# UI and UX in DeFi Panel | ETHDam 2023

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 40:41
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-aeB_lYP8MMU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeB_lYP8MMU

## Description

Nuno Loureiro is a Lead Designer for Ethereum.
https://twitter.com/nloureiro

Ismael Darwish is a product manager at Argent.
https://twitter.com/ismael_eth

Jan Zibelni is a Product Manager​ at BlockWallet.
https://twitter.com/zibmacher

Moderated by Jonathan Knegtel. 
https://twitter.com/jpknegtel

ETHDam is a Hackathon & Conference that gathered over 500 DeFi and Privacy builders on the 20th and 21st of May 2023 in Amsterdam. 

Privacy is normal. Following the arrest of Alex Pertsev, a Tornado Cash developer in the Netherlands, ETHDam 2023 is determined to counter the chilling effects of the lawsuit and bridge worlds to discuss the future of privacy and encourage to build on the shoulders of cypherpunk giants.

ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, - a blockchain education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zurich. ETHDam 2024 is on the map already! Keep up with us to see updates: 

CryptoCanal https://www.cryptocanal.org/
CryptoCanal Twitter https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal
Join CryptoCanal Community https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity 

We would like to thank our partners and sponsors that made this event possible. 🌷
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Marlin Protocol https://www.marlin.org/
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] cool um all right so next up we have I believe one of the last panels if not the last panel of this event so I'm a little bit emotional actually um and this is going to be on the UI and ux of D5 Bridging the Gap between complexity and usability and and this is actually a really nice way I believe to actually close off the panels is this topic has come up quite a lot over the last couple of days because ultimately we can have the best privacy technology in the world we can have the best blockchain technology in the world but if people can't use it then it's kind of all for nothing um so I'm very very excited um to welcome the panelists to the stage we'll start with Nuno from the eth foundation it's a pleasure as well as Ismail from Argent who uses Argent wallet here okay we have a few we have a few and we have Jan from block wallet please give a round of applause [Applause] all right thank you all for coming today with any hangovers or all clear all right good oh good cool all right um if it doesn't work there's this one as well do all the microphones work does this work yeah there you go perfect all right so to start off as usual um please introduce yourself and your interest in the UI ux in defy um all right I guess I can start um Ismail product manager at Argent mainly focused on the stock net uh side of things at urgent um and I guess my interest in UI ux I guess comes from the the first moments that I started using crypto I was fascinated by the technology I always thought okay this is going to be something that everyone uses but when it comes to to the ux I couldn't imagine my parents actually using metamask to do any simple transactions so I started digging into some solutions found smart contract wallets and airdrop soon my name is Jan I'm product manager at block wallet and product management is a little bit more than ux but I think if Road mapping and syncing the teams and aligning the vision is the main course I think ux and UI is like the suite at the end um hey I'm Nunu I work for ethereum foundation I'm lead designer for ethereum.org so it's a a website that we all know and the door to help onboard people to ethereum so it's an open source project Community Driven so we invite everyone to join the community and help out all of the folks and learn the process and actually I wanted just to bring it out that it's really good to have some design panel on stage because we hear every other talk talking about bad ux bad things every now and then and I feel as a designer that we didn't don't have the stage to speak about that like why it's bad how can we improve and it's always a conversation every other conference it's always about and how many conferences do you have designed in the main stage I think we still need we need to step up the conversation about design once and for all yeah ultimately you all do make the stuff that we look at all day every day so um cool so to kick it off um I'd like to ask each of you to share one of the biggest challenges in usability that you've faced and um yeah how was that solved it can take the form of a story or just yeah a simple statement um I guess I can start so I feel like well one of the the main issues in the blockchain space and particularly for wallets is the the problem of of Key Management and how we we Design Systems around key management and how we present that that challenge to to users and the way we've solved with that Argent is by not letting the user even know that they have a seed phrase so yeah by making but making uh UI that doesn't surface that seed phrase and that doesn't surface that complexity and all the um yeah the the issue of of having to store a seed phrase with uh whatever methods we try to tell them to to do um yeah that's that's how how we're we're solving it it's we have different ways of of doing that but uh yeah there are there are ways to do that and yeah we we've done cool um I'm going to talk about seed phrases uh also um but I'm going to say that I think we need to be proud of the whole community that has been able to step together at least in one thing and that is how not your keys