We peel off features-sets, adopt a more lean, iterative approach. Testing more often, sharing designs, our thinking, and our prototypes to the community more often, and then increasing the fidelity of the product as we go.

It’s about designing in a way that informs and supports the needs of the network design, yet wrapping them in an overall process that incrementally improves the user experience all the way to launch.

How do we do that? Well in large part it’s down to designing for the system as a whole, and considering it as an entire Ecosystem.

Ecosystem Thinking

Thinking about, and building for, the SAFE Network as an Ecosystem that a user inhabits, allows us to set our trajectory correctly.

Let me explain a little bit more what I mean:

On the one hand, maybe we’re just making some infrastructure that other people will use. It’s a layer that other people’s apps and experiences will leverage, and the end user may be completely unaware.

But at the other other extreme, we’re working toward that something you could quite reasonably create an entire OS on top of.

It’s somewhere in the middle of these two that we find ourselves; and where our users will find themselves too. The Ecosystem.

If we are cognisant of the Network Fundamentals (in particular things like: #10 using any machine but leaving no trace; and #6 Catering for multiple identities) and keep on reminding ourselves of the complete vision for SAFE, then I think it will help us dial in our trajectory correctly.

The way users will use and live with the SAFE Network will come in a variety of forms; from apps that just leverage the infrastructure, to tightly coupled utilities like the Authenticator, or intrinsic features like Safecoin. There are also aspects that people may perceive like a mini OS within an OS.

So this is what I mean by thinking in terms of creating an ecosystem: Something that users can understand and become familiar with across a range of platforms, and across a range of apps with varying levels of exposure to the underpinnings of the network.

And most of all it needs to feel trustworthy across all these touch-points.

Trust isn’t just about users having faith in the principles or motives of the project, or the fact it’s open source, or has been security audited.

As a user I need to know what to expect when I perform certain actions, I know where to find things, I feel in control. Feeling out of control, or not knowing what to expect, where I am or how to find things, is a very quick way to erode trust in a system as whole.

What Next?

Tackling the User Experience design for the SAFE Network, with the whole ecosystem in mind, will require building out frontend features in parallel with the underlying network as two streams. So we’ll often be working on interactive prototypes, then prototypes coded on top of a mock network, then finally bolting each of these feature sets down on a live network.

This transient SAFE Network application, will help you get all the test apps we’ll be evaluating, and will evolve over time to support the ecosystem.

As the first step on this journey to building out the ecosystem ready for launch, we’ve been developing a small transient application, which will start as a launchpad, or download manager, for our suite of applications.

This will become a test bench for these feature sets — pushing out a variety of applications to the community, while we design and evaluate them — and over time it will become a way of decoupling the authenticator from the browser, and allowing many of the functions of the system to become more portable. Like an OS within an OS, or a start button for the Network, coming in and out of view when needed.

Shown above is an an early concept drawing of the SAFE Network transient app; part of the creative process that helps us set the direction of travel for the Ecosystem UX.

This SAFE Network app will be evolved over numerous design iterations as we design core UX components of the Network; either as discrete apps, portable components, or tightly coupled ecosystem tools.