The Future of Web3UX - a paradigm shift for a better collaboration

Transcript

hello everyone um i am sasha tanase i'm a product designer and user researcher collaborating and contributing to the threshold network which has been formerly known as network the keep network and you cipher i am also one of the co-founders of the web3ux user panel user research panel and what i like to say about my work is that i'm trying to transform extremely complex products into more palatable bits my goal is to make the web 3 user research open source so we

can make it better and benefit from one another and also i would love to make the explorative research and explorative design phase uh a mandatory step in any product life cycle so today's talk is about a new collaboration flow between designers developers and bus devs it's a critique brought to the way things are currently handled we'll try to go over together about what the issues might be of the present building process how they affect the products life cycle

and we will explore how might we collaborate better from the start and how to be more inclusive today's talk is an open conversation hopefully this subject will set the wheels in motion and i would be very happy to hear any ideas of suggestions of how might we better this proposed approach so um the web 3ux why do we even even talk about this is there an issue well so anecdotally 70 percent of the user experience of a web 3 protocol or dap is

dictated by the smart contract smart contracts usually are not upgradable so the experience should be flawless from the start and if you don't know what that what that means well the user's experience in web 3 is made of the entire user flow and user journey number of transactions until the goal is reached and this could be translated in web 2 as the number of clicks in e-commerce of until the user can reach its goal gas spent by the user displayed information so what is the current situation of ux in web3

now well technology leads the product which means the product is not user centered the products are extremely complex and difficult and the development teams are more focused on solving the problems which are localized at the smart contract level and there are many levels in between the smart contract and the user so this is what's happening the development team meets decides how the protocol or the app will work they will write the smart contract and afterwards they send it to an audit usually there are multiple audits done in average two to four and after the code has been audited and fixed the development team decides to bring the design to the table so basically design

is brought when all the user journeys all the user interactions all of the interaction experience has been set in stone and there is no going back so there is a tendency for technology to lead the product versus the other way around this means that there is high likelihood of over-engineering and unfortunately ux becomes a by-product tech people do not have the priority to put themselves in the user shoes which is not really an issue unless the entire experience depends on them so let's check the downsides of this flow

the teams are siloed which means there is zero collaboration any findings from research that require redesigning the experience is impossible design can improve the experience only by adding explanations and any tiny ux writing gimmicks design can only cosmetize it cannot fundamentally improve the experience product building time is longer because everything is cascading and onboarding and retention of new f3 users is low due to the clunky experience and steep learning curve so we've learned why most of the ux resides in the smart contract we learned the current

situation in the ethereum product building and the issues so how might we improve this state so first of all we all need to be open-minded and flexible to replace our common behaviors this means stepping out of our comfort zones and by changing the bit and track the deliverable is the user facing product not the technical smart contract back-end product thus having a goal and the target to get to a desired ideal outcome is a great place to start from so this is not the product this is the product

so a new way of working let's start from a process that has been proven to work very well this is the double diamond process it was popularized by the design british council in 2005 and it's based on a diverge converge developed by the linguist bella panetti the process suggests that a product process should have four phases discovery and definition in which we are discovering the problems we need to solve the needs of the user and then we defined our problem this can be together made in an explorative phase

and then we have the development and the delivery which is the iterative phase so explorative design helps us do the right thing iterative design helps us do the thing right this should become our mantra so what could be a flow that respects the two important phases in a product development cycle and it can also respond to the web 3 environment so this is my new proposed product process for web 3 in which we uh separate everything into phases the

explorative divergent phase and the iterative convergent phase so let's break this down the explorative divergent phase um it starts like this so we have the stakeholder alignment everyone is brought to the table to this from the start design development business a designer will facilitate stakeholder interviews and each team will map out their requirements the user needs technical constraints business goals and all of them are taken into account afterwards a user journey is created based on each team's insights and

requirements like evm constraints security issues user needs pain points kpis any business requirements and all of these elements are incorporated in a high level user journey map that will mark each step a user needs to take in order to achieve their desired goal the user journeys assumed needs and pain points are pro probed in the generative research and we basically speak to the real people this is a very impactful moment in the process since we are moving from merely assuming things to actually spending time and observing the people who will in the end use our products

in this step of the process we are testing our ideas and this may be the moment in which we might need to pivot all of the unearthed insights and findings will be incorporated into the new user journeys so just to recap each team gets a voice each team can tell its own requirements there is complete transparency and collaboration between the teams assumptions ideas and protocol design can be tested and researched in a very early stage there will be no um sunken cost fallacy uh nobody is emotionally attached to the idea we can still be objective we haven't lost

and invested a huge amount of time and money okay oop so again we just ran and conducted research we have probed our assumptions findings had been incorporated into the new user journeys and all of the stakers our stakeholders are aligned and happy so we can now start the iterative phrase so the new journeys were validated by users and stakeholders and now they are becoming the backbone of the project based on these documents and artifacts

the development team and the design team can start working in parallel the prototype and smart contract writing phase is a very very important step in which the two teams will need to have constant check-ins and we'll need to accommodate each other's findings which means there is constant collaboration any change from the prototype that is tested in usability tests and whenever the designer brings the findings they will need to communicate them to the smart contracts on the other hand whenever the smart contract developers are finding different solutions or they are encountering unforeseen technical issues they also

need to communicate it to the design and this will be rippled into the prototype so there needs to be a constant collaboration a constant back and forth between the design team and the development team and after everything is done and ready and the audits are done and usability tests and are done then yes we can ship a product that will be loved and mostly used by our users so just to recap some benefits of the proposed flow the team is fully integrated and not siloed there is constant collaboration and back and forth between the design team and the development team and also the

business and there are shorter building times and more time for research and testing so something that i want you to remember and never forget you have to love your users because if you ignore them they will ignore you back thank you any question yes so in the beginning you said the 17 of the user experience start from the smart contract yeah shouldn't we we

start by questioning that that the user experience should not be coming from the contract itself right we should be able to like reimagine the user experience and not this even if the contract is not helpful we can still make a better user experience can we yes but then if you're thinking of a smart contract that decides for you as a staker let's say that you have to go through seven transactions only to deposit and then to four other transactions only to authorize an app then i believe as a designer you can't really do anything about it so this is why i'm saying that unfortunately a lot of the ux is dictated by the smart

contract do you have already like a case that you feel proud of that where you have been able to smooth the the weigh-in for the user uh no unfortunately now it's really this is a very new flow that i'm trying to implement with threshold as well yeah but i can tell you that in the past when i worked with the ssi wallet company and they were trying to make some sort of advancements wages advancements for employees while running explorative research i have uncovered

that neither the employees neither the employers were happy about this idea and their then their actual need was that employers had um a lot a lot of tokens and then employees didn't have a high risk profile to be paid in crypto so what they needed was a platform with an input of tokens and output of fiat so basically they had to pivot which was great i guess just a quick um kind of additional clarification with that other point that i think there is some decoupling between the smart contracts and the uh the front end say with um yeah with the back end and with wallets as well so

newer wallets um or there's new things coming around multiple um actions within one user operation that's four three three seven things like that i think are going to also smooth these edges so luckily it's not just the smart contracts there is this middle part that will also be changing so i think that's a good process for that and and don't get me wrong i'm not villainizing the smart contracts there are uh proxy smart contracts that are doing extra uh uh the extra ux job for doing stuff for you as a user so i don't think that's the issue what i'm trying to say is that we need to collaborate more okay thank you so much thank you

[Applause] you