Human-Centered Decentralization: Designing Blockchain Products That Matter
Peruse the hallways of invite-only Clubhouse right now or fall into the wrong hole of CT (Crypto Twitter) and you’ll enter a new yet potentially uncomfortable world. A world where the digital token-rich have unironic discussions about the pros and cons of renting castles, how much they made or lost with PancakeSwap (a real DeFi platform), or when they’re flying to Dubai to watch two CT stars box it out to settle Twitter beef — 280-character mudslinging just wasn’t enough. The crypto basements things like this happen in are dank, full of multidimensional memes and layers of culture the world above won’t and probably will never understand; it’s a lot grimier and less cute than the Dogecoin fandom the mainstream market has more readily embraced. But where do we go from here? How do we crawl out from the basement and get our seemingly brilliant solutions in front of normal people in a way where they can easily understand what it does for them? Better yet, however painful it is to say this, what can we learn from the Doge craze? I don’t mean in terms of price, pumpanomics, and meme marketonomics — no, what can we learn about human beings and how they connect with emerging technology?
What I’ve absorbed from a career in technology as a whole is that our ideas mean nothing if the end-user or intended market doesn’t understand what you’ve made, doesn’t enjoy using it, doesn’t see the inherent value in it right away, or has reservations/trust issues with the fundamental packaging or concept. Frankly, right now, these hard lessons the tech industry learned decades ago still haven’t seemed to infiltrate the crypto space nearly as intimately. You certainly have apps that are becoming more user-friendly and who have UX teams built out to orchestrate real strategy around the user experience — but the vast majority of the market I see is wrought with high learning curves, high barrier of entry, dense technology or financial terminology, branding and marketing that appeals to a very specific demographic (those who created it), and little-to-no A/B testing or metrics to monitor happy paths and user success. Further, there is also little research being conducted into what the common misconceptions are in the public, and why people have formed them — something I believe, based on my own experience, is rooted in us trying to force people to understand complex technicals instead of much simpler, human-oriented selling points. Like I hinted at, very few are carrying out the work we know in the traditional tech world to succeed, by researching, strategizing, creating, and iterating completely around the wants, needs, and goals of the customer. Even companies like Coinbase, whose platforms may seem extremely adolescent and straightforward for people like us, simply do not present immediate obvious paths to users who may be joining without any prior knowledge to the fundamentals. More importantly, the decentralized technologies that could be even more useful to a broader variety of people with their own needs, businesses, interests, and so forth, are things quite obviously not designed or built with them in mind.
Considering all of this, my plan with this article is to outline a high-level vision for what a more human-centered model for decentralization could look like. Hopefully, in the process, you are also then motivated to always remember that our eventual goal should be to stop circle-jerking to our own successes in the space and share the wealth of this revolutionary technology with the world — a world full of people who aren’t looking to arb, ape, or die trying. They’re not going to lock up $50k in a shitcoin in hopes of earning 2,000% APY. They aren’t going to understand every dimension of your meme. They aren’t going to read your whitepaper or join your Telegram group. Let’s put our product and UX hats on and think critically about the direction we want to take our work.
Party in the Front, Blockchain in the Back
Recently, a friend told me about a new project he’s working on called Sunflower App. I took a look at the website and enjoyed the simplicity of what it communicated:
My immediate question was: “6% APY? How are you doing that without crypto?” It turns out, a few layers down, crypto looms. From their How It Works page:
Sunflower deposits your money into a FinCEN certified and SOC II Compliant custody partner. Our partner turns your funds into digital dollars known as stablecoins, which are lent out as loans to institutional borrowers.
These borrowers are over-collateralized: they must put up more collateral than their loan, which ensures your funds are always safe.