not your crypto right um and what we've been able to do in the past few years is make this really a phrase that everyone knows and we've been able to unify this experience of saving and then storing keys and everyone is doing this part in educating the users right um so we rarely um have a common standing ground with a lot of other ecosystems but this thing is the one where that we have in common that we're and we're working well together to educate the users on this so that would be mine on my side I would let's try to be a little bit different it's more about learning as well but more about the jargon and to understand it like before usability before you're building a product you need to understand what's what's the need for it the real need the real use case I think you need to uh it's a design problem to begin with because you need to understand how to communicate how to understand the needs of the real real world person and try to tailor the needs to them and that's a design Problem by itself and it's all about jargon it's all about how to understand the needs how to understand the flow and then before even thinking about some of the usability issues uh in detail that's fair I think one one story about Arjun was that at the very beginning you guys would sponsor everyone's ethereum guest fees I believe yeah yeah which was a you is a usability problem um but yeah I think at some point that just got too expensive right yeah definitely yeah at some point we yeah the gas fees were just prohibitive and and we realized that we couldn't we weren't going to make it alive if we if we kept doing that so we we stopped and we had to to compromise a bit but now with layer twos that we're focusing on quite heavily that's that's a promise that we might we might uh bring back at some point cool if I made a little anecdote uh I think Argent was responsible for a lot of other wallets thinking about this approach um and with externally on the counts this is tough right um so we did spend a lot of time thinking about how we could potentially do that at the Block wallet um but like uh Ismael said it's it's prohibitively expensive and also in our case it's prohibitively expensive to design and develop that's fair I think it's always like with a with a traditional card payment you know the fee is taken out of the merchant so it becomes very easy for everyone to understand but when you make that jump you're like what the [ __ ] is a gas fee like um which brings me into the next my next big question um which is from your guys's point of view is the ecosystem ready to onboard the next billion users if not what do we need most are we ever going to be ready your net your next never ready and it will happen right before your eyes hey it's a good example what happened in AI like you want to anticipate it to be so fast and probably what we needed some sort of event like that's happening like some massive option of some like vertical nfts right like at some point looked like it would be the way of going more adoption but I think we will never be ready it will always be buggy it will always be that software that's that's technology being what it is [Music] yeah I think I have to agree with that um it'll just happen um but it will not it will happen in a way where someone will build something that will be the Catalyst for this like AI that you mentioned um and yeah nfds are a promising thing uh in the sense of of I like to say that right now we have high value and low utility nfts when we should have the other way around but this is not the topic of this panel so I guess there will have to be a cat like this event that will trigger the next wave of users to come in and really adopt but I do think that that the technology is also not quite there yet it's all there's no network that can handle a billion users right now and our promises on on on our hopes our on layer twos right now um uh especially CK Roll-Ups but uh if if that big use case comes tomorrow there's no technology that but it never happened like remember the beginning of Twitter the file while image yeah I was around when it happened it was growing so bad so big and deepest record was not ready and you need to fix that on the way it will be a lot of mistakes along the way and a lot of things can be risky and in this ecosystem risk it's a real thing so okay we need to be careful of that but either way you can prepare yourself but you never know there's always something that will happen and that's the beauty of it that's that's good that's why why we're here yeah I agree with that um so we had a we had a certain users um late uh late last year for obvious reasons um and yeah the the issue was that you can scale that fast uh as you can't scale as fast as users come in your infrastructure what was the reason oh FTX yeah yeah okay that that brings me to to something that you mentioned earlier that we we've been doing a quite a good job of educating people but not your keys not your crypto but the fact that well all the scandals that have happened in the past year with the FTX Scandal included that that tells me that we're not doing quite as good a job as uh as as you mentioned because if everyone is using um yeah FTX or or many of us probably use use coinbase or cracking or or binance decentralized solutions that that means that not everyone is completely aware of of the fact that they don't have complete self-custody over their assets so I do feel like we we have a long way to go and and a lot of a lot of the job has to be done on the on the wallet side of things and and making it way easier for users to to be comfortable with with dealing with these Technologies because otherwise they're just gonna go back to to decentralized