Break Up with Your Bad UX! | SheFi Summit Bangkok

Transcript

[Music] hi everyone um it is a pleasure to be here today um I am here to ask you to please please please break up with your bad ux because we're bored so I couldn't help but Wonder does crypto ux have to be so bad this was me in 2022 when I first joined um the crypto industry and and it was one of the things I was like most excited to kind of like come in and Tackle I lead the product team and we're also the team behind mobile stack really focus on making web 3 mobile okay so why does that matter on average

50% of the top 100 daps traffic is coming from mobile and actually a lot of the partners that we work with say it's more like 60 to 70% and yet 8% have mobile apps like what gives I think we come to these conferences and talk a lot about onboarding Mass ad like onboarding users to web 3 Mass adoption but I think sometimes we're focused on the wrong things and maybe not focus on meeting the user where they're at and so that's why I'm so excited to um just share that we launched the Shi mobile app which is really focused on again meaning users where they are really focused on a tailored experience for newer to crypto users um and also just being mobile first um yeah thank you and I know this

is is like small but it's really great evidence to see um reactions to um building for end users and actually seeing what that means and the impact that that has and so just want to say that if your ux exhibits any of the following behaviors highly highly recommend that you dump them so for example poor communication lots of friction not helping your users understand what's going to happen next in your app two gaslighting okay saying that um it's really easy and intuitive and yet having to connect to adapt seems to be so frustrating and hard speaking from experience commitment issues so someone's saying that they're

all about mobile but they still require you to download and do something on desktop very frustrating signs of incompatibility so not being interoperable or working on multiple networks and of course being still in love with your ex so this is us um really focused on making web 3 mobile and I am so so so excited to be on this panel um to talk more um about bad ux or good ux so thank you so much good thank you so much Laura awesome well while we're getting the intro slide back up just want to say how is everyone going today can everyone give a bit of a chair yay awesome so we've got a really good talk today the topic is called

break up with your bad new ex and as Laura's already started to show there's a lot of toxic patterns going on in this industry we're here to change that we're here to discuss it bring it to the surface and work out how we can move forward so I'm going to quickly introduce everybody here so today firstly we've got Jane Jane is from Stella welcome welcome now we're going to do a little bit of a bio and we're going to ask them a very important question so Jane is from Stella she's been working in the industry since 2013 uh she's been um previously at JP Morgan doing onboarding wallet and a developer tool for NE protocol so Jane can you tell me in one word how would you describe your relationship with ux I

think for me it's very exciting I've been telling these ladies that I've been in a toxic relationship the past 11 years so I started in the industry when there was primarily Bitcoin and I came from an engineering background where back in the base everyone had to um just you had to know Cod to be able to work in the industry and so I think it has grown so much since and we should acknowledge how much we came from that point wonderful yes and we also have Georgia so Georgia is from metamask I'm sure that needs no introduction who in this room is using a metamask wallet nice it will get better very nice very nice so Georg is the lead user

researcher at metamask and she's been working in the space for over six years plus a lot in before that so Georgia what word would you use to describe your relationship with your ex frustrated oh no yeah been working in the space for a long time this the topic of this panel I've spoken on a wiers your ux suck panel every year for the last six years thankfully the conversation has changed a lot but still we're here and we can get into why we're here still um a bit later but yeah frustrated with the space but hopefully with some nudging people in this room can help change it I'm sure we can take a step forward at least I

hope and uh Laura's just spoken so you've already heard a bit about Laura valura and some of you might be using the shui app who's using that right now a few of us cool I'm using it it's been really great really well done and so yeah Laura what is the word that you want to use in one word I would say humbling I think um the crypto ux really forces you to think about what these are really needs education and accessibility particularly um for a newer to crypto audience and I think really captures the um importance of yeah focusing on on building with real user impact fantastic so I think you can see we've got free industry Legends in the room and today we're really going to unpack a little