Now, this may not be something everyone without a financial background or interest in crypto would immediately understand, but that’s why it’s a click away from the main selling point: if your bank is currently offering you 0.1–0.3% APY on average for savings accounts, here’s 6% so you can let your cash go to work for you and earn more over time. Your passive income boost. I have no real connection to Sunflower App, no personal stake in its success, and, to be safe, I’ll emphasize that I am not giving financial advice in this article. However, what I do want to use this section to communicate is that I believe the most successful crypto-related products — who see the most adoption by average folks — might just be those who know how to speak to them, holding parties in the front and letting blockchain silently hum in the background, doing what it does best. We can still solve big problems, improve quality of life and access for people abandoned by traditional financial systems, nerd out about things in Telegram groups, and wear Chainlink t-shirts at $6,000 weekend conferences. But what we shouldn’t be doing is packaging products everyone may benefit from in candle charts, dark mode, and the thick brush of technical and financial terminology — hiding the real differentiators and purpose deep under layers most people won’t bother crawling through. You don’t convert with confusion; you don’t inspire intrigue in your customers by speaking to them in a different language. Sunflower App seems to meet the average consumer where they are and immediately tell them why they may want to sign up for their service, keeping the technology itself behind the scenes where the consumer who doesn’t care, doesn’t need to grapple with it.
I will say that not every blockchain product needs to be marketed toward every type of consumer. Chainlink, for example, is an oracle; it’s not something my mom or dad need to understand. Admittedly, a lot of blockchain products currently on the market are not for everyone; many are just for us. This is a problem in and of itself that should be addressed: we’re holding a technology we can truly change the world with, and we need to start thinking more and more about what that means for everyone else — we need to put our megaphones down and instead of lamenting people for their caution or confusion, build products that are self-explanatory and intuitively useful. We still need to actively develop the picks & shovels, so to speak, but those tools will mean absolutely nothing if there’s no market on the other side of the mountain once we dig the gold out. The other difference I do want to mention, as well, is that many blockchain solutions — things I’m calling, “products,” here — are not actually companies or centralized entities at all, which is pretty much the point of decentralization. They have teams of people behind them, with roadmaps and projections and deliverables, but the resulting relationship is not as simple as the traditional business-to-consumer (b2c) or business-to-business (b2b) models many of the concepts I’m discussing here are currently associated with. Simply, that’s okay; it doesn’t change the fact we have to be just as user-focused in building crypto-related companies as we do in forming Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
The Design of Everyday Things
In college, when I was studying for a degree in Human-Computer Interaction, I was adamantly told by many a professor that The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is the quintessential Bible for any modern UX practitioner. Whether or not it’s holy book material remains to be seen, but I’ve certainly never heard of any UX crusades inspired by or wars being fought over it. What I am sure of is that how we fundamentally design things — in a user-centric way or not — dictates how successful our products will be. The shift toward the user is what supercharged technological adoption earlier on, after all: when applications stopped simply being the random generation of a socially inept nerd stereotype holed up in his garage, and started being filtered through designers, product people, and marketers in between the engineers and the market, suddenly everyone had a computer in their living room and fights broke out between parents and their kids for tying up the phone lines. The internet became a playground of Renaissance-rivaling creativity, productivity, and connection. In Don Norman’s book, he argues quite convincingly that design is the crux of both responding to and influencing human behavior. And more than that, it’s the secret to first understanding the user’s journey and potential obstacles, and then — and only then — creating useful solutions for them.
An example from the book that I think illustrates the type of hard-to-achieve-yet-simple design which people immediately understand, and which improves their lives, is a faucet. Norman explores the brilliance in a faucet that we all benefit from every day (hopefully): the ability to walk up to any sink, no matter where we are, and know intuitively how to use it to wash our hands. And while many faucets do have labels to indicate hot or cold, sometimes those labels are merely color-coded rather than needing to use words, and most, arguably, work just fine without having any labeling at all. Some of this may be the result of being taught earlier on by our parents how faucets work, and because they all use this unsaid universal protocol, we really never need a lesson in our adult lives on how to navigate a new faucet design. These notes aside, faucets are not something we need manuals, instructions, or practice with in order to use them every day. Over time, they have even improved upon in their ability to respond to intuition with the introduction of automatic sensors (although these have surely brought some minor inconveniences, too, as I’m sure all of us have stood there moving our hands back and forth hoping to coax another stream out of the Moen gods). We all need to wash our hands, fill things with water from the tap, or clean dishes, and despite there being plenty of individual faucets with bad reviews online from consumers for one reason or another, not a single one reads, “I had no idea how to use this thing.”
