Ðime gets a Refresh ✨

Since I finished up the requirements of the challenge last week, I wanted to spend a little time on the design and interface of the site. The site was using the default (bland) theme of the Bootstrap 3 UI framework and it could use a little lipstick. So I added the Yeti theme and created a new logo. It’s a camera shutter surrounding an upvote arrow — get it??

Dime.photo and its beautiful new logo

OST KIT Alpha III Final Questions

1. What problem does your project solve for and what was the user need for creating your token economy?

I wanted to demonstrate how crypto tokens could replace the useless karma points used by Reddit, Imgur, etc. This empowers the user with ownership of their tokens and brings real value into the economy of the community.

2. What was your key goal behind doing the challenge?

I enjoyed building Dime.photo in the previous developer challenge and wanted to improve on the wallet and economics of the site. I am interesting in learning how blockchain technology will shape Web 3.0.

3. How did you plan the design for your wallet features?

I thought it was important to show where the transactions were headed, not just confusing hashes and UUIDs. So the wallet shows who the sender and recipient is (unless the recipient is the site itself), and has links to the the transactions on the OST VIEW blockchain explorer. I added pagination and some nice color coding to indicate inbound/outbound transactions.

What APIs did you use: Ledger, Balance, Actions, Token Details, etc.?

I use the Balance and Ledger APIs to query the blockchain after each token transaction. Token transactions are added to a queue on the server and executed in the background, which allows the website to be fast and responsive and not wait on API results. As the transactions are settled on the blockchain, I poll the Balance, Ledger, and Transaction APIs to update the local cache of transactions.

Ðime Wallet 2.0

What information did you show to the end user and why?

Each transaction has From/To, the type of transaction, its amount, and its official ID on the OST blockchain. I feel that users will need some amount of education to begin to trust blockchain technologies, and linking to their transactions on the explorer should help to introduce the concepts.

How did you use design (UX/UI) for how to display this information?

I added a wallet balance to the header of the site for quick reference, since that is going to be the most important info. The wallet itself lets you page through timestamped transactions and should be familiar to anyone with a bank or PayPal account.

4. What did you like about using these APIs?

The APIs have improved and become more consistent since the early Alpha releases. They work as expected and have gotten faster and faster. I’m looking forward to additional capabilities like key management and branded token exchange.

5. What did you learn about designing these wallet features?

I have learned that transferring real value over the internet is new and exciting, but it’s going to take time for websites and applications to get it right. We need to figure out what the average person really needs in order to trust these transfers and how much magic should be applied. I learned that blockchain transactions are powerful, but not instant. We’ll need to educate users on concepts like key management and wallet addresses. OST KIT gives us powerful new Web 3.0 capabilities to work with and it’s exciting to be an early adopter.

In Conclusion 🙌

I’d like to thank OST for the opportunity to do these developer challenges — they are a lot of fun. I have enjoyed watching them grow their infrastructure from all angles and I believe they have a bright future.