Delightful Product and UX Design for Web3

Transcript

okay cool hello welcome this works i'm andre thanks a lot for coming around uh i'm andre i'm co-founder and ceo of deepwork studio which is a product design studio over the last two and a half years approximately we designed over 35 to 40 different products and in the next 20 minutes i'm going to show you the biggest learnings from these and introduce you to a couple of case studies and also share some tools so we'll start off with some fundamentals on good design and what were the learnings of these platforms then i'll talk a little bit about how to make a an experience actually delightful and

interesting for your users and at the end i'll show you share some zero-cost tools to actually implement some of these strategies pretty much right away and approach design from a very efficient perspective so before i actually go into design itself i want you to all think about this question and it sounds a bit odd but this is probably the most important thing you should decide on before you start building a product so what problem exactly are you solving and there's a lot of opportunities with technologies that we have but only very few of them are actually useful and useful for the users use with the world so answering that question alongside with things like

who are your users or what technology are you using why do you want to use that technology or why are you actually the person to be able to execute on that technology is fundamentally important to get a start into whatever you want to build so it's almost like simon sinek's statement of why like you want to figure that out and everything else is going to emanate from there and so once you've answered that you can actually start with some idea that will help you create a product and how you go from an idea to a product so here's an example actually for hummingbot they started off with a as a protocol actually no real product just like not

even a real interface so this is uh they started off with a command line interface and they were solving a problem for market makers and day traders to actually create their own market making bots to automate their trades as frequently as possible and they were a really small community um on on discord just playing around with these things and trying to trying to build their own um their own market makers and first of all what we did is kind of did a few i'm just gonna stay here so we started off with a lot of workshops actually first of all deciding on the prioritizing the challenges that were that the hummingbird was facing writing on some user journeys sketching out

wireframes together and please don't delegate that kind of work to designers um i'm also saying that because a lot of teams do that this is something that requires your full attention especially if you're owning the product so do it with people who are knowledgeable and exchange information during these these workshops together i'll also share with you how to do these things later and so after doing that we took three days for workshops and then designed an interface which looks like this or these are parts of it essentially that showed to users how that product could look and it was great it looks super usable but so we also actually user tested it so we showed it to a couple of people but what turned out at the end was that

in this case it was actually not helpful to create a graphical user interface because people were more interested in supporting more exchanges and so based on this one week prototype after user testing hummingbird was actually able to pivot really quickly and design something that now has become liquidity mining and emanated through the entire space of defy and so that was kind of the the process of workshops prototyping and user testing so once you have something that you can show to people they will resonate with that and you'll pick up on this and what hummingbird also did really well this is a schematic from a book called um crossing the chasm what they really did

well is that they narrowed their target audience on the very very first initial segment and also please don't try to go for for all the user at the same time it's super important to pay attention to the very very niche at the very beginning which is the innovators at least if you're starting out and then you're slowly going to expand the product into other areas and you will see how people will become aware and how would they become interested and they will also change throughout time they will become early adopters and then the majority and so with you can look that up in the book it's really a great book but what hummingbird actually did in in our um kind of as they designed the prototype they were aiming with the prototype for something that was way beyond here where they were trying to create

something that's very very user friendly and and interest easy to use but they were actually still right over there at the very beginning where people weren't really interested in being super user user-friendly and so it was really good that they actually user tested that interface and listened to their users for most web 3 products and d5 products again actually going to look something like this i can talk about that a bit more of that conversation so ask me if you if you have any questions around that but realistically it's going to go something like this because web 3 is enabling marketplaces so you will have to jump back and forth between these things quite a lot and so once you have that i i want to suggest to you to kind of

think about design as a mental model from stigmargy from how animals and these are like ants create very specific trails to food and to things that they that they wore that they like so they communicate to each other build out these trails and then based on the trails they understand where to flock and how to expand and with building products it's actually very very similar mental model so you're not designing something and hoping that people will like it but you're you're creating or you're actually designing a product you're putting it out there as a hypothesis and it's almost like you're watching people flock to it so wherever they come from whether they're like from social media or another

different platform they come to your place and then they come to your product and the design part is actually kind of segregating the users you prefer from those that don't really align sorry that's a that's a typo um don't really align with your intentions so if you're building a d5 platform that's motivated for long-term uh for for long-term holding or long-term investing you don't want day traders on there because behavior of these people will kind of ruin the experience for the others and so you want to like design work is actually about kind of creating these boundaries and solidifying the channels of where individuals walk through and get what they need from your product and so you do that through wording

through through imagery through actual kind of experience of uh of the of the interface and so and so that's the way to think about design really and so another example of that is for instance source cred they are a tool that quantifies feedback from um from discord discourse and github so they count posts likes and relationships between individuals they just count them and build a social graph on it and what they realize at some point was that people expanded outside of discord and they started to create events or writing articles which were not really quantifiable anymore and so designing a new interface was more like about

