User Experience for Blockchain-based products

Why does it matter?

We have all had that experience of coming to a new website, which promised to deliver so much, just to find ourselves struggling to understand where to start or what to do. It is utterly frustrating when, instead of using a product, you have to think about where and what to click next and struggle to get to the desired outcome.

In the blockchain space, where complex procedures are ubiquitous, such experience is not foreign. Covee is building a blockchain-based marketplace and we believe that user experience lies at the core of our success. We are excited to share our views regarding the importance of user experience in complex projects.

Why does User Experience Matter?

UX is the experience, emotion, intuition and connection a user feels when using a site

User experience determines the success of every product, especially in an online setting, where it is easy to close the browser tab and go to a competitor’s website. When the only interaction with customers happens through a website — an example are online platforms — it is crucial to make the experience enjoyable enough for them to be willing to return on another occasion.

It is very important to ensure that the first experience a user has with a product is positive and not, like in many cases, confusing or even frustrating. Complex and new ideas need to be explained in a way that is easy for everyone to understand and, more importantly, remember. This is the first step in locking the people into an ecosystem; and the more people join and stay, the better the experience becomes for everyone.

Due to fierce competition in the industry of online platforms of all kinds, a provider needs to offer something that makes it stand out from the rest. That can be new features or a fancy design, but the most important thing is indeed how the product is presented — the user experience. Take Amazon as an example. Their user journey and experience has not changed much over the course of its lifetime and people still love to use it. The simple and intuitive design won over prettiness. Who wants to use a product they don’t really understand?

User Experience in the Blockchain space

When companies try to implement blockchain in their applications, the challenges regarding user experience become even bigger. As the technology is novel, few potential users are familiar with the concepts and risks that come with blockchain-based products.

For instance, the sheer existence of cryptographic tokens (e.g. ERC20) in an ecosystem can be challenging to justify to a non-technical audience. Explaining what they are, why they are needed and how to use them needs to be taken seriously and demystified at the customers’ first point of contact with the blockchain-based application.

As there have been many cases over the course of the last year, where individuals’ and companies’ crypto assets were stolen by hackers, the public remains skeptical about the products that embrace the technology. And fairly so — there are indeed high risks associated with the fact that you, and only you, are in charge of keeping your tokens (i.e. money) safe from the adversaries that seem to be everywhere. Would an average person on the internet know how to react if they were asked for a private key (i.e. the access to their funds) by a stranger? No, and it is the job of the UX designers to educate the users and prevent such events.

User experience and Covee

At Covee, we are investing a lot of resources into developing a platform that would be easy to use for everyone. We realize that most of our potential users, knowledge workers and clients, are unlikely to be familiar with blockchain and the details about how it works. Therefore, we are dedicated to creating an easy-to-use product, which all users can safely adopt.

We are constantly conducting user research through interviews, focus groups and experiments to improve the user experience on our platform. Our ultimate goal is to build a blockchain-based marketplace, for which the users can’t tell it is run on blockchain. This is challenging, because the components that are needed for such a platform to work haven’t been well integrated with the existing tools yet.

For instance, everyone, who wants to interact with a blockchain-based platform, needs a wallet (an Ethereum wallet, in most cases) to store their tokens. While a neat browser wallet integration is already offered by MetaMask, we have found that most of the users struggle with understanding its functionality. Therefore, we believe it is imperative to educate the users about the need for such tools through extensive onboarding tutorials and other means available.

Covee and the rest of the blockchain community still have a long way to go until the public starts to realize blockchain’s true potential and people start using it in their everyday lives. To accelerate the adoption, the barriers have to be removed, especially those concerning User Experience.