From password geeks to large-scale applications, an in-depth exploration of cryptographic user experience

Author: Pzai, Foresight News

Since the birth of blockchain, crypto geeks have been committed to building an interactive environment and architecture rich in rebellion and fundamentalism. This environment, while ensuring purity, also creates certain barriers. As more and more ordinary people participate in the interactions within the blockchain ecosystem, the user experience trending towards the masses will determine how the next billion users navigate the ocean of crypto.

When traditional user experience design collides with the new architecture of blockchain, we need to consider how to dismantle the existing barriers one by one. This article analyzes the user experience architecture step by step and, combined with the development history of the crypto field, offers a glimpse into the formation process of user experience in the future crypto domain.

From Personal Homepages to the Paradigm Shift of Free Currency

In the interaction of humans with the information dissemination networks they have built, paradigm shifts have always been calculated in terms of "years." In the early internet, most users hosted their own homepages, building information networks based on individual connections. The experiences gained by users were more related to the implicit social connections and sense of belonging generated through the network (or, in other words, their participation in the construction of the experience as part of the network). A clear example is that early internet communication was heavily laden with ideology, and the deconstruction of language output (e.g., GM :) ) profoundly influenced the subsequent propagation of original language on the internet.

Subsequently, with the trend of network clustering, a group of internet companies began to seize territory, and most of the experiences we use today stem from this phase. The paradigm shift has begun to strip users of their dominance in the network, instead providing "services" to users through a series of centralized methods. It was likely during this phase that product designers began to pay attention to user experience, as the smoothness of interactions designed for the masses determined their competitive position, a fact proven by the growth of mobile internet. Back then, Zhang Yiming of ByteDance believed that recommendation algorithms could create more personalized and customized content for users, aligning with their psychological expectations, leading to the later emergence of Douyin.

In today's crypto field, I believe it has simultaneously experienced the aforementioned two phases over the past decade. Initially, it represented the ideology of cypherpunks and free currency, where users could build through various means (e.g., running full nodes or participating in technical proposals). Later, with the influx of giants and the significant growth in asset scale and forms, user experience has increasingly become one of the important considerations in protocol design. If we view these paradigm shifts as a linear process, we can say that the crypto field is a return to past ideologies under the trend of clustering, creating and nurturing new interaction and experience paradigms through this return. As large-scale applications approach, we also need to seek the Nash equilibrium point among these elements, thus requiring further analysis of crypto user experience.

What is Crypto User Experience?

The term "user experience" originates from cognitive psychologist Donald Norman, referring to a purely subjective feeling established during the user's interaction with a product. Initially a psychological term, it emerged during the flourishing of usability and human-computer interaction in the last century. In the early days when computer technology was not yet widespread, people began to study the interaction processes and outcomes between individuals' physiology, psychology, and machines, leading to the birth of user experience. In cognitive psychology, the defined user experience includes three levels:

• Instinctive Level: This level showcases human instinctive responses, focusing on appearance design and creating a good initial impression, mainly related to visual experience, brand perception, browsing experience, etc.
• Behavioral Level: This level encompasses the feelings users experience during application interactions, including functional experience, content experience, and interaction experience, mainly related to application usability.
• Reflective Level: This is the highest level of user experience, aimed at shaping the brand value of the project itself, creating memorable experiences for users, allowing them to feel pleasure and satisfaction during the service process, and gaining a sense of identity in the interaction process, thus enhancing their self-worth.

Hierarchy of User Experience

Within this research framework, we can abstract the levels of crypto user experience based on the characteristics of the crypto field:

• Crypto Instinctive Level: As one of the many flowers in the crypto space, a good initial impression for users is reflected in the construction of community atmosphere and front-end presentation, both of which can provide users with initial impressions related to the project while laying the groundwork for the reflective level experience.
• Crypto Behavioral Level: Here, we can split it into two parts: front-end and contract interaction. The front-end can be built on contracts to create a more diverse experience on-chain. For example, the user interaction optimization of Farcaster Frame combines on-chain experiences with off-chain visualization (rather than just financial transactions on-chain).
• Identity Level: Through the combined effects of the first two levels, users cultivate loyalty in the community by understanding the project's brand value and are endowed with emotional value through various incentive forms, gradually involving users in the protocol governance process, thus making them "loyal users" of a project and contributing to the growth of the protocol.

However, before these levels truly form a closed loop of crypto user experience, many projects have still not realized the importance of user experience after years of development. Due to some historical legacy issues and the characteristics of the crypto field, they have been unable to complete the construction of user experience. Therefore, I will explore how crypto user experience needs to transcend itself, even surpassing all other experiences.

How Do We Build?

The transition from Web2 to Web3 has brought many changes. For example, if users want to migrate assets on-chain, they cannot just remember their passwords; or if users want to invest in on-chain products, they must bear the risk of smart contract theft. This learning threshold is vividly reflected in the behavioral level of user experience, and it is precisely this threshold that deters many users. The unique environment derived from the crypto field also brings certain difficulties to the migration of user experience, reflected in the following points:

