Designing for the Humans of Web3 | ETHDenver 2022

Transcript

🎨 Designing for web3 involves understanding user needs and creating intuitive and engaging products that address decision fatigue in an open and composable environment.

Um, my name is Yang. I am a product designer in Web3 if I haven't met you yet. Um, and I started working in the space 3 years ago designing for institutions at Anchorage. Um, currently I'm at Syndicate. We work on Web3 native investing tools, um, and most recently have launched our investment club product which makes it super easy for anyone to pull funds together with friends and invest together. I'm also an active member of Vector DAO. We are a collective of designers. Changing up the traditional 9-to-5 model of work via design work in exchange for ownership and equity.

So, the title of my talk today is designing for the humans of Web3. Maybe you're sitting here thinking, "Okay, Yang, tell me how I can improve the design of my product so that users will come." Is it designing or deciding on the precise angle of the gradient and corner radius of my buttons? Or is it dark mode? Is it sneaking in this portal shape into my product luring users in their subconscious to go down the rabbit hole? Or is it choosing the right item in the food pyramid to name my product after?

For the record, we are way over indexed on sweets with almost no carbs, which I says, uh, I think it says something about the state of Web3 as a whole. So, not no that no not those exactly, um, but yes, I will be sharing some tips on how to design, uh, better Web3 products. For the next 15 minutes, I want to challenge you to really zoom out from your specific product interface and think with me as a human of Web3. So, all the messy transactions, channels, discourse, and decisions that we all individually and collectively experience.

In Web3, we think, do, hear, and have the potential to build things a little bit differently. So, let's start with the first. Decision fatigue is amplified. Now, given how open and composable Web3 is, um new applications are being built quicker than ever. And users have way more options to choose from and decisions to make. In the old world, if you wanted to earn some money on your dollars, you either put it in uh normally safer high-yield savings accounts or in riskier stocks.

💡 Designing for everyday products should focus on presenting only necessary decisions to users, as research shows that having too many options can lead to decision paralysis and fatigue.

But, if you want to earn some extra interest on your crypto, here are a dozen dozens of places where you can earn anywhere from single digits to quadruple digits of yield, um fair variable versus fixed rates across every chain. So, take your pick, but also do your own research. Now, with more of us joining DAOs and with more DAOs moving towards progressive decentralization, governance proposals present yet another layer of decisions that require my attention. And studies show that the more options we have in front of us, the harder it is to choose one or decision paralysis.

Uh they also show that our ability to make more and more decisions uh over the day um across the course of a day becomes worse or decision fatigue. So, how do we address some of this in the design of our everyday products? As a start, only present necessary decisions. Now, this this may sound like a no-brainer given what we just talked about, um but too often we get wrapped up in thinking about what the data or what the contract holds um or what the what the contract passes or what the database holds, rather than how 99% of users are thinking about a decision.

📝 Designing for Web3 involves using pattern recognition to interpret user input, providing contextual information to aid decision-making, and allowing users to fully experience an app before committing to it.

Let's use pattern recognition to interpret and parse what the user is inputting, rather than having to make an extra decision just to tell us what they're giving us. So, looking at an here, Rainbow Wallet does this from step one. Um I have several ways to add or track a wallet, but they spared me from making an extra selection for the method and provides this ability to enter enter any of the four input types in one. Next to aid in decision-making, know what information people need in order to make that decision, and then present that information in context.

Coinbase Pro does here by displaying contextual UI. When I tap buy to initiate a trade, I see the drawer to take in my order details, but can still see the current price up top in the same spot as before. And as I'm deciding my limit price, I can pull the drawer down and study the trade history or candlesticks, as you see in the middle middle screenshot. This is all context that allows me to decide on my trade parameters without ever having to leave this form. Finally, let's talk quickly about onboarding.

One of the most frequent decisions we now have to face in Web3 is is this the right product for me? Give Give people a way to experience your app fully in order to make more informed decisions before paying gas or even connecting a wallet. Taking Syndicate as an example, we made it a priority to build in demo mode during our initial product launch. So, users have full transparency into what they're what and how they're able to manage an investment club before they even connect their wallet or pay any gas fees.