Solutions a quick note on this is I think it was eth the last eth Denver where everyone came back being like well it wallet wallet wallet wallet as like this is it and you also just said it again my question is like okay like what is the killer feature in a wallet that like everyone's kind of dreaming of or is it kind of we're expecting this moment where someone's going to release something that is such an intricate puzzle of it that it is then going to just open up the floodgates I I do have uh an idea of what the ideal wallet is and it's it should be completely minimal in my opinion just a wallet a wallet function is to to do Key Management as well as possible and letting the user know uh what they're signing basically those those two things is the basic stuff that a wallet should do and all the functionality around it you can you can build it on top of that wallet but all of that could be dashboards on top of uh other uh platforms but yeah I I do believe that that the key feature of a wallet is just key management and stuff like uh social recovery or all that that stuff that we uh that we support at Argent or or fraud monitor system which is kind of this part of the what I mentioned about surfacing to the user in an easy way what they're actually signing but those those are the the two things and and anything really on top of that is something that the wallet can do if if they want but not not necessarily hmm um I sort of agree on that um sort of I don't agree at all um you don't have to be nice so my my take on this um I'm going to expand I'm not going to fight this um opinion that you have it's um I agree that the wallet should be as secure as possible and um its main purpose is Key Management and we've also been playing around a lot with privacy features and what we've what we've sort of realized is that privacy features are very hard to to make sexy right um it's very hard to to use that as your key differentiator you need something more right you need something that is that is not um how do you call it we so our marketing guy told me we can't scare the users right because if you want to Market privacy you're going to have to say hey there's so many monsters out there you need our wallet right so you have to find other narratives that you can pursue and it's tough because like Ishmael said the key point of the wallet is to hold your keys right but we have to build something more exciting on top of it I think um so yeah that's why you should not call it wallets like we've discussed about the word wallets and you have like two different fields the ones I believe that the wallet should be called wallet and when it's believed that it should not have something else like even the sign in with something like connect your wall sign in like we are trying to bridge a little bit what a wallet is to try to call it to sign in like it's your identity so that's a transformation that's a trend that it's happening right now with world called World coin conversation and all identity providers uh around that so I think it's one of the trends around wallets if you've if you are spoken about well it's how to uh overcome the just hold your keys kind of thing and be your identity as well so the narrative is changing a little bit I'm not sure if it's a good way or a bad way but it's changing um that's yeah I think this is a personal opinion uh but I think I I really do believe For Better or For Worse I don't know if it's accurate but I think the next billion users will not know that they're using D5 but they will be using D5 in that sense and I don't know if it's possible but I think that's kind of the the the the goal of kind of what should be achieved I I think it totally is and and actually that I well I can chill with the the one probably that we're working on at Argent it's called Web wallet and it's pretty much an SDK that allows any dab to just offer an email and password flow where users just create an account thanks to account abstraction and and uh smart contract Wallets on chain that includes that fraud monitor system all that key management and all the the recovery mechanisms but the users don't really need to know that they're interacting with the blockchain so we just offer this as an SDK the DAP integrates it and upon connecting or or signing in they will just see an email input they enter that authenticate with um with their email and maybe even second factors and then they have a wallet they don't know about it they're interacting with that dap and they they don't really need to know that there's there's a blockchain behind it because this this product is just focused on the two things that I mentioned earlier just key management and surfacing to the user what what they're actually signing yeah okay actually uh I I do disagree a little bit with not knowing what you're doing you need to understand the risks and if we abstract everything from the user they will think that it's safe it's a web choose or it's a bank or it's some sort of platform that is Insurance somehow you need to understand the risks and you need to tell them the risks and again that's a design problem how can you tell the risks to the user they need to learn the risks you can have a lot of metaphors around it like you learn to drive it's risky to drive you don't need to understand how the engine works like inside of the engine but you need to understand what is still unreal what's a break how to break a car and so if you don't you will crash and you can die or you can kill other people but so there's stuff that you need to understand and we are trying to abstract so many things from the user and say oh this is so easy to use just use it and it's like if it is so easy it's risky but I do think