How web3 communities can respond to humanitarian crises in Africa

Transcript

um thanks for having me here today um last day of eth cc uh appreciate you guys coming and bearing with the heat i'm excited to speak here today about a topic that i'm pretty passionate about um and it's about my point of view on designing for the future of crypto adoption and diversity um also i think i should address the elephant in the room first because on the website it said the title was still tbd and i just want you to know that's because i'm planning on launching the procrastination network and launching uh my own token tbd so for all of us procrastinators i hope you'll join me until the end um

so a little bit of context about me like i said i'm michael gluesman and i'm visiting paris from a town on the east coast of of the united states called atlanta georgia um where i used to work for a company a small startup you may have heard of called the coca-cola company and i worked on a handful of brands um on the north american business unit where i led design for brands the some of which had bubbles and some of which did not um that that's kind of my tenure there but while i was there i worked on a lot of amazing projects and i learned a great deal about connecting with consumers through great design

today i'm chief design officer at thesis thesis is a product studio where we build and launch products that empower people to live um to live life with more choice um we've we forward individuals um in that sense this is the portfolio of products that we work on i don't know maybe you've heard of them maybe you haven't keep fold tbtc saddle and we've recently launched a wallet called tallyhome now i'm sure it's uh barely

worth mentioning that the current state of the market is you know has has some of us nervous um and uh in this industry um and and our company in particular as well um we've had to face the reality and adapt a bit and um the point of view that we share at thesis is the notion that in the right time in in rough times it's useful to reflect and go back to to basics and double down on the strategies and values that we know make meaningful impact in order to thrive through the crypto winter you know like uh the bear necessities so one of our core

neces necessary basics will be to continue to making user experience core to to our products so in our industry as i'm sure some of you already know as we think about the future of this industry um we kind of hear this pervasive question of how can we make crypto more user-centered um and there's some some variation on this on this question right like how do we get to mass adoption how do we use how do we use ux to do it how do we improve the ux of crypto and

if there are any designers in this audience welcome um i'm sure that maybe you feel similarly in uh some of the dismay that i feel that um you know the practice of user experience hasn't necessarily been um frequently or successfully deployed across this industry and it seems like it's an afterthought that's tacked on at the end um i believe it's time we actually adopt a different angle entirely i'm i i don't think it's about asking this question anymore how to make crypto more user-centered i think we need to acknowledge a much bigger truth and that is crypto is already

human-centered it always has been which means if design isn't core to the product development as tech is then i think you're anti-crypto i think that the um the basic fact is that crypto ethics is inherently human-centered and we can begin to map how crypto and design are incredibly related the practice of wielding user experience strategically is quite close to crypto um and when we think about the future of crypto and the other side of this market

people are going to have a much stronger demand for desirable and friendly experiences um they're not going to have patience for for any of the the really poor experiences they have today um and all those products are going to be ignored or just avoid it so designing ux can be a major competitive advantage moving forward and it's going to open doors and can open doors for a much larger and more diverse audience so let me show you kind of my thought process on this a little bit of what i'm getting uh what i've been thinking about so just a little more detail and i've picked just four principles that i think make crypto particularly human-centered and how um how design will can support that

so first and foremost crypto's global it's arguably one of the most impactful global phenomenons of our age so it's imperative that we actually design for accessibility it means considering diversity from the beginning [Music] it's geo-diversity neurodiversity fiscal diversity techno-diversity the uh there was a talk just a couple before mine uh talking about folks in ethiopia who have no access to electricity i mean that's that's crazy how how are they going to get access we have to consider that and empathy is really required here um you know also more diversity ultimately

means more decentralization that's a core principle and you know power shifts need critical mass so again the more the merrier if you will next crypto prioritizes security um and we're talking about security to protect valuable assets that people own whether it's um whether it's financial or data what have you um so we've got to um [Music] you know we've got to make sure that that people have confidence and skills and the ability to both control their security and know the state of that security is very very vital so we've got a design for

the usability of that security what we know is that everybody makes mistakes including experts there's no one to exclude from a good sense of usability of security um there's also a need for a sense of calm which is one of the best emotional states you could possibly have um if you're gonna deal with an emergency frankly and we can achieve that by giving users plenty of confidence in their ability to manage security and be aware of errors error states that inform and guide are painfully missing in crypto products uh we know the preventative care

um is the is always the healthier alternative so we got to think about the potential pitfalls that users are going to encounter rather than wait for them to have a really no good very bad day next crypto is trustworthy i don't like the word trustless so i won't use it again um but depending on your glass huffle or empty kind of point of view um nevertheless in order to build trust and and design for something that is trustworthy you first have to earn that trust you have to design for credibility um one of the ways to build greater trust in this industry

kind of veers from ux for just a minute and because i'll touch on the fact that we need more great brands in the space brands have the ability to tell stories that really connect with people and great stories brands with great stories can scale beyond any telegram or discord group you know those are the early adopters who might get involved but beyond that we need stories that everyone can connect with and there's a there's a great paper published by um

a designer named toshimogi and he works for the prominent design consultancy frog and he wrote a paper on the pillars of designing for trust and finance competency uh i'm sorry competency reliability empathy and customer orientation are the pillars of of trust and um what that means uh what what they mean our competency is about being an expert in what you do and sharing that knowledge reliability is about being consistent maintaining a reputation for following through empathy of course is understanding your your users emotional states and valuing them as customers uh and really meeting them where they are on their journey and customer orientation means putting

customers needs first through compatible values and ethos i think that crypto actually does a pretty good job at the last one to a degree and it stops quite short of making the case relevant to the masses but empathy score is quite low all right and last certainly not least crypto supports self-sovereignty um this one is really important because with self-sovereignty we're making the biggest ask of people in apparel it's a major paradigm shift so in that regard i think it's a really really

major cognitive reach for for some people so designing for clarity is very crucial here bringing people along for this journey to more self-sovereignty um [Music] in order to do that we need to not only teach good habits we've got to introduce them and that's got to be done in a thoughtful way and i'd really love to see more focus and effort in our industry made towards thinking about the language and the terminology in our products so that they can act as methods of wayfinding for new users there's a lot of jargon that kind of skips over and doesn't consider people who are

brand new so just to recap the the crypto values of being global secure trustworthy self-sovereign mirror up really nicely with the practice of design and ux this is what ux tries to accomplish for any product in any industry to be accessible to be usable to be credible to be clear we can do this for crypto because it's necessary for crypto and it is it's about people designs about people crypto is about people every story you will hear today two talks in uh before me all i hear are stories

about how people people people need access so if we can shift our minds a little bit here designing for people means designing for crypto let's stop trying to uh you know separate the two and and ask design to fix crypto design should already be embedded in in the way we approach building these products so thank you [Applause]