How do we design the everyday things for a decentralized future? When someone needs to hail a rideshare, order delivery, swipe right on a hot local single who caught their eye, post an angry rant on Facebook, or set up recurring purchases on Amazon for something they will not need once a month — things that are perhaps too easy today — the fact such tech giants have spent years or even decades constantly studying their users in order to shape their business models and experiences around their exact needs and behaviors is anything but a secret. In fact, they’ve reached points of dangerous intimacy with the user; they or their algorithms are in the driver’s seat, constantly learning, tweaking, and adapting practically in realtime in order to manipulate consumer decisions. Even the physical world has taken a step back to solve problems or subtly control our behavior with clever design, from the way retail stores are laid out, to the story of how airports put inclining spikes under our feet to stop us from getting too close to the baggage claim. As the builders of a decentralized future — one in which people have even more ownership over their data, apps, business, finances, relationships, etc. — it should be even more important for us to conceptualize, design, execute, and iterate on things in a human-centered fashion.
The Other Know Your Customer (TOKYC)
Know Your Customer (KYC) is a big topic right now because it’s been an attempt at regulating the crypto industry — forcing exchanges and platforms to verify the identities of their users before allowing them to use their tools. That’s not what I want to talk about here. Rather, this title refers to the more important job we have of knowing our customers. Who are they? What makes them tick, what makes them happy? Do they understand this button placement and copy over this other button placement and copy? Where do they fall off in a funnel? What are their most common questions and how can we answer them in the app — by design — prior to having to answer them in a support ticket? What are not just the metrics we care about, but the metrics they care about? These are not new, groundbreaking questions, but spending any amount of time in the crypto space would make you feel as though they are — because we’re just honestly not starting with them when we hit the whiteboard, let alone asking them when we launch platforms and have the opportunity to add the proper analytics and testing. Know your customer before you design your solution. Know your customer while you’re designing your solution. Know your customer’s second degree — the stakeholders in their lives your product may also benefit indirectly. Know your customer through every step of their first day, second day, 365th day on your app, and iteratively prioritize your roadmaps and sprints in order to respond quickly to your relationship with them even more than your other stakeholders or your own ideas and wishes. Make strategic decisions based on their data, not just your own genius, and we’ll start to see the real revolution we all say we want.
There’s a Shiba In-You: NFT Him
People I’ve never even spoken to about crypto in the years I’ve been involved with the space have come out of the woodwork to ask me, quite earnestly, “So what do you think about doge, bro?” Through sighs and awkward laughs, I’ve had to refrain from crying, instead. People who didn’t listen to me in 2013 and 2014; who didn’t listen to me in 2017, or even this past DeFi summer when powerful financial utilities the public have never had such uninhibited access to were suddenly at our fingertips — these people suddenly want to bond over a Bitcoin-code copying, inflationary Shiba Inu serving as a live comedy routine for a couple of billionaires. My surprise and angst aside, I do recognize we’re in this chaotic moment of r/WallStreetBets (WSB) alternate-reality, where pumpamentals are driving otherwise rational people to think less about the downstream effects — about who may be caught holding the bag when the bubble bursts — and run away with their pot-o-doge donning an evil grin. In recognizing that, I’m also able to extract some valuable lessons from what we’re witnessing: something is working. So much of the public ignored Bitcoin, many more still have no idea what Ethereum is, and a long list of altcoins with real utility beyond those two will probably never be household tokens. So what is it about Dogecoin? Is it a yet another late-stage capitalistic response by younger millennials and zoomers alike who are fed up with the traditional systems piling student debt on top of their liberal arts degrees and sneaking credit cards in their stockings, all the while becoming richer at their expense? Is it the clear out-of-touch scaffolding of those institutions paired with the apathy-turned-anarchy of a youth intent on taking things back for themselves? Is it the ever-evolving and increasingly dynamic definition of, “value,” — what we consider valuable — creating this awkward moment of transition, with culture as a tricked-out vehicle? Am I just too old to understand? No, surely not: utility and the underlying economics or tokenomics of blockchain technology still matter the most — but clearly we can look at what does work, or is working, and use this as a insightful case study for how we should be selling anything else to this market. If we don’t like Doge, we should at least be cognizant of what it’s been appropriated to stand for, and find the Shiba in all of ourselves when we approach strategy.
