Written by Pzai, Foresight News

Since the birth of blockchain, crypto geeks have been determined to build an interactive environment and architecture full of rebellion and fundamentalism, which ensures purity while also creating certain barriers. As more and more ordinary people participate in the interaction of the blockchain ecosystem, the popular user experience will determine how the next billion users will swim in the ocean of encryption.

When traditional user experience design collides with the new architecture of blockchain, we need to consider how to break down the barriers between them. This article analyzes the user experience architecture one by one, and combines the history of the development of the encryption field to take a glimpse at the formation process of the future user experience in the encryption field.

The paradigm shift from personal homepages to free money

In the interaction between humans and the information dissemination network they have built, the paradigm shift has always been calculated in "years". Most of the early Internet was self-hosted homepages. These users built information networks based on individual connections, and the experience obtained by the corresponding users was more based on the implicit social connections and sense of belonging generated through the network (or, in other words, they themselves participated in the construction of the experience as part of the network). An obvious example is that the communication in the early Internet itself was accompanied by a strong ideology, and the deconstruction of language output (for example: GM :)) also profoundly influenced the communication primitives in the subsequent Internet.

Later, under the clustering trend of the network, a group of Internet companies began to conquer the city, and most of the experiences we use now come from this stage. The paradigm shift has begun to strip users of their dominance in the network and instead provide "services" to users through a series of intensive and centralized methods. It may also be at this stage that product designers began to pay attention to user experience, because for intensive services, the smoothness of the interactive links designed for the public determines its competitive position, and the growth of mobile Internet also proves this. At that time, Zhang Yiming of ByteDance believed that the recommendation algorithm itself could build more personalized and customized content for users, and it was in line with the psychological expectations of users, which led to the later Douyin.

As for the current encryption field, I believe that it has experienced the above two stages in the past ten years. In the early stage, it was a derivative of the cypherpunk ideology and a representative of free currency. Users can build it in many ways (such as running a full node or participating in technical proposals). In the later stage, with the influx of giants, accompanied by the substantial growth of asset scale and form, user experience is becoming more and more one of the important considerations in protocol design. If we regard these paradigm shifts as a linear process, it can be said that the encryption field is a return to the past ideology under the trend of clustering, and through this return, it creates and breeds a new interaction and experience paradigm. With the approach of large-scale applications, we also need to find the Nash equilibrium point between these elements, so we need to further analyze the encryption user experience.

What is Crypto UX?

The term "user experience" originated from cognitive psychologist Donald Norman. It refers to a purely subjective feeling that users develop when using a product. Originally a psychological term, it originated in the last century when usability and human-computer interaction flourished. When computer technology was not yet popular, people began to study the interaction process and results between individuals' physiology, psychology and machines, which gave rise to the birth of user experience. In cognitive psychology, the user experience it defines includes three levels:

• Instinctive layer: The instinctive layer shows people's instinctive reactions, focusing on appearance design and creating a good initial impression. It is mainly related to visual experience, brand perception, browsing experience, etc.

• Behavior layer: The behavior layer is the user's feeling during the application interaction process, including functional experience, content experience and interactive experience, which is mainly related to application usability.

• Reflective layer: The reflective layer is the highest level of user experience. Its goal is to shape the brand value of the project itself, create unforgettable memories for users, make users feel pleasure and satisfaction in the process of using the service, gain a sense of identity in the process of interaction, and realize the improvement of self-worth.

The hierarchy of user experience

Under this research framework, we can abstract the levels of crypto user experience based on the characteristics of the crypto field:

• Crypto Instinct Layer: As one of the blooming flowers, the crypto project gives users a good initial impression, which is reflected in the construction of the community atmosphere and the front-end display. Both can provide users with an initial impression of the project and pave the way for the reflective layer experience.

• Crypto behavior layer: Here we can split it into two parts, namely the front-end and contract interaction. The front-end can build a more diverse experience on top of the on-chain assets based on the contract. For example, Farcaster Frame's user interaction optimization combines the on-chain experience with the off-chain visualization. (Not just the financial transactions on the chain)

• Identification layer: With the combined effect of the first two, users understand the brand value of the project, cultivate loyalty in the community, and give users emotional value through various forms of incentives. At the same time, users are gradually involved in the protocol governance process, thus making users "loyal users" of a project and contributing to the growth of the protocol.

But before these levels truly become the closed loop of the crypto user experience, many projects still do not realize the importance of user experience in years of development. Because of some historical issues and the characteristics of the crypto field, they have no way to complete the construction of user experience. So the author will explore how the crypto user experience needs to surpass itself and even surpass all other experiences.

How do we build?

The transition from Web2 to Web3 is accompanied by many changes. For example, if users want to migrate assets on the chain, they cannot just remember their passwords; or if users want to invest in related products on the chain, they must bear the risk of smart contract theft. This part of the learning threshold is vividly reflected in the behavioral layer of user experience, and it is precisely this threshold that makes many users discouraged. The unique environment derived from the encryption field has also brought certain difficulties to the migration of user experience, which is reflected in the following points:

• Isolation of the circulation system: Most of the current users’ circulation and transfer needs for crypto assets need to be carried out through centralized exchanges or on-ramp/off-ramp services, which severely limits the circulation within and outside the system. This isolation not only limits the cross-platform availability of applications (not to mention that in the blockchain ecosystem, each chain is also split), but also indirectly leads to the experience gap between the front end of the crypto project and traditional applications, thus limiting the perception of the behavioral layer to a certain extent.

