UX Lessons From Testing 30+ Wallets - jakub konopka

Transcript

[Music] Hi, I work on ethereum.org. Who has ever visited our website? Just curious. Okay, everybody. So, I am a UX designer. That means that I often ask myself what are like the UX things that we could do on the website. And one of them is um one of the main reasons why people visit our website is to find their wallet. Wallet is kind of like the main gate to all things on Ethereum, right? So it's really important to have a good UX in your wallet. And um people often ask like what what is a good wallet? What is

a good UX? So over the weekend I heard a podcast by Don Norman who is considered to be kind of like a founder of modern UX and he said very blunt statement on the podcast. He said if we only focus on technology we end up with crap. So I think this is pretty like thoughtprovoking. Uh but how I kind of interpret this and I have seen in my experience is that you know technology moves very fast. Um there are always new innovations, new improvements that we could do and as people in the tech we are the innovators. We get excited by all the new possibilities, the visions of the future and what could be achieved one

day if we just make some new improvement. But most people they kind of see new things they want to try it but they are not really up to date with like all the latest tech or they are not even motivated to you know understand all the latest improvements. So there is this kind of divide between um focusing on the best STS and what we want to do and like just doing a good product. So there is a difference between just innovation and product building. And I think it's important to sometimes slow down, listen to our users and understand what are their needs because sometimes it's not just the newest tech that you needs to implement in order to attract users. You just have to make

some simple adjustments to you know make sure that people understand what it means and what they can do. So when I look at wallets, I kind of installed maybe 30 40 different wallets over past few months to kind of see um when people come to me and ask which wallet should I try? What should we tell them? And I bet I'm not the only one here who also thought about this like if you have friends or anyone which wallets would you choose to kind of suggest that they use? I think it really depends on who the person is. There is not one fits all solution right now and um it depends on the person who you are

trying to suggest a wallet. So if we start with people who are kind of maybe crypto curious, they have maybe Coinbase account or Binance and they want to start actually interacting with Ethereum. Uh then there are wallets that specialize exactly on that and that means some things that you have to do in your wallet that are not necessarily related to improving you know account abstraction or whatever. Even though that's great and it's a step up it's not the main thing that you need to do. You actually have to provide guides and support. You have to remove all the jargon. you have to think about uh progressive disclosure and how much information you give them at what point.

Uh my favorite is my ether wallet. It's one of the old wallets. Uh one interesting thing they did uh they for example removed in onboarding the step about like writing down your seat phrase. That's something that people dislike. But the result of doing that was that they had 10 to 15% decrease in uh customer support engagement on u I lost my seat phrase and why because they thought about it from design perspective. When you are just crypto curious and you want to try Ethereum you really do not have any reason to like stop exploring and writing down some seed phrase. What you want to do is you

want to quickly install the wallet and explore what Ethereum offers you. You have no money. Why would you like write down this seat phrase? Instead, what they did and a couple other wallets do also, you prompt them about the seat phrase once they have money in the account. So now there is some motivation why actually care about seed phrase and people actually manage it better at that point. So no need to even like think about smart accounts. We could have done this and we would have had better UIX. Now this has been almost standard in the better wallets. The worse wallets still do it the other way. Okay. Social memes. So this is kind of the trend of the last one, two years. Uh there are wallets that really try to

optimize for people who are in this part of the ecosystem. You can see that even Coinbase wallet for example now the main dashboard is not your wallet anymore. It's the what's happening on the blockchain. You know the latest meme coins, the latest mints uh in Rainbow. You can even start your own token inside the wallet or you can for example see what's trending on Farcaster in last few hours. So they understand what that kind of segment of users wants and they optimize the features in the wallet so that uh people actually are engaged with using the the wallet. Uh so and if you know anyone from Gen Z for example, I

think they tailor the experience for them. It would be really a mistake to send people like that to MetaMask. So it really depends on who is your kind of person that you talk to and based on that there are wallets that kind of focus on improving their features and layout to tailor to that specific target audience. Finance of course that's kind of one of the main interesting things in Ethereum. I see now wallets that optimize exactly for this use case alone. So, um I don't know how many of you have played with uh DeFi protocols, but if you have positions on 20