• Isolation of Circulation Systems: Most of the existing user demands for the circulation and transfer of crypto assets need to go through centralized exchanges or onramp/offramp services, severely restricting circulation within and outside the system. This isolation not only limits the cross-platform usability of applications (let alone the fragmentation between different chains in the blockchain ecosystem) but also indirectly leads to a gap in experience between the front-end of crypto projects and traditional applications, thus limiting the perception of the behavioral level to some extent.
• Cultural Differences: The early cultural origins from cypherpunk brought an extreme pursuit of technology, and the field related to cryptographic technology itself is a very niche circle. The limited outreach to the outside world has weakened the demand for front-end interaction design, resulting in very limited designs related to users' instinctive responses (assuming users are inherently lazy, the best presentation for a transaction would be one-click processing, which contradicts the design of self-custody). Additionally, for many front-end design primitives of crypto projects, the strong composability of the underlying layer combined with the complexity of token economic systems leads to a lack of uniformity compared to traditional designs, resulting in fragmentation in user front-end interaction processes, and in many cases, optimal solutions cannot be obtained. (Some DeFi protocols restrict their LP distribution on-chain, and users need to find the corresponding DEX for trading to achieve the best depth.)
• Weak User Sustainability: If, during the development of the entire crypto industry, a portion of users can achieve long-term retention, then user experience will become a subset of these users. However, amidst the ebb and flow, many users may completely miss out on crypto projects that could reconstruct their sense of identity. The reality also proves that the product cycles in the existing crypto field cannot build a form of sustainable growth in the traditional sense.

The strong composability unique to the crypto field has also generated many unique interaction layers, which, while interconnecting, also determine the user interaction experience from zero to one. Former Baidu Chief Product Officer Yu Jun once said: "Essentially, every interaction process between users and products is a transaction. Users may not have incurred monetary costs, but they may have incurred time costs, cognitive and thinking costs, etc. Every interaction and detail design of the experience essentially aims to reduce the transaction costs for users while increasing the benefits users gain during the transaction." Jon Crabb, founder of Web3UX, divides the Web3 user experience into four layers: visual layer, functional layer, access layer, and technical layer architecture.

Four Layers of Web3 User Experience Source: Jon Crabb

Visual Layer

At this level, the design related to user experience is relatively similar to that of Web2, but due to the differences in the ecological niches of each protocol, the corresponding design styles can vary greatly. In general, the design at this level should provide maximum accessibility, including reducing the use of jargon and enhancing the prominence of important functions of the protocol.

Functional Layer

In Web3, smart contracts are almost the carriers of all operations. The algorithms and assets derived from smart contracts (such as AMM, NFT, etc.) create experiences different from traditional systems, but this construction complicates the understanding and execution of transactions. Moreover, the governance derived from this fact allows only a small portion of people to gain entry, which is precisely where crypto projects can gain user recognition. Therefore, at the functional layer, we can create automated strategies for transactions, unify experiences (e.g., ensuring account and asset identity across the entire chain to avoid transaction hindrances caused by asset differences), simplify front-end operations (aggregators), enhance the functionality of governance itself, and enable NFTs to play corresponding roles in certain scenarios.

Access Layer

Users generally access protocols through wallets (software and hardware), and an easy-to-use wallet can greatly simplify the setup process. Many technical solutions are currently working towards this goal (e.g., Passkey login or account abstraction wallets). Additionally, the circulation layer of assets needs enough fiat service providers to build smooth on-chain deposit services. In terms of address readability, on-chain domain services like ENS and 3DNS are creating an increasingly readable environment for users to ensure smoothness. In the future, we may even transcend the existing internet interaction paradigm and participate in various internet activities primarily on-chain.

Technical Layer

Compared to the original payment systems, blockchain can achieve second-level confirmations, but when it merely serves as the settlement layer for on-chain economic activities, it is far from sufficient. The demand for stablecoins is growing in obvious forms, not to mention that there are plenty of depths in on-chain economic activities waiting to be explored. Therefore, the construction of the technical layer of user experience is about "speeding up and reducing costs." As long as large volumes of transactions can be processed in seconds, all economic activities will achieve common prosperity. Furthermore, to enhance the connectivity between on-chain and off-chain economic activities, more transaction verification infrastructure (such as ZK proof layers, etc.) is needed.

Leveraging Strengths and Avoiding Weaknesses

At this year's EDCON, Ethereum founder Vitalik shared a history of the evolution of decentralized Twitter. The former was EtherTweet, built on simple transactions, showcasing a very crude interaction interface that bore no resemblance to social media. The latter is the interface of the decentralized social application Firefly, which shows that the overall front-end presentation can now rival that of Twitter.

Analyzing according to the framework mentioned earlier, the latter has iterated on some key points compared to the former:

• Uniformity of Front-End: Firefly brings a "unification" to the social media experience, with a standardized interface and interaction model that lowers the interaction threshold for users, while the aggregated experience allows users to manage complex information flows within a single interface.
• Narrowing Experience Gaps: The overall interface benchmarking against X can reduce users' learning costs in interactions, thereby narrowing the overall experience gap.
• Better Infrastructure: It can be said that without Lens and Farcaster, Firefly could only become X Plus rather than a decentralized social platform. The key lies in the infrastructure laying a foundation that matches and surpasses the original experience for existing users.

Future potential applications of user experience construction can focus on the following points:

• Initial Impression Introduction: Projects can build schemas for their communities (for example, some public chains often use well-known crypto schemas like Pepe, overlaying their main design colors to enhance community vibe), while closely integrating with the community on the front end, allowing users to build their initial understanding of the project through direct community participation.
• Mid-Term Behavioral Construction: Through incentive mechanisms and token economics, while tailoring ecological experience routes for users, construct an overall interaction paradigm for users, while providing real-time feedback on user interactions to create a set of highly sticky sustainable interaction mechanisms.
• Late-Stage Sense of Identity: Users' sense of self-worth is usually constructed from both behavioral and sensory aspects. After the initial user experience construction, consolidate the sense of participation generated for users (e.g., through governance or ecological activities), thereby enhancing users' sense of self-worth while generating sustainable value for the project party.