bit about what's going on in the space so we can think of it a bit like ux is our toxic boyfriend and we're going to get a little bit uh nasty and just talk a bit about it but I promise it's going to get better so uh let's start with Georgia do you you want to tell us a little bit about some of the toxic patterns that you have found since working in the web free space yeah so I'm not going to talk specifically about like bad ux patterns as you might be familiar with them which is like you know sneaky buttons and opt outs that should be opt-ins and things like that the bad ux is a result of like multiple like macr level um issues the first one is uh an obsession with solving really

gnarly engineering problems I've spoken to teams who have like they've been working on a protocol for two years and I asked them what's your use case they're like we don't know why are we spending all this time building these things if we have no idea who it's for and what it's for a few maybe controversial things also that are a reason why the ux sucks is culture web3 culture is really insular it's tribike now it's not necessarily a bad thing it's cool to be part of the tribe but it's so heavily signaling in a particular way there's a sizing for a lot of people what ends up happening is our interfaces reflect our culture you know you've we've all seen like daps with like terrible like you know ironic interfaces that's not how you adopt a

billion users right irony is not going to get you there we need to be things to be really simple for folks another issue really is well we've got developer centricity uh culture um is is money right also so this obsession with um building things for web3 investors so you have to Signal your web thess which means you're not then thinking about being like a nice easy to ous web 2 thing and my last thing I say is obsession with community community is great makes a project feel really good when you've got people in your Discord they're not your users most of the time they're there for speculation they're part of many communities what does it even mean to be part of a community is

people building a product based on feature feedback from people in their Discord not even knowing if they're actually users it's a massive problem I'll stop there well what do you think Jane how's it been for you based on all that you're building your own community in the nonprofit yeah definitely so I think as industry we definitely have set ethos and that signals that you're in The In Crowd and those ethos tend to hold a lot of weight but not all those are productive so for example we have the saying not your keys not your crypto and pretty much true it's it's true technically but it doesn't actually apply for all the users so given a personal example at some point I realized FTX is going down and

as my mom to withdraw her little bit of crypto from exchanges into a ledger wallet and just watching her and how frustrated it was for her to learn how to use a Ledger made me realize that not your key is not a realistic outcome for all different type users so I think we need to take a very practical approach and understand that crypto in order to get next billion users not just for the crypto native but for people from all different backgrounds say and build those user experience of those type of users yeah I think those are all really great points um just to add a little bit to you know I think often um the experiences that we have in web 3 or you

know the front end just matching the back end and realistically that doesn't actually help a user accomplish what they're trying to do so that's one thing for me and then the second is using a lot of jargon that's not really familiar and so we use terms that why would anybody know what a liquidity pool means necessarily and so I think just that's like proliferates in our in our industry to some degree it the language is really ostracizing like even just the fact that the term nft became common pance right in like 2020 2021 everyone's in the world was talking about what's an nft there's no reason why the term non-fungible token should ever have existed in nor in the normal world it's

a digital collectible and it's like like to your point like the UI is that the front end is basically the back end which is basically the white paper like no thoughts gone through the process about how we actually going to interpret this information so that that a person who can genuinely get something out of it is attracted to it when people see something and they don't understand it they think it's not for them and we lose a massive audience yes agree it's a real problem I think all of this we got the terminology we got the fact that like like you say the core principles of what ux was built around they're not working right but Jane you were saying that the space is also come a long way you've been here for a very long time and what have you got to say about like how we've

moved over the last 10 years yeah so backing the days when I started it's pretty much the focusing the ecosystem is mostly from a her Punk background and pretty much we're running codes on our local or basically our home computers I think over time I've seen us working on you know Concepts like meta transaction sponsor transaction gas transaction some other also smart wallets and we've gone a long way in thinking about how do we bring very difficult web 3 Concepts to web two audiences now our industry and is we do have very complex Concepts and that doesn't really exist in traditional

