HCI & UX Academic Research, UX Unconference

[Music] so thank you for that very good introduction to wallets because my talk is kind of similar to that so hi my name is richard i am a product designer and a master of hci graduate student at the university of salzburg and i'm going to talk about how we as industry professionals can apply insights from web3 related hci research to industry projects so the overarching question that i'm asking is how can we improve web3 design with academic and industry industry perspectives so let me start off by saying that web3 as a research area in hci is small but it's steadily growing right so in the latest kai conference which is perceived to be as the premier research conference in human computer interaction we're starting to see a lot more studies being published related to plato earn crypto security and blockchain as a whole in these kai conferences and that's something that's really interesting and it shows that we're starting to see web3 as more of a mainstream thing right and one of the things that i really want to focus on in this presentation is more on the wallet side of things because as mentioned earlier it is really the first interaction of someone that wants to use a web 3d app or a play to earn game or whatever kind of blockchain application right so i'm just going to be going through two main papers mainly on their recommendations so the first paper that uh i have recommendations from is this paper from vos ko bojnikov where they did an empirical study of user experience with mobile cryptocurrency wallets so i'm not going to go through the whole paper but essentially what they did was they did an empirical study on i think app reviews from a bunch of different wallet apps available in the app stores and these are the three main recommendations that i really found interesting while i was reading through this paper so the first is they recommended that uh wallet apps should mimic how existing payment systems work to leverage users existing mental models on bank apps and i think this insight in particular is still still applies to uh to a web 3 as an industry because usually people are really more used to using banking apps or maybe even mobile wallets right and there's also the recommendation of wallet personalization for beginner and advanced users which also plays into the whole theme of improving the onboarding experience for these wallet apps like maybe it's not that good of an idea if you bombard a user with all these terms about staking about swapping about bridges and maybe you could uh abstract these concepts with much more familiar terms like let's say foreign exchange something like that and the third recommendation from their paper is the usage of tutorial or sandbox environments to teach users how crypto blockchain works including its quirks and transactions like the gas fees right and this point is um a rather interesting insight because this is something that i don't think is being done yet in most wallet apps like um at least in my experience most wallet apps assume that you already have a baseline knowledge of how the of how um wallet applications work and i think as a whole the web3 ecosystem would be much better if we had some sort of tutorial or sandbox environments especially for the people who've never had a uh a banking app or a mobile wallet app uh in their lives because some people in the global south they have access to crypto but they've never had experience in uh in fintech or banking applications and for the second paper that i'm going to share uh it's more of um this paper from abramov they try to understand the different risk perceptions and security behaviors of crypto asset users so in the study they they identified three user types they call it rookies huddlers and cypherpunks and they recommended that the current uh or rather one of their insights is that the current one-size-fits-all design of wallets is really impractical considering the user's different level of expertise and this is something that we can still see today in the the wallet apps that we use right as i mentioned earlier we are assuming that the wallets or the users of these wallets have a baseline expectation or knowledge of how to use crypto and it fails to consider that other people have specific needs like for rookies maybe they just want to use crypto as a savings instrument right as a way to grow their funds over time and maybe for huddlers they they would be much more interested in like joining staking pools or providing yield something like that right and they also uh came up with the insight that providing default user profiles could perhaps separate more advanced features for certain types of users so going back to their to their identifications of rookies holders and cypherpunks maybe providing um user profiles for these like hiding features like staking or even bridging funds could help prevent financial loss could help prevent some confusion in using these platforms and maybe make wallets as a much more safer and much more usable thing to experience and yes now you might be wondering ask professionals why should we care about academic research and isn't the academe too slow too outdated into traditional now why should we care it's because number one you can enhance or bootstrap your products design research and prototyping efforts a lot of these insights are really hidden in published papers and studies can provide a potential framing or uncover opportunities for your products designed so the insights from these papers can serve as your north star when you're designing products are yeah and these are some potential points for discussion so what can we as industry professionals do to address the knowledge gap when everything is super fast in web3 can we even keep up in documenting and is it worth the effort to actually document and are there opportunities for academics or industry professionals to create new design patterns do we even need to create new design patterns or do the ones that we've used for a long time still apply in this new web3 space so yeah that's it for my uh talk yeah thank you thank you for listening [Music] you