The Importance of User Needs in web3 - Stilyan Mitrev (fungibletaco) | Consensys, VillageDAO

I use this hello thank you for the warm intro yes so hi everyone my name is Stan um I work as a product manager in the success uh in the customer success team uh in consensus however this team uh this talk is not specifically about consensus it's more around uh my thoughts uh experience uh and lesson learned Lessons Learned with uh user needs specifically building in in web 3 um and yeah um it's uh this talk is intended for anyone who is building all the builders whether you're a developer whether you're a designer product person I hope you can take something from this uh from this talk cool so a little bit about me um I started my career in a typical corporate environment um then I moved to management consulting and in the last two and a half three years I've been working in web 3 and I love it uh web tree is is is is great the level of innovation that I'm seeing compared to my previous job to the previous jobs is just great um we are seeing technological strides every year or depending on where you work how you define it probably every quarter um and I love this I love this I love this about web3 uh you know we have blobs changing the way how we scale ethereum we have this new concept of freaking which we're going to see how it plays out and we also have foraster um which brings a sufficiently decentralized uh social Paradigm Shift um and I love this uh I I'm I'm uh I love the fact that we're seeing all of those examples of of technological um um um shifts um however often times in web 3 we are seeing that we start building on top of a technology we build something that's very exciting we build something that's very hyped and and often times we forget that at the end of the day we build for users we build for people and we want people to actually use our products um and last month I think um lenia um started a campaign to bring more liquidity to the protocol and they uh have all those applications and protocols coming into Lena deploying on Linea um and I was looking around I was I was looking around checking the different protocol and I saw a protocol which was doing bonds uh recently deployed on Linea and I stumbled upon one of the bonds and this is what the bond said it said a oh oh that's very cool oh wow uh a vibrant ecosystem which combines uh deflation user rewards and buyback mechanics where a eel bearing multivolt system that Fosters the protocol and the value of their native token I got lost and I I got a little bit lost here um it put a lot of mental effort on me as a user to understand what this means had to go to figure it out to understand um and you know I felt a little bit like this um and you know it's it's something that we have as a meme but honestly I really felt it when I when I saw this and this is a tweet from Mt Mt is a Founder in the Solana ecosystem uh just ignore the standard obsession with Steve Job in the beginning um and he says I've noticed many Founders in crypto conflate product with how can I add new cool features to my product that no one asked for it's done in a way that overly focuses on the technology and not the user benefit like just because something is modular or parallel doesn't mean anything you often have to work backwards from a problem or Market that you're interested in not upwards from a teex stack that you like and um I love this tweet it's it encapsulates what I said often times we build on top of Technologies we build on top of text tags that we like or we build something because we we really enjoy it or it's very hyped up and we forget about the user needs we forget at the end of the day we hopefully want users to use our product um and it's uh don't get me wrong web3 is a complex environment right we have on one hand technological complex complexity and on another hand we do have those new types of experiences that we see in web tree we have self custody of funds we have governance and putting those two things together really Pro really creates this complex environment however regardless of the scenario that we operate in again we need to think about the fact that people are using our products and they are different people uh and they want to achieve different things with our products and they want they hire our product to do different jobs um so there is this concept around you know building a product inside out right we can sit on top of a Tex stack and build on top of this Tex stack or technology or this hyped up new thing and we can build inside out our product right or we can think about building outside in considering the um the the circumstances that we're in considering the market that we're in considering what problem we're solving for who we're solving it and how we're solving it um often times however this is what what ends up happening uh that we think that the customer needs are really um very much pointing to our own needs and what we want to do uh unfortunately that's not the case in in most in most scenarios uh and don't get me wrong I've been a victim of this of this trap many many times um before I joined consensus I was working for adal and we were building metaverse Pro product uh that was back in 2021 and metaverse was all the hype it was older age we were Building metaverse Products uh and we had a very technologically sound team uh the team that EIP 4400 which was the first uh EIP enabling renting of ERC 721s we were very hyped up about this we were aiming to become the Airbnb of the metaverse right and as we were building our product and building our product we decided that we want to supercharge our growth and we said okay let's do referral program and we created this absolutely complex referral contract which if you're a metaverse and you want to enable renting come to us and you can get a piece of the pie if you know people who want to rent a lot of land you can come in get a piece of the pie if you know whales who want to give their land again come in we can give you a piece of the pie and we created this um and it was I remember the day when the the the tech lead and I we were sitting in a room and we were super excited that we're launching this contract and we like figured it out all the technical