that the the level of of knowledge that we require from users should be uh yes proportional to the the amount of risk that they they have if I just want to play a game and I want to just spend like two dollars on it why do I need to understand how the key management is is happening that the fact that I have some key recovery mechanism and all that stuff I just wanna play my game with my account that I that I created and I have five dollars in it if if I start putting more and more funds in that account maybe we can have user flows that start explaining that complexity to a user as they getting their journey through but then again you never know if the user has one dollar has 1000 or whatever so you have to prepare the system and when you're on board the the user they need to understand that you can use that wallet to create value or there's some value in in it that is for you like the keys to your house use its own pockets and you don't lost it and you don't lose it if you lose the key of your house what you do you change the lock so it's a secure thing you need to understand the risks of of having your keys with you yeah yeah very if I just got a house and there's nothing in there no but uh well I I think that analogy yeah is not completely accurate I think because as I mentioned earlier if I just want to play my game I don't need to know all that complexity behind it and you we can as long as as soon as the user adds more funds to it or they want to do an action that requires or has more risk we can we can design the the wallets because otherwise if we if we introduce all that complexity from the get-go We're Not Gonna We're Not Gonna reach I'm not saying that you need to introduce complexity I I I'm saying that you need to proceed the risks need to be perceived by the user it's you can do it in the last uh risky less um complex way like complexity it's a word that brings some like inherent complexity it's like it's different anxiety it's hard it's like probably it's not the best way isn't it does not need to be complex it does require some work but that's not a bad thing to begin with there's stuff that you can do like work yourself out if there's an incentive to do it Financial or to play a game or to own something if you understand like you will own something and that something can be valuable if it is a playing card it's again again on a game or some clothing or something like that and I'm not thinking about token incentive like Financial real incentive I'm just like you said in the game like I can't just get that to another game and it's mine it's mine and that procession of being mine and not being within the game it's something that you need to teach the users they are not used to have that at all like if you play some game it's within the game that's the owners it's centralized thing the centralization it's different concepts to understand last comment and then we move on okay yeah I do agree with that but I do feel also that uh with current games even though they're centralized users to get the feeling that that asset is theirs so maybe wrong feeling they don't own anything one story I heard last night Simon from the graph he was on the panel earlier and he was telling me that his girlfriend bought an ens domain ten ten dollars yeah you don't give a [ __ ] then suddenly she got the airdrop and suddenly everything became super serious so that's when she got red pilled and then really starts to understand all of the different considerations in the space so yeah monetary incentives I guess yeah it sucks but it does play A Part also fun fact last night someone was like you don't talk about the price and we were everyone else was like yeah um so another question building off of this is what metrics should we use to measure success on web3 products um from the from a from a design perspective um does that make sense it does and I'll let you think about it but I want to remind the audience like uh please ask questions on slido we have a design panel that's very special where you discovered that at the beginning so please do ask questions yeah whoever wants to ask the metrics question yeah I think that's that's a really tough one because um it's hard to measure how successful your UI was when the motivation underneath it is so strong because in crypto look we just talked about this earlier is there's a strong motivation to earn money right you don't get into crypto just like that you get it because you want to buy a token you want to I don't know participate in these like all these D5 protocols um so it's very hard to figure out how successful your ux has been in ensuring that the user gets what they want because they really want it and they'll find a way right um so I I think metrics like tvl active accounts all that isn't very relevant to ux right now I honestly I don't know the answer to this question I I do agree and I think we need to evolve those metrics again need to rethink if we are rethinking a lot of different things like everything the way we as a society work within this technology we need to really think this success metrics as well probably you cannot measure by the number of users by total but how secure is your product how private it is your product that's a metric of success if it is a private it's a successful thing and those metrics need to keep being account to measure how good your product how good your flow is it how private it is how secure it is uh and not just how easy it is how can you onboard one million in one click is it a good thing on board one million folks in one click or probably three clicks might help a little bit uh to ensure that it's private you ask three or more questions you ensure that the flow can be better I