was not about like making a better experience for the discord users was actually facilitating the interface for the the interaction for these other newly emerging behaviors of people trying to quantify the contributions to the community outside of discord so that's what they designed or ended up designing you can also click through the prototypes share with you later as well and so once you're there you might be thinking that kind of growth is the next step so you have your community you have a couple of people so you want to grow but that's another thing to pay really close attention to because growth hacking as it's popularized in startups is actually a really huge policy the way that your your product is

growing is determined by your environment and your environment our vcs your clients your users friends and allies they will tell you or communicate to you what exactly is required from you in order to make them really happy and there is a limit to that so you can't grow beyond that because once you grow beyond you start pushing but you don't want to push because then people will also become skeptical and not use your product so there are always these these limits and and each technology actually goes through these like sigmoid curves you can observe that with pretty much any startup you have a you're starting off with a concept and you go into a sigma then at some time some point it's going to flatten out and if you don't take care of it your project is going to die

so you'll have to re-innovate again and so another example of that was for instance molecule for from a couple of years ago they started off they wanted to create basically a marketplace for uh pharmaceutical research teams to be connected to retail investors and kind of facilitate that that exchange so they wanted to get get them to get the research teams to tokenize their ip and then get you guys to just invest in whatever pharmaceutical research you think is interesting and and they were like okay we're going to use blockchain we're going to like create bonding curves and and like had these really great ideas of like layering technologies on top of technologies before releasing it

and what they realized was so they were actually aiming for way too high so the users their investors were like what is metamask so they didn't even want to interact with crypto their um their research teams were like we don't know what bonding curves are we don't understand how the pet like what we do with like our patents we just stay safe and the actual pharmaceutical industry was like get the out of our business because that was gonna maybe destroy it and so they were really like aiming way too high but they should actually be having this started really way earlier and that's what they ended up doing so they ended up scaling all the way down not using any blockchain and just like manually automating everything with

well not auto that's a they did not end up automating everything they actually ended up doing everything manually and now they're like vita dao you can follow them it's actually quite an interesting project so and it's and and you might think so so it's actually you can think of your product almost as an organism that way that is in an environment that interacts with all the other things and from that perspective you're not really trying to race against the others but you're just trying to be as unique as you can about the things that you can do really really well and you might think okay so this is like

the the the organisms also kind of face to survival of the fittest but it's also not precisely defined what fittest is really like okay i mean darwin described it as the the trend of how evolution works but he was also keeping um he was also describing it as a as fitness being defined by the environment and the environments are different so it always really depends on what the definition of the fitness is so is it either your product is faster than some other product or maybe it's like you can create much higher quality or maybe even a mix of all of these

and so it's it's it's it's really um it really doesn't become a race it's more like trying to work with everything that's that's um surrounding you and then one last thing before we go into kind of the light and and nice kind of design um this is an example from from covalent they were pure api api they essentially thought and knew that they are very very similar to the graph but probably more powerful and that's how they kind of meant verbalized it for themselves but what they ended up communicating was actually kind of the value behind it and so um saying things like they have a marketplace for api endpoints so you can actually earn money on this so like figuring out the things that distinguish

them from the competition or from the graph and not trying to compare themselves with and so that way they were able to really get the attention of those who are really interested in using the kind of multi-chain data collection from their ap api so now there's a couple of examples of how to make a an experience really delightful because um i think it's really fun and uh it's also kind of the the goal that your users are actually um happy with using it and i think the very first thing that you want to like the number one thing that you really want to avoid especially with defy is a situation like this because people are constantly constantly confronted with their their monetary assets and sending them through

the internet they they still don't really understand where it goes so you really need to establish kind of the this notion of trust because if people don't trust you they're not going to be happy or even delighted like it's just not part of the reality so trying to try to figure out how exactly to establish this trust and there's also another example from dhedge for instance um there's a lot of ways to do that in the interface itself that are very very simple to do for for dhedge which is a like a synthetics hedge fund they basically had these managers and we we pointed out exactly who the who these people are we pointed out to their social media profiles so people could do their due diligence and actually figure

out what these people do how knowledgeable they are and also allow some comments and i mean you probably can't see it but there's a comment section on the bottom so this there's actually like human interaction that you can follow through and that's what they ended up doing people actually kind of using that and understanding how much they can trust these individuals who might actually also make mistakes other things involve things like always being transparent about your smart contracts or showing smart contract audits um these things always have a really really high kind of value in terms of trust so a lot of times it's also enough to put them on the website or on the homepage but it's also sometimes you can put them somewhere in the product itself so the next thing is is you actually want to create the

experience and and this is something that's very interesting because it's almost like an art like creating an experience is very very similarly structured to how that happens in movies or in with comedy or or with music because you always start with making a promise on something that is very very unique and special and it has to be important and people have to pay attention and that's what you have to want to communicate you're you're you're taking your users and you're like you're getting them to the edge of a cliff and showing them what's there and it's like a magical world and you're slowly dragging them back and then you guide them through the experience of actually kind of interacting with your product like

