User Journey and User Experience in the cryptoeconomy

Transcript

okay next up we have Daniel Barr from Sydney and he is chairman and founder of bit Ford community and he'll be talking about user journey and user experience in the crypto economy and you may remember him from the dance at the opening act so okay yeah my real passion is actually the choreography and stuff like that but if we're already here then we may as well share some other things for nerds so yeah a bit about what we do it before it so it's now the fourth year

that we're running a community driven venture network developer content all sorts of those things to kind of together bootstrap the crypto economy and bring this thing to the real world so yeah taking a look at what does crypto apps experience look like today the basic concept is quite known you first verify yourself through a third-party exchange you then wait however long does there kyc process takes to verify transfer money from the bank to the exchange and then install some web extensions and then you end up using this kind of looking dashboard

which is yeah beautiful or ugly is arguable already and this is kind of state-of-the-art crypto application of today radar really then if you're going to mobile even the best mobile wallets so you have mobile browsing web 3 compatible mobile browsing which is yeah kind of main like today in like when we're used to already like the uber generation this is totally suboptimal and some of the applications are not even accessible in mobile so that's really bad basically the user experience is terrible it leads to slow adoption or no adoption in some cases and hinders

the industry as a whole so taking a quick step back I often ask people this question where do you live so some people tell me I live in Berlin I live in Toronto in Sydney or like if I'm really cool and like I'm Syrian guys I live on earth because I travel all over but actually we're all already digitally living right we all basically browse online and use all of our online accounts for many many different things for example this is screen time eight hours a day telegram WeChat whatever and

these devices the phone the computer it has our thoughts our emotions our sexual desires our money basically everything is there we're already living in a digital space and we're not really looking at it that way and some emoji was factor so now the question is besides all the like really good stuff about the network architecture how do we look at you X from decentralized perspective how do we achieve this centralization in the UX realm so the answer obviously is the Great Firewall of China the Great Firewall of China basically divided between China and the rest of the world and by that it let

those digital netizens evolve differently and that led to a vastly different UX which is actually a good thing because diversity is not a bad thing basically it leads to diversity of digital species if we are all some form of digital life online now we have at least a few kinds of that and not just the one Google Facebook style kind now if we're looking at what do people want in the different digital species that they come from so if you're saying China and you're looking into an app you want everything you want food games shopping sexy time movies everything right and

how does that look like that's super up so you have apps that basically integrate payments utilities dating everything and like you'd be familiar with that from various of those apps like WeChat and Ali and go Jack and each of them in the realm integrates a bunch of different things if you're looking at it from the Western perspective you're looking at focus efficiency elegance all the Apple style things and then you end up with a very nice-looking search bar right now when we're thinking about it from the product management perspective with the super app style it's all about integration so

like the deeper level of integration leads to reduced friction and by that increases usability if you're thinking about it from the Google style basically its fragmentation this is a screenshot from my phone I have a folder wholly dedicated to Google and as you can see it's not even just one screen in that folder so all that just imagine how many actions I need to do to go between those different apps how much friction did that ad mark on the other hand he's like one of the only people that obviously is like one of the most popular people in this room and you know he's the only one who kind of really gets it he lets the

products like Instagram and messenger cannibalized each other so that it will all culminate into something that is powerful and like encompassing much more than just like a one function with the caveat of which at that when I what's up when they acquired it so the two founders put a clause that they don't allow them to infringe users privacy and of course they have to respect it until this thing expires and then we'll see what's happening after that so yeah and if we're looking at again like the product philosophy of the super apps the creator of WeChat Alain Jiang Jiang Xiao long he's basically he's like a big deal as Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs in the world

of digital products and people don't know so much about him in the West but for those who are interested in the space I really recommend reading Connie Chan she's the general partner at a 16 said and she covers which at obsessively so all of her content is written in like nice English and really like digs to the depth of how we chat in Alan Jung does all their things and recently they published this for product principles the interesting one of them is the decentralized ecosystem principle which you may be surprised to hear that this is the principle they have given that it's one of the most centralized applications but actually the