we need to rethink the metrics to begin with if you're thinking a lot of different things The Matrix is one of them uh I know it's a business I know you need to have uh your startup need to grow need to do more business but probably you need more active users and the ones that interact how many transactions did the user do and was meaningful those transactions they Great Value how impactful they were it's more important than have one million yeah like ridiculous transactions just for them something that is not useful at all and those metrics need to change it's a narrative again that needs to be changed but how to measure success in your products and double clicking on that like when you talk about metrics like privacy security and all of those things how who comes up with those metrics how are those reported by the ecosystem if you have a short answer on that it can be battle tested by different users you can have a third parties to ensure that so there's a different being open source it's one of the best ways okay if it is we now trust more than open source project and a close Pro source project just because it can be verified that's what metric upstairs just do your product open source the code and let people verify that that's one metric of success within our ecosystem like there's a lot of small things that we can use to to measure uh how good is the product based on that and if it is secure if it is I don't know if you can create a scale of how secure it is I I have no idea but probably you can try to work a little bit as a whole has has an industry industry to create those Medics and be the be valuable not just okay I have 1 000 new users a day oh cool for you are they good users why did you onboard your product they do they interact with your product or is it just are hopping into to make a quick Buck on some airdrop or something like that's that's not the way of going in the future fair enough Ismail do you have any thoughts on the metrics of success I I do agree that it's it's a pretty difficult thing to to nail down specially because yeah there's there's so much activity happening on the blockchain just because the incentive of an airdrop is so uh high that it's it's just yeah it's just difficult airdrop I have I have a short remark um it like I recently witnessed uh this is an anecdote of I recently witnessed a person who is not in crypto trying to buy Pepe oh yeah so um so just the the moral of the story is that user testing is amazing um and it can give you so many insights and it will also expose all the dark stuff yeah of why it's hard to gain traction and why like overall the ux right now of crypto in general is is not on par yet right I think did he bought uh yes but after after a lot of interventions by me including sending over some money for a gas I would love to see this as a marketing video but from wallets if you can compare or like take someone from an older generation and get them to buy Pepe with different wallets and see what the experience is and make it into a tick tock I think that would be hilarious um okay last question for me before we go to the audience questions um I would like you all to name just one emerging UI ux Trend in web3 that you think Builders should be aware of I think I've spoke a little bit about that because I was thinking about the the signing and the way you interact with the sign in and like connect or sign in or the way you interact with with the wallets within the product with defy or whatever thing you're doing might be a trend for the next year uh the world coin thing it's booming a little bit like we are talking about that good or bad I'm not not judging but uh that might be one of the interesting uh things to see on how easy it will be to interact and how can we have that flow going on cool I think a trend that has been going on for a while and um that I think Argent is actually pursuing most actively is um trying to make the whole experience more akin to web 2. right I think that's a that's a huge Trend right now yeah I was I was actually going to mention the the same thing just uh yeah try to try to bring uh try to meet users where they're at pretty much if we want to bring web to users to our space the best way to do it is by designing flows that are something that they're already used to and this email flows even though they might not be um the the perfect solution it's something that that will bring Mass adoption to to this ecosystem and on top of that we can design way more secure systems but yeah that would be it cool all right to the audience questions um the first one is uh would do this quite quick fire what has been your favorite ux that you've interacted with recently crypto or not and why your favorite ux oh um yeah there's there's this uh thing happening on the on the stagnet ecosystem um it's uh um a standard oh my God yeah there's this uh standard called webothem for authenticating with um with a back end and some people in the stagnet ecosystem are using it to sign transactions web of then basically allows you to sign transactions with Biometrics so basically you could you could uh just have your your wallet there's this super cool project on stagnet called the cartridge which is a smart contract wallet that has some custom verification Logic for verifying transactions signed with web authen so basically what you have is your account and um when you when you want to perform a transaction on an adapt you just see it right there on the website it asks you for your fingerprint or or face ID on if you're on mobile you sign it and it's done and it's completely verified on contain there's no back end involved at all and it just works it it seems like magic really right now it's a bit too