• Cultural differences: The cultural origins of the early cypherpunks brought about an extreme pursuit of technology, and the field related to cryptography technology itself is a very niche circle. The limited expansion to the outside world has weakened the requirements for front-end interactive design, and the related designs for the user's instinctive reactions are very limited (assuming that the user is lazy, then for a transaction, the best way to present it is to process it with one click, but this itself violates the design of self-custody). In addition, for the design primitives of the front-end of many crypto projects, due to the strong composability of the underlying layer and the complexity of the token economic system, there is a lack of certain unity compared to traditional designs, resulting in the division of the user's front-end interaction process, and in many cases the optimal solution cannot be obtained. (Some DeFi protocols limit the distribution of their LPs on the chain, and users need to find the DEX corresponding to the protocol to trade in order to obtain the best depth.)

• Weak user sustainability: If a portion of users can retain for a long time during the development of the entire crypto industry, then user experience will become a subset of these users. However, as time goes by, users may not be able to access crypto projects that can reconstruct their self-identity. Facts have also proved that the product cycle in the existing crypto field cannot build a sustainable growth in the traditional sense.

The strong composability unique to the crypto field also produces many unique interaction levels, which determine the user's interactive experience from zero to one while exchanging what they have. Yu Jun, former chief product officer of Baidu, once said: "Essentially, every interaction between users and products is a transaction. Users may not pay monetary costs, but they may pay time costs, cognitive and thinking costs, etc. The design of each interaction and experience detail is essentially reducing the user's transaction costs while also increasing the benefits obtained by users in the transaction process." Jon Crabb, the founder of Web3UX, divides the Web3 user experience into four layers, namely the visual layer, functional layer, access layer and technical layer architecture.

The Four Levels of Web3 User Experience Source: Jon Crabb

Visual Layer

At this level, the design of user experience is relatively similar to that of Web2, but due to the different ecological niches of each protocol, the corresponding design styles will also be very different. But in general, the design at this level should provide maximum accessibility, including reducing the use of professional terms and increasing the prominence of important functions of the protocol.

Functional layer

In Web3, smart contracts are the carriers of almost all operations. The algorithms and assets derived from smart contracts (such as AMM, NFT, etc.) create an experience different from the traditional system, but such a construction makes the understanding and execution of transactions complicated, and the governance derived from it is actually only accessible to a small number of people, which happens to be the key to crypto projects gaining user recognition. Therefore, at the functional level, we can create automated strategies for transactions, unify the experience (such as the identity of accounts and assets in the form of a full chain (avoiding transaction obstructions caused by asset differences)), simplify front-end operations (aggregators), improve the functionality of governance itself, and enable NFT to play a corresponding role in certain scenarios.

Access Layer

Users generally access the protocol through wallets (software and hardware), and an easy-to-use wallet can greatly simplify the setup process. There are many technical solutions working towards this goal (such as Passkey login or account abstraction wallet). In addition, the circulation layer of assets also requires enough fiat currency service providers to build smooth on-chain deposit services. In terms of address readability, on-chain domain name services such as ENS and 3DNS are creating an environment with increasingly strong readability for users to ensure smoothness. In the future, we can even go beyond the existing Internet interaction paradigm and instead participate in various Internet activities mainly on-chain.

Technical Layer

In fact, compared to the original payment system, blockchain can already achieve confirmation in seconds, but it is far from enough when it is only used as the settlement layer for on-chain economic activities. The demand for stablecoins is growing in an obvious way, not to mention that there is enough depth in the on-chain economic activities themselves waiting to be explored. Therefore, the technical layer construction of user experience is "speeding up and reducing fees". As long as a large number of transactions can be processed in seconds, all economic activities will prosper together. In addition, in order to enhance the connectivity of on-chain and off-chain economic activities, more transaction verification infrastructure is needed (such as ZK proof layer, etc.)

Strengths and weaknesses

At this year's EDCON, Ethereum founder Vitalik shared a picture of the evolution of decentralized Twitter. The former is an EtherTweet built on simple transactions. It can be seen that the entire interactive interface is very sloppy and has no social media form at all. The latter is the interface of the decentralized social application Firefly. It can be seen that the overall front-end display is comparable to the Twitter interface.

According to the framework of the previous article, the latter has some key points compared with the former:

• Front-end unification: Firefly brings a unified social media experience. The uniform interface and interaction mode lower the user's interaction threshold. At the same time, the aggregated experience makes it easier for users to manage complex information flows in a single interface.

• Narrowing the experience gap: The overall interface of X can reduce the user's learning cost in interaction, thereby narrowing the overall experience gap.

• Better infrastructure: It can be said that without Lens and Farcaster, Firefly can only be X Plus rather than a decentralized social platform. The key is that the infrastructure lays the foundation for existing users to match and surpass the original experience.

Future potential application user experience construction can focus on the following points:

• Introduction of initial impression: The project can build a schema for its community (for example, some public chains often use well-known cryptographic schemas such as Pepe and superimpose their main design colors to increase the community vibe), and at the same time, closely integrate with the community on the front end, so that users can directly build a preliminary understanding of the project through community participation.

• Mid-term behavior construction: Through incentive mechanisms and token economy, we build a paradigm for overall user interaction while tailoring ecological experience routes for users. At the same time, we provide instant feedback on user interactions and build a sustainable interaction mechanism with high stickiness.

• Late-stage identity: Users’ sense of self-worth is usually constructed from both behavior and senses. After the early user experience is built, the sense of participation generated by users is consolidated (for example, through governance or ecological activities), thereby improving users’ sense of self-worth and generating sustainable value for the project party.