Similarly, we’ve obviously seen plenty of adoption from traditionally non-crypto interested folks in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) category. Artists and musicians — of all kinds — have flocked to NFT marketplaces, sold on the prospect of having real ownership over their work, not dictated by centralized gatekeepers and middlemen. Once again, this has been a cultural adoption; it’s been driven, almost entirely, by passion, creativity, and human experience. Artists have curated community around decentralization — not because they care about cryptography, Merkel trees or other data structures, encryption (at least in any technical sense), benchmarking, proof-of-work vs proof-of-stake, tokenomics and economics, mining and staking rewards, or any other topic of conversation critical to most whitepapers, but because they care about their work and their connection to their audience being pure. Certainly, opportunists alike have also taken advantage of this trend to make a ton of money, but it isn’t opportunity alone that results in the kind of organic adoption we saw the moment certain groups recognized the benefits decentralization offered them (not just the disruptive design of blockchain on its own). Even more impressive has been the growth in the NFT space despite record gas prices for Ethereum during that adoption — something that is inarguably a nuisance and barrier to entry for many, but clearly not so much that plenty of others weren’t willing to sacrifice those fees for the sake of the mission. This is yet another moment to jot some notes down: we’ve known the benefits of crypto for awhile; what was it, specifically, that got the attention of artists now? The minting flow is still somewhat cumbersome for someone without crypto experience, forcing adopters to install web3 wallets like MetaMask and understand the process of moving crypto around, connect that wallet to marketplaces, sign every step of the transaction, and pay out gas fees like it’s 2012 with a Hummer at a BP. Some have even had to go a step beyond and comprehend the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to attach unlockable content/larger files for their customers (since the NFT marketplaces have file size limits). For the average, non-technical person — especially someone who may be more of a fine or traditional artist — scaling these walls and excitedly landing on the other side is not only a beautiful thing to witness, but it’s a testament to how much something clicked for them when they stumbled across the high-level concept. Our takeaway lesson is that we need to keep our messaging front-and-center, and make sure it’s one step ahead of any technology that’s lagging behind just due to the often-cumbersome nature of blockchain solutions right now. The other lesson, of course, is that culture is a force to be reckoned with, and it’s either going to work with us — if we harness it — or against us, if we laugh off Doge and forget the broader public doesn’t think much like we do, and are much more susceptible to rubbish. If they’ve fallen for it, it’s our failure, and we must learn from these mistakes to design the more useful products of the next wave of public adoption — like the success of something that is inherently beneficial with real utility, like NFTs.
Next Steps
This is merely an introduction, not a comprehensive guide to designing dApps that will change the world or peoples’ lives. What I do hope is that we look up from our wallets every once and awhile to take inventory on where the rest of the world is in relation to us, and do a better job of bridging that gap with decentralized tools that are designed for the everyday lives of those not yet in the fold. Who are they, what do they need, and how can we make it for them? What are their most common complaints with the tools and services available to them now? All too often, we’re just asking ourselves and designing for ourselves; it’s time to share the wealth. It’s time to make real products which clearly communicate what they do way before they communicate how they do it; it’s time to design everyday things for customers we know intimately; and it’s time to harness culture instead of yelling at it to get off of our lawn. Human-centric design will be the transitioning force for blockchain much like it was for the original internet, and while the dot-com boom was inarguably a bubble that burst quite dramatically — sending shockwaves through the market and giving naysayers a moment to say, “I told you so,” — what bloomed from the rubble was the internet that ultimately proved to be the greatest advancement of our time. Blockchain is both the new internet and the new economy, but it’s up to us to design the things that bloom, and ultimately, the things people will use and iterate on until the next system improves upon this one. Let’s hope there are some faucets in the bunch.
Disclaimer: nothing I’ve talked about above is financial advice and I am not a financial advisor. I have not been compensated in any way by or for the specific products, services, tokens, or other entities I’ve mentioned. These opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