things and we're launching this and I don't know if you can guess no one used this um absolutely no one used this first of all it was ahead of this time and second of all we really failed to recognize uh user needs and you know as as we were building and building and building this product we started to figure out what are the different users that are using our product the different segments of users that are using our product and I remember I got an email uh at some point and it was an email saying uh this is by the way the the the model that you get when you want to rent a metaverse land and I got an email and the email said oh I have this problem with using your product you know I have this start date thing it's it's great out it says next slot and the start time is great out and then it says you know um um uh operator address I don't know what that means it says that I am the operator but I don't know what that means and then you know at the end it says that you're going to charge me $23 but metamask asks me for $40 so what's happening right where is this discrepancy coming from as most of you can guess at least the answer to the last question it was due to gas fees but coming back to this email that I got uh really I recognized that this was something I had to do with this new experience right it had to do with the complexity it's a new experience that we provide to users renting land in the metaverse and what we did is that what I did is that I failed to recognize the fact that we need to educate the user right and and their needs and and kind of like recognize their needs um arguably and and you know you can we can all we can we can say that this is a fairly complex model for especially for a person who's fairly new to this experience and we arguably one of the best experiences that we have in web Tre today is unis swap right and Unis swap has done a very good job of educating the user in this new experience um it says select token connect wallet right after you do that next step is to enter an amount you enter your amount and only after that all the information that you need for doing your swap is presented with the price impact and slippage and so on and so forth right so they have done unof I think have done a very good job of educating the user along the different steps on how you can use their product and I recommend this talk by uh Jeffrey Xiao from slope he he talks about this and similar concepts related to to the topic of this talk um cool and I'm coming back to to the landing page of the product that I was building um in the email that I got right what ended up happening is that I connected with this person it turned out it was a lady she was hit of strategy of a web two company for glasses for for glasses yeah um and it was 2021 remember it was metaverse was all the hype everyone wanted to be in the metaverse companies wanted to do activations and they wanted to do their headquarter they wanted to deploy their headquarters in the metaverse so it was this lady we ended up having a you know we ended up going on a on a call you know figuring out the rent and everything and uh I remember asking her I said how did you find my email you know it's it's very it's the first time I'm getting a support email she's like oh I was trying to you know work out your product and then uh I had this problem I was working I was looking for a support email I wanted to to send an email to the support uh I didn't find the support email and then I uh I I you know I try to find this chat bubble thingy which I usually get I I didn't found it and I ended up going in your blog and that's where I found your email I was like well that's weird you know we do support in our disc Discord if you would have come to our Discord we would have helped you you know we have our great Community manager who's going to be there to help you out but you know and and then she she she told me that and I said oh light bul we need to figure this out so what I end up doing you can see this this question mark in the bottom right we I end up building this question mark which opens up and says need help join Discord and that's a complete failure of recognizing user need because user needs because if this lady had trouble with navigating this new experience pretty sure that she would have trouble navigating a hectic Discord creating a Discord profile joining the channel and so on and so forth and that's very funny because right now I'm working in the um customer success team at consensus and we're building products which uh help people to figure out figure out web3 right um and the product designer that I work with defined what we're doing in a very interesting way and and I'm using this slide uh he says Innovation happens at the blockchain level and then Builders go out and they make a new app users try to use it users get confused and that informs Innovation at the blockchain level and this is really our business it's where users get confused and what can I tell you business is booming I mean users in web Tre get confused left and right we have a lot of confusion in web tree um so what we're trying to what we're how we're thinking about this is that learning from you know our experiences and really trying to figure out those user needs we're doing two things we're doing one of one of one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to understand based on all the questions that we get in our team trying to understand what are what are um user struggling with what are their problems and the other thing that we're doing is we're talking to people we are going out talking to communities talking to products talking to protocols talking to people like you in conferences so we're trying to understand how they think about support and how they're approaching support as well so as I said in our team we're a product team we're building products um and one of the things that we figured out based on the you based on the questions that we get is that a lot of users struggle with transactions they're not sure sure whether their transaction went through what is their transaction especially with newer users right um and the standard experience that you get today is this uh which is ether Lena scan all right and