web 2 world so there is a onboarding problem that we need to think about for users starting from web 2 and teaching them these Concepts such that they can become a sophisticated we three uh wonderful so we've heard a little bit about our uh bad relationship with uxx and I do want to keep this positive so we're going to talk now a bit about what good ux looks like in the industry and what best practices are happening as well as what you guys are doing in the space I know all three of you been busy working so let's talk a little bit with Laura you've been working on this uh really exciting app do you want to tell us a bit about what good ux looks like and what you guys are doing to move the

industry forward yeah I think for us um being mobile first is so important you know so many people have a mobile phone but not everybody has access to a desktop computer and so I think mobile first is uh one of the things I think is really exciting I also think one of the things that we're really focused on at 2 is being able to do something in just a couple of TAPS so for example not needing to try and get a gas paying token to like do what you're trying to do or not really understanding what you have to do so you have to go and do a bunch of research before you do it like really contextualizing um what a user is trying to do and making that really easy in just a couple of TAPS so um we also are pretty focused on um gasless

transactions as well um and making it easier for users to just do what they're trying to do you make it sound so easy is it as easy as you make it sound um I think yes and no I I do think that it often takes more work more effort to make a beautiful user experience but it's totally worth it the impact is high just to give a bit of an idea for the teams that are building better ux how long does it usually take for you to try and remove some of those steps when you guys have an idea what does that product process look like uh your face tells it all go ahead well I I can speak you know in a metamask capacity when you have so

much engineering overhead so one of the problems is there's a lot to lose right if you make any change or like mess anything up in the experience there's a lot to lose so what happens is that changes in the in the app are very slow because of this like fear of of you know what happens if it explodes so very very slow on our side but there are some big things which are happening so along with things like gases transactions which just absolutely has to happen in this space and is happening metamask uh the team at metamask rolling out their own SDK it's called Gator it's a delegation toolkit so it's this essentially account abstraction to allow any daps or um

developers to be able to build something where all the web thess is AB abstracted you get all you know the usefulness and security and Technology of a of metamask but it's hidden so the user doesn't have to save Keys any of that stuff that's exactly where we need to get to in order for um the you know the mass Market to be able to use this stuff like coming back to our earlier points no one actually wants to be their own bank that's the terrible experience and I say no one 99% of the world doesn't want to be their I'm sure you know the other 1% are here at Devcon right so it's talking to the wrong audience but but the reality is like you know most people will will go for convenience and ease of use over something that's very very difficult for them to learn to use and

that's where we're going to get to that's great Georgia so we started this conversation talking about good ux so you've touched on that a little bit Jane is there anything you want to add to that yes I think about I think you should think through the different user audiences certainly you have the web three nature folks who are looking for customization the granularity of control fast transactions you probably have have web three users when you think about onboarding and move them into uh deeper into the rabbit hole 100% so I would love to kind of unpack this a little deeper maybe each of you could share a bit of a story of something that you've worked on uh when it comes to ux in the space and how that's kind of come to

play Laura would you like to start off yeah great um I think for us um one of the things that we've built recently that I am personally very excited about is making it really easy to earn on your crypto and that seems really straightforward but um actually there's a lot involved in like curating that experience for a user making sure that a user can just deposit funds and not need to get a different token it's really clear what they're doing and so I think for for us that's something that I'm really excited about fantastic how about you Georgia um so we talk about things like we're excited about going forwards or like things in the past that we've

done I I would like to think about things moving forward but if you have a story to tell it off your CH I think uh no no it's all good I've I've got some War Stories so I'll happily share them after the talk but I think what I'm excited about is seeing uh more interest in the topic of user experience and more uh product designers and more experienced product managers moving into the space as well we need people from web 2 to be working in web 3 because they've built products with users and it's quite frustrating seeing people heads down building something and then naively thinking that people are going to use it uh because that's just not the case so um I'm excited about us actually like this technology is I'm really jaded but this technology is so powerful like