clicking around like trying to explore what's going on always like obviously guiding them communicating to them exactly what they need and then you deliver on that promise and you give them what they want and you give them the thing that they thought in the beginning was completely impossible and for for this one this is uh this is bp.finance probably one of the most ridiculous examples i don't know who of you knows it uh they had ridiculous apys which were like i know we user tested it and it was like 15 q percent or something there's a it's a it's an aggregator for yield farming essentially and it was like some of them had trillion apis so it was like yeah 15 q percent and some user testers were like

that's not a number and it was it was really ridiculous but but they also were able to um to fulfill that promise because they had a mechanism that made it work maybe very short term so it most of these projects died really quickly but that was what the experience was about so we showed them like here's the historical data here's the project team um here are the things like here's the risk kind of score we came up with that um i mean we didn't came up come up with the numbers but we came up with the concept of a risk score in order to show people what are the risks if there's a apy that's just like has more numbers than you can uh more digits that you can count to and um and then we delivered them on the

promise so like first of all obviously giving them these these insane ap apy quotes once they actually go through that and then also showing that really prominently on the very top so this is what you get this is yours at least for some amount of time and then obviously things like the the launch pad which was quite an interesting process because people would have to dedicate like you know sent through several thousands of dollars into space and you sometimes have to go through like friction points of so in the interface we actually slowed them down so they don't click through that way too fast so we slowed them down with saying please read these things you have to

check these marks and you go through this experience and then like click the metamath to send the money away save your your uh recovery phrase and then you get and then you get rewarded by by a nice image and it seems it seems ridiculous but these these very small things actually create a lot of experience of delight for people because they really enjoy going through this actual kind of story and even if it's just an image that tells them that yes everything's right in this case uh they ended up changing that to a rhino you probably know the leslie the rhino so that was the original stuff um but it's still the same concept so it's still kind of rewarding them for for the actual

um experience and for for sticking around there um so one last thing i think i'm also uh pretty much finished um what i would really like to suggest to you and what i also keep um kind of repeating quite a lot in this space is please steal ideas from everywhere because because everything that you find important is going to help you build something that will be important for someone else so i keep a notebook around and i just like write things down most of the time we have a website where we publish all of our case studies as actual figma files so if you have something that you work on that's something similar you can actually just go there explore the figma files copy paste them maybe refactor them a little bit and

make it work for your own project and it's not a bad thing to copy things as long as you kind of do the thinking part too and like refactor it into something that you think is important and that way you'll collect things like like get inspired by movies by other products by trees by books by poems anything and again anything that really resonates with you even funny things it really creates a unique experience for other people that they haven't seen before and that they will enjoy for for a long time that's it thank you so much oh wait sorry actually one one last thing i forgot um the tool so this is a qr code it's their website is deepwork.studio but you can

scan that thing and we open source everything so we have a knowledge base for all the processes so all the workshops that i mentioned before and more we have a knowledge base we basically have a documentation on how all the individuals and designers work yes perfect uh or ask me if it doesn't work okay for for someone it didn't work just awesome okay well type in we we put up a new website recently so type in deepwork.studio uh cool okay yeah great job andre

um we'll type in deepwork. it yeah looks nicer than the url but yeah type deepwork.studio um apologies for that next time it'll be better and but but if you go on the website there's a knowledge base uh which is the like a git book of all the processes that we do so all of these processes our designers follow step by step so they're very very granular so even if you just want to kind of learn how to do user research or something you can find example interview guides you can find reports you can find the prototypes themselves you can find basically an individual like a complete guide to how to design something from start to

finish there are case studies as well look through them we we don't do them to show off the work we do them in order to show like to share the actual files so we never work with teams who want to sign an nda with us because all the design work should be accessible to everyone and you should be able to steal the ideas and copy them and make them yours and also if you if you want there's also a link if you're actually interested in design or interested in kind of shadowing actual active projects you can join our discord and observe how these projects actually work in real time you can shadow on them you can also contribute and buddy up with an expert designer and do some work and learn from that um so that's it thank you so much for your

interest and uh opinion uh yeah thank you thank you for interest in product design and i wish you to build the best products products ever you're great if you have any questions i'm sticking around here for like the next i don't know outside there maybe because there's another person coming to speak we have time for one question oh cool okay yeah sure one or two yeah okay go ahead does anyone want to ask okay all right okay

yeah maybe you were first or okay you got the mic so i i liked your graph with the early adopters and uh and so i'm just curious do you where from your perspective and your experience with interviews and stuff of is it still too early to try to get quote quote non-web3 people to actually get onto so it depends on your product um but um on average i would say well again it depends on your product and what your what your target audience is so there are projects that are actually building a web infrastructure but they're targeting but but they don't

need people to interact with it so it's they would always almost have an their own team that does the metamax transactions and stuff but the actual users are then web 2 people for for whom it looks like a website it's no difference if that is possible yes if you expect people to interact with transactions probably not at least not yet but again it depends but also happy to hear what you're building on so i can probably give you a bit better answer that way cool okay anyone else questions this guy wanted okay cool nice yeah

thanks so much then and enjoy your day you