📊 We built a demo mode to simplify managing investment clubs in Web3 and recognize the need to show rather than tell new users how things work in this space.

So, that was all about making decisions easier. Now, let's talk about taking on new roles and responsibilities. So, one amazing result of building things that democratize entire industries and replaces third parties is that we ourselves are now taking on those roles. Some have their defined rules and tools in the existing world, while others are newly invented in Web 3. And similar to how a huge wave of people suddenly became dog owners at the start of the pandemic, millions of humans are now suddenly custodians, investors, traders, among many other roles you see here.

And with these new roles comes a boatload of new responsibilities, like keeping my private key safe and accessible at all times, managing all of my positions, and making sure I don't avoid getting liquidated, um as well as doing taxes for myself and the DAOs that I launch. All very fun tasks. So, how do we onboard new audiences and have them thrive in these roles that traditionally take years to master? Let's show, don't tell how people how things work, especially how numbers are calculated.

DEX aggregators like Matcha do a great job at explaining how my trade is being fulfilled and how I'm actually getting the best price without having any prior knowledge on what a DEX aggregator even is, or the fact that I'm playing a role of a trader here. Uh I understand that it's able to give me this rate by bringing together die across multiple exchanges. Let's also consider the entire journey of a new role and make simple the non-glamorous and complex parts of these journeys. Syndicate's latest product, as I mentioned, is Web 3 investment clubs.

So, we've learned a ton about the end-to-end journey of social investing, all the way from coming up with an idea all the way through to distribution. Uh what's shown here is a gross simplification of just a portion of that journey for an investor on Syndicate. We heard consistently that one of the biggest uncertainty for new investors was the legal considerations, as well as the back and forth with members to get their docs signed and their funds deposited. So, we doubled down on that part. Uh sharing guidance around legal entity formation and embedding doc signing as part of the core product experience.

📝 Addressing legal considerations and streamlining document signing is important for new investors in Web3 to navigate the journey and succeed, while implementing best practices like test deposits helps protect against noise and spam in the blockchain space.

In other words, look for ways to address the entire end-to-end journey um to help users thrive in a new role, even if it's not your product's core value prop. So, many new roles, many decisions. Um now let's go on to part three of a glamorous life in Web3. The exponential growth of noise. We all know that how uh given how open and composable um building on the blockchain is, the speed of which people are um the speed of which things are being built is exponential, and that includes noise and spam. And bad actors will multiply alongside the good ones.

So, how do we better protect ourselves against this world? Uh two points. The first The first is building in best practices. Uh we can learn from institutions here. Given that they transact at higher volumes more often and with more counterparties and consumers do, there's a number of things we can learn from their behavior. Uh one example is test deposits here. Almost all institutional users will receive some funds for sending test deposits of a tiny amount um before making a large transfer to a new counterparty.

Both to prevent against fat fingering as well as to check that the counterparty is indeed who they say they are. Now, let's apply the same concept to the actions that consumers or we often take, such as staking or pooling a new we come across. Now, it's quite scary that these contracts uh can unknowingly transfer our funds out, and not everyone knows that. So, what if we could nudge people to uh take precautions like generating a fresh address and doing a test um first? There's a few dependencies here, I recognize, um and a few things that will make this a significantly better experience, like lowering transaction costs and making on-chain destinations more human readable.

💡 It's important to educate users about the risks of Web3 and provide them with simple precautions to protect their funds and transactions.

But while we're still getting there, let's make it dead simple to take these precautions for our own security. Okay, let's take one step back. Even before taking any action on chain, there's an opportunity to learn about who and what I'm about to transact with. So this tweet by Chris Cantino had taught me a lot personally. Um before before this, I confess that I never bothered to dig much read much on Etherscan beyond seeing whether my transaction went through and tracking that progress bar.

After reading this thread that walks through Etherscan's analytics tabs and data that's available to me, I found myself checking this info way more. Uh reading contract analytics and browsing recent transactions like a true crypto nerd. Now that I knew where to look. So what if we could help people understand how to evaluate a contract or token as a first line of defense? Which leads me to point number two, which is teaching me how to be blockchain literate. Via interfaces that one, aggregates the most important pieces of information on of on-chain data.

