AirGap recovery phrase — Usability improvement

Usability is going to play an integral part to further push adoption. As seen at Devcon, the topic was widely discussed and inspired us to take a step back and find out where we can improve usability and lower friction.

In order to simplify user onboarding, many projects are trying to get rid of the recovery phrase altogether or try to guide users to a backup after a certain balance is on the wallet.

Due to the nature of AirGap we’ve decided that it’s still an essential part to have a backup of the secret besides being saved in the secure storage. We took a closer look at this process, to see if we can potentially lower the friction.

For this we went through the verification process of a few other projects.

Coinbase Wallet — Recovery Verification

¬ Coinbase Wallet

The user has to arrange all the words of the recovery phrase in the right order, this is the same approach as AirGap had before.

This can work with 12 words but gets to complicated for AirGap’s 24 words.

¬ Gnosis Safe

The user has to fill in four blanks, by selecting the correct word for each slot.

This makes sense from a usability perspective but can be gamed by the users without backing up the recovery phrase.

¬ Enjin Wallet

The user is asked to fill in the word of a specific position ex. word at position 5.

The user doesn’t have to verify each word of the recovery phrase with this approach.

It was really important for us that:

¬ the user has to verify the full recovery phrase and not just a few parts of it, to make sure each word was backed-up correctly

¬ we have a solution that works for our 24 word recovery phrase

¬ it has to be quick and simple, the user shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time to search for each word

Because of these three requirements we came up with the following solution:

For each position in the recovery phrase, the user has to choose between three options, where one is the correct one. The other two words are words out of the BIP39 wordlist.

This approach allows a quick verification even with a 24 word recovery phrase and extended social recovery phrase.

The user does not have to go through all unselected options like he had to with AirGap’s old verification. If the user made a mistake at a certain position it’s also simpler to change it, just by selecting the word and choosing the correct one from the three options.

left: old verification / right: new verification approach

The new verification is available in AirGap Vault version 1.3.4 for Android (GitHub) and iOS (available shortly).

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