first step. And right now I think web 3 tools often spike both the learning curve and the trust curve at the same time which is bad. So that's like h handing someone a parachute and saying ah you'll figure it out on the way down. So good UX I think really lowers the trust curve first and says hey we've got you it's okay to try then it generally ramps up the learning as they explore more without the and as it

goes linearly both the trust curve and the learning curve it prompts a sense of safety in the user's mind as well and I think without the sense of safety people don't climb they walk away now another big mistake is uh I see is treating UX as a handoff and it's a lot more prevalent Still a lot of things have changed in web3 in the last 3 four years just on UX point of view but still this one is a it's a it's a big one. So like once the smart contract is deployed we can just slap a basic UI on it and say ah well the protocol is there users will figure it out.

No that's not how the trust is built I think that's not UX that's just cosmetics you apply in the end. Good UX doesn't come after the hard part. I think it is the hard part. It is the layer that turns this complexity that we saw into clarity. Also turns these options into choices and turns dangers into trust. So to solve this like think about stripe for example you don't have to understand payment routing or fraud detection or banking infrastructure to use it. You just use it and it feels solid. It feels elegant. It's like someone already thought through your worst case scenarios so you don't have to and solved it in the end. And that's the power and I think that's what good design also does. It makes the scary

stuff behind invisible. So in web 3, we need to stop thinking of UX as a handoff that we just do and start treating it as onboarding because if the user don't feel like they belong in the first two minutes, they're never going to come back. Now, yeah, let's talk about something people almost never say out loud when we talk about UX. Fear. It's not confusion. It's not uh friction. It's fear. So people are scared. They're scared of clicking the wrong thing, of losing money, of of uh getting rugged, of feeling stupid in public. This irre irreversible way. And when people are scared, they don't explore. They freeze.

And if they freeze, they don't transact. And if they don't transact, the whole point of your protocol collapses. And all of this stuff, it's not theoretical. It's human psychology 101. And this is why just make it simpler is not enough. So we are not just removing steps, we're also designing for emotional safety. We're designing also for the nervous system. And I also like to always say that uh good UX doesn't just reduce clicks, it also reduces your cortisol. So let's uh look under the hood for a moment. Most people, even some founders, uh they think of UX as a surface.

There's the buttons, there's the layout, the colors. But I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface is what actually shapes the user's experience. There's smart contract limitations, there's wallet design decisions, there's protocol logic, there's gas mechanics, there's latency from RPC nodes, even things like like how errors are surfaced from failed transaction. All of that lives below the UI. But it directly impacts also how the users feel above the surface. So if you want to improve the UX in web 3, we can't just Figma harder. I think we have to design and start debug debugging trust like we also debug systems in the first place because the problem isn't always the surface, it's what's underneath as well.

Which leads me to a very big mental shift. Something that actually took me a long time to realize myself. So in web two, you could often ship a good UX and with just good designers and actually product managers. But in web 3, I think that's not enough. You need cross functional collaboration actually very early on in the product pro process. And I mean protocol designers, there's smart contract engineers, there's front-end devs, wallet teams. So all in the room asking how does it actually feel to a human? Because that's how you move from technically functional to emotionally trustworthy. And that's a big shift.

Because if you move from the function to form, that's how you move from fear to actually trust in the end. And let me give you an example that actually breaks this pattern that we talked about. Think about something like Zora's minting flow. So you connect a wallet, you preview the NFT, you click mint, and boom, there's transactions done. There's assets in wallet. It's clean, it's clear, it's delightful. So what makes that work? There's gases transaction uh so you don't panic about fees. You also don't have to know what gas fees is in the first place. There's very clear and friendly copy. There's previews that match what you're getting and there's also transaction feedback

that doesn't leave you wondering ah did that go through? It's a very very solid uh UX example of what works. So it's just not that it looks good but it feels safe and understandable as well because you're never left guessing. And that's the bar I think we should be setting not just for art drops but for everything from staking to governance to identity. And let's be honest uh most people even here I think still think that UX is just about interface right but I think the interface is just an echo of the deep deeper system underneath. I think real UX is what the user does feels and believes across time in your system. So I personally approach UX as kind of a behavior shaping engine which means the

protocol is a part of UX. So if your contract is punishing exploration, no amount of UI can fix that. The governance process is also UX. So if your users feel unheard, no banner will regain trust. And the data model is also UX. So what you track is what you value in the end. And that is what the users will always optimize for. Now most user flows uh they're designed like a one-way street, but the real behavior I think is really looped. The loop is the unit of this behavior and not the journey as a whole. So what I mean by that is we don't just sign in and succeed. We attempt, we react, we interpret, we decide and then we try

again. So I call these uh what we saw here the influence loops. So they're kind of a feedback engines that drive the learning, the identity and the habit that we uh we are striving for. And here's a real world example of that in web 3. So you go to a platform, you stake, you see yields, you feel competent, you tell friends, and then you restake or the opposite as well.