that's why I'm still here is because I see that we can change people's lives for the better people who don't care about all the stuff that we necessarily care about but when web 3 makes someone's life measurably better that's that's what we we can aim towards um as a community and so um talking to more users getting out of our web 3 bubbles is essential is essential for this how about you Jane at Stellar we're focused on bringing real world use cases so you seen earlier a talk where the speaker showed dispersement for refugees on Stellar so those are some of the mission aligned businesses we're looking to bring on chain we're making a lot of new interesting Innovations including smart

wallets including matter transactions and we have uh 100 million Community Fund that is open to everyone and there's a monthly application process so if you're building web 3 we would love to see you bring great uux to Stellar oh no I was going to say yeah it's great brilliant that's great all right so uh to wrap up this panel we're going to just end with a little bit of a takeaway something that you want to say we've got these great people in the room everybody in the ux and web free space so do you guys want to start maybe we'll start with you over there Laura what is one thing you want people to take away from this talk yeah I think the most important thing is to always think about

the user and what's most important to the user I think to me that is like the number one thing and really tailor an experience that makes sense for who you're building for and making their life really easy um the path to success is being being open to the idea that you are wrong right your assumptions are wrong and we have to welcome that and then we can learn and take on learnings and build better things so get outside of your bubble speak to users who don't care about your product who are not interested in when moon or anything like that go and talk to normal people and find a problem and then see how you might be able to solve my device is to unbrace disruptive ideas our industry moves at a big next speed and there's

always something new that that's happening so you might have heard from talks about AI I think that's going to be a massive change in the way that people develop applications and perhaps have low code and no code solutions for the future so if you're thinking of what to build I would say be at The Cutting Edge that's where the Innovation happens well uh while we've got to run on stage and is there anything maybe Georgia I know you had a really big speech to me about user research and all of the everything around that do you want to talk a bit about that yeah so when I first started working the space um six years ago um there were about 10 user researchers globally working in crypto we all found each other because it was

so Niche and thankfully there are many many more we have a team of them at metamask and lots of other uh projects in the space too and this community is getting larger um but um I think some of the values that it user research is the most valuable the sooner you do it even before you code anything no one's going to actually do that because those aren't the people starting companies the people starting companies in the space are Engineers right or really into Finance so they're going to just write write code first it's just undeniable if you can try and bring a user researcher in early the better I do have one War Story which is uh when I worked at consensus some time ago as as with all um big tech

companies at that time they had to get into space so the company U acquired an asteroid Mining Company I was tasked with uh doing some user Research into blockchain in Space the value of this user research was that the whole team pivoted away from this idea right because there was no use case for it so this is the value of doing your validation work really early as you could save yourself a lot of Heartache where before you plow loads of energy into building something that effectively no one it doesn't solve a problem for anybody and no one's going to adopt it that's wild how about you Laura any wild War Stories on your side um wild stories Jane do you have any that you want to

share in terms of ux I think is quite interesting in the crypto oh in the defi Summers we actually saw applications that was built from UI from the '90s and that was quite challenging actually to use but that was actually considered cool in a kind of offbeat kind of way I think they have realized that that they needed to switch to a better ulax to on board a wider set of users but yeah I think that's quite funny I'm not sure I have a specific wild story that I'm going to share but I will kind of reiterate um my word at the beginning which was humbling I think um one of the value like such the value of doing user

research early and often is that um you find so much from your users and it can be very very very very humbling you spend a lot of time working on something and then you're like oh exactly it doesn't have user impact or like users don't need it and it's so great to get that um before you start building fantastic all right and now I have my final wrap up so we've talked a little bit about breaking up with ux we've heard the stories of what's been going on in the space heard about these uh toxic relationships and what we're doing to improve the situation and how far the industry's come I think it's a really inspiring place to be really exciting what's going on so definitely have a chat to these panelists after the chat and uh we will get off stage so you can

go to the next panel thank you so much thank you