it's um for new users it can be fairly fairly complex I showed this to my girlfriend and she was like I don't know what this is so you know it's it's um um U it's it's a fairly fairly complex experience for new users so we end up building zero explaning zero explain is um this uh this uh application which really really simplifies transactions and links common problems to the type of transactions that we're seeing so this is you know this is the same transactions in both in both products um so this is we figured out this by you know understanding the types of of of questions that we're we're getting um and then the other product that we're building is called Village da now Village da is a fairly new product uh by consensus and Village Dow tries to enable Community Support essentially we enable Brands like metamask to um have Community experts to do support on their behalf to enable this Community Driven support in web tree um and ever since we launched in last year we launched with metamask this is how it looks like today for metamask but ever since we launched last year what we have been doing very very actively is we're talking to Brands we're talking to protocols we're talking to products we're talking to communities trying to understand how they're thinking about support and how this idea of this community-driven support looks like for them so we talked to all those people and we found out two things so first of all what we found is that this is more or less something standard we see today and a couple years ago if I have to be completely honest with you um what happens when when a user get gets confused right you connect to adap you get confused you go back to the homepage you find the Discord you verify you found the find the channel and then you ask your question right so this is kind of like a standard flow that we're seeing today with support in web tree and um as I said we found out two things first of all we by talking to various communities Community said today we do have a lot of places where communities live right we have Discord we have telegram have X you know we do not need another platform we don't have to introduce another platform we don't want to introduce another platform for support specifically for support fair and then the other thing that we found out is that this can be shortened or we try to shorten it right it's it's a fairly exhausting puts a lot of mental effort on users to go and ask their question so what we end up doing rather than building our own application continue to developing our own application we said okay let's try to answer those needs in a way that has been answered before that has been done before and what we're currently doing right now is we are building a popup which has been very well received in web 3 very well recognized as an experience in sorry in web 2 um and we're bringing that to web threee uh within a within a web threee way right with empowering the Community Support here um cool and yeah principles for web threee product design by Ben this is another talk I recommend which is related to um uh building in web3 building products in web 3 um he really talks about meeting users where they are that's what we're trying to do here meeting users where they are in the dab um if there's one thing that um you should remember from this talk is is this image you know sometimes user needs are different than all the cool features and the stuff that we want to build on our products and um be mindful of who you're building your product for consider what users are trying to achieve with your product and you know if your product is complex do your best to educate them um thank you if you want to talk support I'm here [Applause] and so that amazing first of all I I I gotta say and I have so many questions but I I'm gonna let the audience go first so feel free to raise like question like raise your hand if you have a question we have some time for Q&A so hello Stanley uh what are the benefits of the Community Driven support groups compared to let's say AI chatbat and whatever yeah yeah fair question um several so you're absolutely right uh we have to recognize the fact that you know with llms and AI um things are changing and we can argue that customer support uh could and might and maybe is one of the industries that we're seeing really changing in a rapid way uh however in in our team um working with a lot of support for our various products uh we found out that um in different cases people want to talk to a person they don't want to talk to an LM they don't want to talk to a bot they don't want to talk to anything automated especially when you're dealing with more sensitive information like for example something happened to your wallet or anything anything like this so we have been using a bot uh in in our support flows for for some time now um we're thinking about you know thinking about llms of course but um from what we're seeing and observing is that there's always going to be a need for a human touch when it comes to sensitive topics in support and uh so that's one thing and then the other thing is that Community is something that really um differenti Ates web 3 from from web 2 right we have those communities that are that are thriving living together and um we we are trying to enable this uh this this community love in in in in in the industry of support because we're seeing this happening today regardless right we're seeing this happening in Discord we're seeing this happening in Reddit quora it's not it's not a New Concept uh we are putting some structure to this New Concept where if you have people who are very involved with your product you can reward them for doing what they already are doing um hope this answers your question yes we have one more question uh yeah thanks uh great presentation so uh my thoughts are that basically uh the ux issues are not really technical like account abstraction and all the new technical stuff but more like uh uh how how do we actually convey what we are doing as you presented so my question would be uh for example uh when we go to most of the web web three landing pages we get like a soup of technical terms and my question would be uh how do we go about teaching not the users but the