The Thrill of the New and Expectations of the Old
The challenges and opportunities of designing digital experiences in web3
Over the past year, my team has been building in web3. On the technical front, we’ve taken a very different approach from the web2 centralised way of building applications, but on the product side, it’s been a year of deep diving into designing accessible digital experiences.
The deeper we ventured into web3, playing with new projects and building our own application, WalletBound (decentralised content manager 💅), the more we realised that adoption and community growth are driven by exceptional user experiences. The decentralised technology and cultural shift in web3 applications introduce new complexities and considerations that demand a deep understanding of user behaviour, preferences, and needs.
Web3 is on the cutting edge of innovative technology and carries the expectations of web2 user experiences.
The circus of Web3 UX
One of the biggest challenges in building products in Web3 is there are no standard way to display or explain the technical complexity of what the user is interacting with. In web2 there are pretty clear expectations of what an email sign-up flow looks like and what a checkout process should include. But that’s not the case across web3 – people are getting creative and also creating a fragmented user experience, where users have to learn a new way of interacting with each new product or service they use.
For example, one of the most popular block explorers for the Polkadot blockchain ecosystem has a very technical and detailed UI. You have to spend time finding the hidden menu options and learning Polkadot’s terminology to be able to use it as a block explorer. (But once you do, it’s pretty insane how much is happening in Polkadot).
On the other hand, setting up wallet is usually done in a clean, uncluttered UI with a step-by-step process and supporting material. This makes it much easier for users to get started. Wallet setup almost has the same feel as a web2 account setup for a platform.
Web2 user flows feel very polished and the experimentation has gone into micro-details of copy and layout. Web3 is still making broad strokes.
At the end of the day, whether it’s web2 or web3, we’re creating digital experiences. Using familiar design patterns and conventions will help users to feel more comfortable and confident using your product. Making sure your product is accessible to all users with disabilities and users who are using different devices and browsers will help with adoption. Tools, strategies and methods found in product analytics and user research are still paramount for anyone building a digital product, especially in the new context of web3.
Cutting the clutter for lightweight product tracking
When it comes to tooling, web2 analytics approach doesn’t always fit the web3 landscape. As web3 applications often span across multiple protocols, platforms, and interactions, product analytics needs to adapt to capture the intricacies of these ecosystems. This includes tracking on-chain transactions, smart contract interactions, and user activities on decentralised exchanges and marketplaces.
Product analytics tooling for web3 needs to be flexible and lightweight.
Taking a look at our own journey – underneath WalletBound’s frontend we use wallets for logins and signing, a Substrate parachain (blockchain) and IPFS storage to manage content assets. Users of WalletBound own their content data (logos, images, photos ect) so we need to know that the way users are interacting with our whole technology stack is working as expected and the state of data ownership is working as expected (because we can’t manage data that we don’t own 🙃). And most importantly, we need to make sure the user experience of using WalletBound is smooooth and delightful.
To address the unique analytics requirements of web3 and ensure a seamless user experience for our own product, we developed our own product analytics service called Mini Digital. Mini Digital was born out of the need for a flexible and lightweight analytics solution that could adapt to the complexities of web3 applications without compromising data integrity. We use it on our public marketing websites, WalletBound app and WalletBound’s content analytics feature!
Another key challenge we encountered was addressing the growing shift of individuals owning their data including analytics data. Our intention with Mini Digital is to release a Data Pocket feature that allows a business/product to be transparent about what data is collected, why it is being collected and letting individuals review and own that data. In a product like WalletBound where data sovereignty is a key feature, it felt important to go beyond the privacy policy and build data trust with transparency.
In the realm of web3, where innovation and user-centric design are at the forefront, you’ll find some amazingly creative digital experiences and some ugly whole-page tabular UIs. For any new digital product or service, exceptional user experiences are key to driving adoption and community growth. There are a lot of design patterns and strategies that should continue to be used in web3. Deeply understanding the user behaviours and needs is still incredibly important to building a product even in products where privacy and data ownership are key features. So if you happen to be a bored UX designer or product engineer, please take a look at some web3 projects for your next case study 🙏