As my first post on behalf of Digix I wanted to introduce myself to those who I haven’t met already in the Digix Slack group. I am Chris Hitchcott, a web developer from the UK. I previously founded TAPevents in Hong Kong, and after discovering Ethereum at the frontier release, decided around November to switch careers and dive head first into Dapp development.

Since then I’ve been dabbling with various ethereum-related projects — among others, State of the Dapps and Ethcore.io. I was delighted to join Digix last month to help with the process of rebuilding the main app (‘digix core’), which as some had pointed out, needed some love with regards to UI.

I wanted to provide a progress update and short term roadmap for what I have and will be working on in terms of front end development. For those of you who haven’t been following along in our Slack group (over in #app-dev), I urge you to join the discussion — we’ve had a very healthy interest so far and it’s great to have so many people be involved.

Templating a New User Experience

When deciding how to approach the rebuild, the main thing I wanted to tackle with the user experience in terms of flow; how can we best lay out the new version of the app such that it’s intuitive and easy to use? For me the answer to this was to take advantage of what people are familiar with — existing websites and UIs. The main role of the core app will be for users to buy DGX tokens and gold assets; it’s essentially an eCommerce site with an Ethereum backend, so why reinvent the wheel in terms of UX? If visitors are automatically familiar with the flow (due to having used any other eCommerce site ever), they’re more likely to make a purchase.

With this in mind, I overhauled the routing system and user flow to be much more familiar. I wanted visitors to not even realise they’re using an Ethereum Dapp until the point of purchase. One major improvement is this: instead of requiring every visitor to ‘log in’ immediately, and then seeing a dashboard, non-logged-in visitors will be able to browse items straight away. Instead of a ‘dashboard’ style menu, they’ll be presented an enticing landing page and a familiar eCommerce-style marketplace. Only when they wish to make a purchase should they need to ‘log in’ — there is no UX barrier in terms of viewing the items for sale, which means more visitors will see those items, which means we’ll get a greater number of conversions.

I’ve applied this philosophy throughout the overhaul and have simplified a lot of the account management steps, whilst making the app feel a tonne more usable overall. The bulk of the templating work is now complete and implemented in the Semantic UI CSS framework and Meteor.

We’re rebuilding the app in Meteor for a few reasons; there’s a bunch of cross-pollination already in the Ethereum/Meteor world, and it’s a stellar framework for building single page apps. A CSS framework is essential, as it’ll allow us to re-skin the entire website with very little effort by tweaking variables; this theme will be applied throughout, plus it means that the UI elements we create in this version can be simply imported into future projects with very little effort.

And that leads us to the next important update: look and feel. Now that the user-flow had been logically restructured and implemented in Semantic UI, the next task was to overhaul the theme. I wanted visitors to get a sense of premium quality and cutting edge modernism.

The Future Feels Premium

At this point, I could have invested a substantial amount of time working on the look and feel side of things; it can be a long and iterative process to get it right. As time is of the essence, there were other things that needed doing that could be done in parallel, so we decided to outsource the look-and-feel of the design process; what better way to iterate than having lots of different designers approach the brief at the same time?

So we launched the premium 99 designs competition. That was two weeks ago and we had over 30 submissions for the qualifying round. Some of them really hit the nail on the head in terms of the brief, and we’ve narrowed those down to just 3 excellent designers for the final round (thanks to everyone who voted in that poll!).

In this final round, the qualifiers will continue their vision into the marketplace to give us a better general idea of how the theme will be unified across the entire app. A final winner will be decided next week, and it’ll be a simple case of tweaking our existing Semantic UI theme and templates.

A Package for Ethereum Dapps

While the competition has been going on, I’ve been working on a secret project that I’m happy to announce publicly for the first time: the Digix Lightwallet Meteor Package. This package will be a core piece of logic in both Digix core, future Digix apps, and as well any Meteor app going forward. Indeed, Digix Lightwallet will be an open source project that hugely simplifies the creation of Ethereum dapps not just for Digix but for the whole community. After all, the more Ethereum Dapps, the more DGX is likely to be used.

The package will be a drop-in accounts system that uses `eth-lightwallet` and `hooked-web3-provider` to implement super simple accounts creation and management for any Meteor app, with pre-rolled UI components. Here are some of the planned features:

- Account Creation (obviously)

- Transaction Signing (both Generic and Template-Specific)

- EIP20 Token Support

- Transaction Tracking

- Backup/Restore

- Address Book

- Offline Wallet Creation

- Internationalisation

I’ve also designed this package to be CSS-Framework-Agnostic. This means that the unit-tested core logic can be included by other packages to implement UI in any kind of CSS framework: Bootstrap, Semantic, Materialize, you name it. Developers would simply write their own templates and hook into a minimal API in order to implement their own look and feel.

We’re going to take advantage of this modular approach for Digix Core — we’ll implement our own premium templates, whilst getting the benefits of open sourcing the core logic and a community version of the templates. We’ll have a significant amount of UI and logic in the form a reusable package, so future dapp development will be a lot easier.

More to Come

Speaking of future dapps — we are also in the early stages of designing the DAO governance app, which I’m really excited to be working on, and with our reusable theme and accounts, should be a pleasure to implement! More updates on this to come as we progress.

So that’s it from me for now. I do have a tendency for writing long emails and posts, so hopefully this hasn’t been too much of a marathon! Thanks again for everyone who’s been participating in the Slack channel — it’s great to be working you all! Stay tuned for updates in due course, with the release of the core app, and some other surprises in store down the line.