founders uh who are I guess mostly Engineers uh how do we teach them to speak like plain uh human language to to convey better and not just to put emphasis on the technology but on the actual product I guess attending this presentation is yes is one one way but just wanted to hear your thoughts on that yeah no absolutely uh good question this is this is essentially one of the reasons why I wanted to do uh this kind of talk because you're absolutely right you go to a to a um um landing page and you get a little bit confused especially if you're not that technical which puts you know a barrier for a lot of new people to come in how do we educate Founders to do that uh yes talks like this one of the things um the other thing is really I think talking to people um is is is a really really you know strong um way or and a very efficient way to understand how your product is doing in the talk in one of the talks that I recommended um it says that your product is good and you're meeting user needs if your usability interviews are boring essentially if you give your product to someone to test it out and you do a usability interview essentially which is you know just sitting with someone giving them their laptop your laptop and just saying just you know play around with with my product and You observe if they're boring it means that your the user is achieving everything that you're set out for the user to achieving your product um and I think those kind of usability interviews and kind of like giving this product to people and observing how they're using it is really really powerful to understand where you have friction points in your uh in your um product but honestly it's it's it's talking to people it's trying to understand it's it's understanding how they're um perceiving your product and how they are using your product and what they're trying to achieve so talk to people and come to talks like this I guess is the answer to your question and we have time for one more question so yes oh oh okay we're going to make it two but like real quick go ahead please sorry uh I had to uh popups you know that creator of popups apologize to the world for creating them yeah like please make a flashing box make anything but a popup that's like crazy most of and uh from from previous question so um an analyzing the the conversation with the user inside those popups and and conversation to the bot uh could really improve the the response of your support team so uh yes feed the bot with all the previous FAQs and everything but also track uh and and U leave the space to to ask questions that are not in the menu and and get get some insights of what user seeks and asks for because most of the Bots are asking you like a bunch of options and it's neither of them yeah yeah no absolutely you're right so um good point about the popup I I would argue here that although the founder of the you know the creator of the popup apologize to the world you know we are seeing that popups in web 2 are very very well recognized experience for users right and and when you go to a website and you see something like this you instantly know what that is about uh I would argue that not a lot of people or maybe not everyone knows about Discord right so it is I would argue that it's a it's a very well proven I would say experience in in in in web to specifically for support specifically L for for support so that's one thing and then learning from your users questions and and what you're trying to do 100% 100% we are thinking about this actually in in in the product that we're building on how we can enable this ever changing landscape of our alation flows on how they can adapt to the new needs and I'll give you an example um you know we release a new feature or something we release a new feature in metamask and then um we have a flock of questions related to that and we don't have anything prepared right this this could happen or any other example where something new happens and we don't have so we're thinking about this on how we can enable and I think to be quite Fair llms here have a very um they're very well positioned to to to help out uh customer support teams with such types of flows um however there's a I just want to add here and then I'll end on that that there is this um um level of traffic that you need to have in order for those to be sufficiently for for them to be sufficient if you're getting a few tickets a day this is not something that probably worth your time investing in right I hope that that answers the question we have question check check oh okay uh thanks for the talk I have a really quick one uh do you treat um education of web 2 and web3 users differently if the and if the answer is yes uh just some details on that thank you web two and web three uh the users who come who come from web 2 and who come to web 3 to your products new users from web 2 and new users from web three different cohorts yeah I think um no no that's fair um it's it's important to recognize the fact that if you're coming from a web 3 uh background you might get a little bit frustrated if you're being you know informed on oh this is your wallet and then you need to remember your seed phrase and stuff like this although everyone needs to remember their seed phrase I'm not saying that's not important um but it is it is it is true that there is this different level of understanding of the concept and the environment when it comes to people who come from web 3 and people who come from web 2 I think today there's very few products that are recognizing this and I feel like um most of the industry is treating education as a General thing where oh we need to educate our users let's try to educate the users in the same way um so that's something that probably people should think about so that's a very good question um but um today we do have a separation between web 2 and web3 users for example I can give you um metamask learn is a great resource for absolutely new people to web3 who can understand what is a wallet how they how how to set up your wallet how to do a transaction so on so forth um so we do have a little bit of a differentiation but definitely this is something that that needs to be worked on give it up for for Stan thank you