different protocols, it's really hard to keep track. Oh, where do I have tokens on this app and this app? So now what wallets do for example is they look at all the onchain data and they create a nice dashboard for you so that you don't have to remember if you have uh stable cons on a morpho or beefy or whatever they kind of integrate and show you everything inside the wallet which is which is really good UX for someone who is kind of really looking into DeFi. Uh, another interesting thing that I see in some wallets is that they hijack kind of the browser kind of experience and they integrate smart contracts directly into

the wallet. So for example with trust wallet and u pillar and others I think maybe not pillar they have collaboration with morpho which is one of the defy protocols and the users don't even have to go to the browser to interact with their lending or borrowing there is just earn tab and directly within the wallet you can supply your stable coins let's say to the protocol this is I think where we what we will see more of because as a DAP you want to have attention to your protocol even before people are deciding where to go. So if you go to a browser tab and then you need to look at like what's the URL and go to some protocol that's a lot of steps. If you have

integrated the protocol right in the wallet, then it's right within the context of your wallet and your account and it's maybe just one two buttons to supply or do something. That's much better. I think in the future we will see more of that. Then we have of course from our cippher punk origins we have uh wallets that focus a lot on security and privacy. Again those provides completely different set of features. Um we have also multi-chain wallets which are wallets that focus more on like all chains within one wallet. If you want to have Bitcoin, Solana, Ether together, there are some wallets for you. But I

think those will be less interesting going forward. Um but the lesson here I think is there is no one fits all kind of situation and the wallets that stand out the most and should be suggested to people to use are the wallets who cater to specific target audience and provide kind of quality of life improvements to that wallet to that use case. And sometimes that doesn't necessarily mean creating new fancy technology, but in reality it really means looking up better DeFi positions overview or just removing all the technical jargon or just you know providing some social proofs. Who are what is being traded by

your friends? You know the people you follow, what are they doing right now? Things like that. One kind of interesting thing is I don't know how many people have tried for example the world chain world app they are kind of doing similar thing where they integrate mini apps into the wallet and you just choose whichever kind of mini app you want. So really wallets are wallets could become kind of this epicenter of all the onchain activity and you don't have to use the browser tab and kind of try to find projects go to their URL etc. Of course there are some security things and etc. But yeah I'm a designer I will let you guys the figure out the text thing.

One other thing that I would like to say is that uh it's really good to think about how you can tailor your product to the audience and another way how to think about it is just pure accessibility. We are here in Czecha and unfortunately there are only two wallets that supports Czech language. So all the things I just said most wallets do them in English. I have I am from a small town. I'm a millennial. I I have friends who are into crypto but they are on exchanges and I often I often think uh you know I could push them to try wallet you know to see what really Ethereum can

do. But then I realized neither of my friends speak English or not to the level that they would be comfortable actually interacting and having money in the wallet and do some defy stuff if they don't speak English. They need it in check but like there are only two options coin wallet and metam mask right now. And metam mask has check I think only in the browser not in the mobile or the other way around. So you know all the fancy talk about the fancy features but it's not in check so my friends will not use it just because of that. So sometimes adoption I think is really about removing barriers where they are not about like kind

of speed running uh and trying to solve all the technological issues on our website. This is data from our website. We know that on ethereum.org about 30% people immediately switch to their native language. about 50% it depends how you calculate who speaks or doesn't speak English but somewhere between onethird to almost half of all visitors prefer their native language if they can one thing I know also is that for example my friends they look at crypto in checkgrounds they don't think in dollars so you know there are there are a lot of simple things you can do to optimize for your user and it doesn't necessarily always have to be a te technological

advancement. So you know I invite you all to think who are actually the users and what features they might need to try your apps and if you want to talk wallets with me uh or give me some comments on the list that I shown you please this is my telegram uh this is my Twitter and yeah thank you [Applause]