You mint, you get rugged, you feel stupid, you withdraw emotionally, then you never come back, you avoid web 3. So what's the design principle here that we saw? So what I found out was designing for second iteration and the first not the first is really the key because the second use is when the identity begins for the user. The first is always the curiosity. The second is the commitment. That means onboarding should always designed should be designed not for completion but for return. And here's a truth I've also learned from uh watching real users over and over again. All loyalty that we see it's memory based. So people return not

because of the feature features but because of the story they tell themselves about what the product did for them when they were there. So I call these the narrative inflection points. So there are moments where the user does literally nothing or they do something that makes them feel good and lit it literally changes how they see the product and themselves as well like recovering a wallet after losing access or or uh voting in a DA for the first time or seeing an NFT land in your wallet after minting and feeling proud about it. So what they remember is uh what they believe because those are the moment that they stick with you. I think everyone here kind of remembers probably the first NFT they minted or or uh the

first time they staked something and it went through because they are emotionally legible as well like they're tellable to friends you can tell that to friends they feel earned so every product I design and work on I ask what's the story the users going to tell themselves about that and it solves almost half the problems that we talked about before this because what they remember is what they believe and this is something I've been actually actively developing. I call it the identity convergence club curve. So basically it's a model for how people go from stranger to visitor to user to advocate and believer. So most onboarding frameworks they assume a funnel but in

systems design I think what matters is how tightly the identity converges with system participation in the end. And since they're designed like a funnel, they're optimized for conversion, not identity in the end. And to solve that, it's not a one oneclick thing. I think it's built across interactions that reinforce your identity as well. So when I'm working on a new product, I ask uh where do users drop off this curve? What rituals can we design to realign them? Are we giving people the space to become who they want to be in your product?

And this is maybe the deepest idea I think in the whole talk and the one that kind of guides all my design work now. So when someone uses your product, they're not just completing a task. Uh they're forming a story about themselves. I'm the kind of person who mints early. I'm the kind of person who contributes to the onchain culture. I took the risk and it worked well in some cases. Those aren't just user actions. Those are actual identity affirmations. So when we do UX, we not just designing screens. We are also designing self-perception in the end. And I think that's why the shallow funnels fail because they treat users as uh data points. But I think the real design is

rather about helping people see themselves in the system to see that they belong there in the end. And let me say something uh that you might not expect from a UX designer. I think web 3 doesn't have a usability problem. It has a belief problem. The flows, for example, they don't break because the buttons are in the wrong place or or they break they don't believe they're smart enough. They break because people don't believe they're safe in the first place. They they don't believe they belong. And I think this belief, you cannot dispatch it with UI polish or or win it through marketing, for example. I think belief is earned. It's uh it's it's a very pure thing. I think it's through

moments that feel true. I think it's true to the user. It's true to the system and also true to the very promise of this whole industry as a whole. So I think the real job of UX in web3 I think is belief architecture and if you don't believe if you don't build belief into the bones of the system that we're building for I think we'll lose the very people we're trying to reach. And I think that's still happening. It's being worked on but still there's a very long way to go. Now it was a quick one but uh here's something I want to leave you with today.

We don't need better interface in invitations. So interfaces we saw the whole problems with how things were and how things are still being done. But I believe we don't need better interfaces. is we need better invitations in the end because every product that's being built right now, every wallet, every DAO, every DAP, I think is an invitation. It's an invitation to enter a system to kind of adopt a worldview to become the kind of person that you're trying to become. And the real question that we should ask always in the end is what kind of world are you actually inviting people into?

So, is it the world where they feel locked out or one where they feel like they've arrived home? because I think good UX isn't just what you build, it's what you believe about the people you're building for. So, it was a quick one. Uh I'd like to end there. So, trustless doesn't mean humanless. And uh yeah, hopefully there's uh some good takeaways from the talk. I know it was quick, but uh condensed into very short one. If you feel if you see me around the venue, just come up to me, talk to me. Any questions, I'd be happy to jam on anything UX and product in web 3. If you also have any questions in the audience, feel free.

Awesome. Cool. Thank you.