expensive but hopefully when stagnet scales that's going to be the the the ux to to bid is cartridge also a dfinity term maybe I'm thinking too much no it's in something like Anyway no well I'm not familiar with it all right I can go next um I think uh I won't point out any particular um ux on web3 right now um but I want to point out that like my favorite experience on the Internet is the internet itself and I use brave because it lets me skip all the ads and as many cookie notifications that that it can and I think the web experience right now is totally broken for everyone um and I I think I want to be optimistic about how web3 and not just crypto could help us like get back that authentic good ad-free um non-intrusive experience so have you heard of Arc or used Arc yeah I love it I've been using it since almost for a year already nice and I've gotten half of the Urgent company to use it nice I I think we can be providers of Arc invites so it's the best browser ever I I just you can fix things that are broken by Nature so recently I traveled to to Japan and the the way you go about entering Japan with the web app that they provide has a government it's such an easy such a good experience to go just to prove just to prove the point that all the systems can be broken at some point and you can improve them even knowing that can be uh so we still we are having bad experience in our ecosystem and I think we can improve them I'm just sending out a message that even the ones that we think that is broken by default like flying like going abroad and going all this Security checks there are some interesting use cases so that might be another use cases going on in the future for our ecosystem as well that might improve so there's hope that's my message um next question is maybe one of you can answer this if you have a good answer is can you give examples of web3 products that have actually got traction because of their good ux and specifically what can we learn from them it's a tough nut actually in the sense that it's usable I traction isn't it was so amazingly good that lots of people went and used it and I don't want to say coin market cap ah we all rely a little bit on the Reddit example has a good way of interacting giving out Collectibles without knowing that they are collectors the risk again of not knowing it's a thing for me but it still is probably one of the best use cases of mass adoption something not the Gen 3 launch though that was an absolute nightmare yeah yeah but I think it still is probably one of the mass seduction from a web to perspective that could onboard a lot of folks to web tree yeah the amount of wallets that was created and the buzz around it was a good thing who here has a Reddit collectible clicked Avatar yes all right um okay and I guess the last the last question that I'm going to take from here is what would you say are the things that designers and Builders can do to understand how to build products that genuinely solve problems I guess this is also like what's your tip to the people that are here I'm going to go back to incentives right um right now there's a strong incentive to earn money in crypto which is making the adoption job for a lot of projects a little bit easier um but what I think we need to work on is incentives of other kinds so if we just remember a huge web to um projects like Gmail um Facebook right they had a different kind of incentive um it was there was a social component so I think I think we need to work on on different use cases and then like work on it in a way that is understandable and like it will capture users and it like will be able to onboard them in a way that is safe and secure for them um and offer them this this exceptional experience fair enough I'd say also I feel like there's there's a lot of stuff happening lately there is too too constrained by the the current limitation of the of the systems that we have in in in terms of uh transactions transaction throughput and and gas fees and stuff I I do think that focusing on the on the ideals that we built all of this uh upon is is a focus that I I'd like more people to have when they start building their their systems just focusing on on on when when this works what are we going to be able to build with with that because all there's many teams already working on on that and I feel like a lot of stuff that that gets built today is just um yeah about D5 and earning yield and all that stuff but there's there's way more stuff be beyond that that is going to be enabled in the next probably six to ten months um yeah we need probably more critical thinking on top of what we do like um like stop for a little bit and think how can we build better products to someone that doesn't understand technology because I think as everyone in in this conference and around the ecosystem has the value of the line the youth as we all know what we can do with it in the very end not the long tail but to get there it's a blurry way and we need to rethink how to build that path uh not bootstrap only on things that we know because we are changing the world and design plays a huge role of it like thinking different like testing out new new things and failing okay we will fail every now and then but we need to test out new flows new way of thinking new products even defy it's a new interaction with with value like it's a new way of interaction it does not need to be in the same interfaces that has a lot of charts and swap that and numbers all over the place like we we need to rethink the whole thing to begin with and that's I think there's the secret sauce to to go to the next level well that starts now sure thank you ever so much guys thank you thank you so much [Applause]