📚 Designing for the Humans of Web3: Helping users become blockchain literate by aggregating on-chain data, providing contextual information, and adapting to user intent for informed decision-making in a future of interdependence, belonging, autonomy, and shared ownership.

Two, are contextually shown at the point of user interaction. Without making me traverse to another site or to multiple places to look for it. And finally three, are adaptive, showing me the most relevant pieces of information depending on the user intent. I drew up this concept here as just one potential way to bring this to life, bringing together data like balance over time and recent transactions to help me understand the contract that I'm about to interact with. Then what if we applied this concept to every address and point of interaction on chain?

To links shared in my DMs, tokens showing up in my wallet, and even individual or group wallets that I interact with. Now, I recognize that there's a ton of work to be done here on scaling blockchain APIs before we can get here. But, it starts with imagining what this world could look like. And in my opinion, blockchain literacy is one of the most important and undervalued parts of education. That doesn't mean we have to teach everyone to read Solidity, um but rather equip ourselves with the critical pieces of live data in order to make more informed decisions.

Now, shifting from what we experience as users, um and to thinking as builders, which uh I think many or all of us here are. Uh so, building towards the Pluriverse. Designing for the Pluriverse, a world in which many worlds may fit. Um I encourage you to check out pluriverse.world um yourself to learn about this declaration and hold your own interpretation of it. To me, it's a declaration of intent that we envision a future where it's possible to have many universals that are interdependent and thriving.

A future of pluricultures over monocultures, of radical belonging, and most tangibly, an open digital space of collective autonomy and shared ownership. So, what does that mean? And whether whether you agree with this vision or not, as builders of Web3, I think it's crucial to formulate that vision of a world that you like to live in. And maybe even more important than what we build is how we build it, especially while we're in the formative years of Web3.

📝 Designing for web3 requires recognizing biases, redistributing capital, and inviting diverse builders, and there are design communities like On Deck and ADP List that offer programs for designers to level up and gain perspectives from design leaders.

So, how can we build things differently? Number one, looking inwards. Recognize our biases and reframe our assumptions to remove them. Design research has taught us that even by holding an interview and having a conversation with someone, we are bringing our own sampling bias, interviewer bias, and sponsor bias, just to name a few. Next, let's look outwards. Admit that our existing systems train us to optimize for efficiency and financial capital. If we continue to optimize for the same things, the results will most likely be the same.

So, let's set goals to focus on more meaningful outcomes over outputs. And to redistribute capital to empower more people. Which is exactly what we're building at Syndicate. And PS, we are hiring, including product designers. Um three, look around us. Invite more builders who think and look different, um and make space for people to not just uh to not just exist, but to belong in every part that we are building. What if organizations that build towards the same vision are not competition, but rather environments that are that peacefully coexist to serve different cohorts of humans, each feeling like they belong to their respective

communities or groups? Now, wrapping up, maybe you're thinking, "Hey, this all sounds great, but how and where do I hire designers?" Cuz that's the most crucial question on my mind right now. Um how do I hire people to understand our user base to this extent? There's simply not enough design talent right now in Web3. Um so, I wanted to share some of uh these design communities that I've been fortunate to be a part of. Um the first OnDeck is a program uh they have a program called OnDeck Design for mid-to-senior designers who are looking to level up. Um many who are interested in the space.

ADPList is an open platform where you can book sessions with design leaders from all over the world, um and get their perspectives. And Designer Fund is an early investor in companies founded by uh designers, and have been investing in Web3 as well. Uh they also have great resources around topics like early hiring and design culture. Okay, the TLDR of it is to design better experience experiences in our products, let's obsessively think outside of it. Thinking about how we think, what we do, what we hear, and leading all the way to how we build um in Web3.

Now, for those of us familiar with user-centered design and any designers who are here, this is not much more complicated by knowing your audience, right? The way we are as a result of our surroundings, and our surroundings are just a bit different in Web3. So, with that, thank you, and I hope to see you around here. Woo!