decentralize ecosystem principle is not so much by the server level it's more about when you're actually using WeChat you don't you can't think of it as an equivalent to what's up it's a lot more it has all those different things and for you to actually discover where things are you really need to start exploring it and some people would say that it's actually quite poor discoverability but it means that the entire thing is decentralized and when people are developing many programs on WeChat there isn't like a one app store that tells you like this is the most trending thing and whatever like the whole distribution is heavily relying on word-of-mouth and those kind of things

and this is an intentional thing that Alan Jiang himself is very very obsessive about so my question is how about we start trying crypto super apps the reason is in crypto there is no west or east it's basically a global thing from day one and it's possible to integrate between all of those different protocols so it's just natural calling for crypto super apps so the first kind of product that I've seen not too long ago there I own they are kind of trying to build a decentralized bank so

aggregating all kind of maker stuff that are out there like compound finance don't remember maybe Dharma it was and then uni swap so basically I regretting it into one interface and by that it kind of reduces the friction from a user to have to know where to go that that kind of integration Outlook is quite cool in my opinion it's the right direction one thing that I think is really not exactly with it is the fact that obviously it's a web interface so by now we're already the mobile generation we want something that is mobile and there is no wallet there so you basically need to still hook it up

to your meta mask or whatever other wallet that you use again introducing more friction so right now the state of crypto is that people really understand that we're moving from web to mobile however it's a little bit hard to develop apps for mobile because if you are to develop an app and you want to be non-custodial BAM you introduce friction if you want to have a wallet then all right every wall every app will build their own wallet just for one single use case app it's kind of like I won't have like gazillion wallets on my phone or wherever it is that I'm using it so a solution that is proposed by Ally's project I'm working on with Mark

recently after surveying a lot of developers that are working on creep traps 70 percent or 70 percent of crypt ops are written in react now using react native we can basically bring the power of those apps to ios and android and plug into the native features of those operating systems and phones basically the Alice SDK allows gives access for the DAPs to the user wallet and the centralized exchange and to the etherium blockchain now because it's built with the native mobile features you basically have camera access location services and

push notifications so just imagine for how many use cases it would be much more nice to have QR scan there or a map that guides you to find something all those sort of things and then an application like locally theorem friends from Melbourne that are doing great work could could basically look instead of this complex web interface it could look like the look and feel like the mobile apps that we use every day and make our lives easier right and yeah like a quick walk through through through like where we're at with Alice we were basically working on the front

end and SDK and if you're looking at the Super app kind of launchpad so this is the app launcher you have access to all your different favorite applications and then say that you got into local aetherium and then because you have the native wallet you basically can sign messages or transactions right then and there you don't need to go out of it and all the while you were still in Alice interface if you want to hear more and go deeper down the SDK you'll have to come tomorrow to the web 3 UX and conference and Marc will basically give us a deeper dive into all the SDK alpha wallet will be there and other teams as well now yeah I want to before I'm

before I'm finishing just couple of days ago when Pandya was on the stage she was asking where should we do the next ed cone now I've been in the last ed cone in Toronto and it was really awesome and it's really great that we made it to bring all of you guys here to Sydney and I think that in both the Toronto case and Sydney half of the link time team wasn't able to come because of visa issues and those guys put so many hours on organizing it so I think that it's kind of it's it's a shame so I suggest to start spamming pandyas email asking her to bring ed cone 2020 to Shenzhen I

started that hashtag so please if you can use that on a post and basically let's convince Pandya together to do it in strange and it's the most cyberpunk city in the world with all kind of crazy hard were maker seen stuff going on there and that's pretty much it so thanks a lot for listening great Daniel so that's really interesting that you sort of talked about what you're doing with Alice so how is that different to for example what alpha wallet is doing they're also trying to aim to be a super app and what status would be doing how do you think you're different yeah so as I mentioned there are quite a few

wallets out there for the most part most of the wallets are focusing on web 3 browsing rather than rather than actual me need app like the widget style we are actually right now testing a few different wallets we're talking to the Alpha Wallet team quite regularly and yeah with status they're a little bit more in the purist side I'd say so like things there yeah like taking a different different direction from what I've seen yeah great thanks so much Daniel appreciate it