# How To Onboard A Staking User in Under 5 Minutes by Adam Soffer & Xuan Yue (Devcon5)

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2020-10-09
- Duration: 19:48
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-miGj_-Cf_Z8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miGj_-Cf_Z8

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/how-to-onboard-a-staking-user-in-under-5-minutes

1) Staking problem overview
As dPOS becomes a popular design pattern, staking tokens is an activity that end users for dapps and protocols are increasingly exposed to in order to get the required network participation. Since user interfaces for dPoS is still quite new for most, we hope to help you with your own design research by sharing some of our challenges and learnings unique to designing dPoS staking applications.
At Livepeer, we employ a dPOS approach to ensure the quality and security of the video transcoding services that our platform provides. Past studies showed that it took from 30 minutes up to 3 days for new users to figure out how to stake. This led us to ask the question: how can we make the experience so intuitive that even new users can go from signing up with a wallet to staking token in under 5 minutes?
2) Research and design
A) We conducted 15 user interviews with current and new users and constructed a user journey of the current staking experience. B) Noting the pain points and feature requests from these initial talks, we then went on to do competitive analysis across 10 staking apps for prominent blockchain projects, taking inspiration from the best elements of each. C) Due to feedback about user confusion, while navigating our staking app, we asked users to card sort features on the current application to help us redesign information architecture. D) Lastly, we iteratively tested our redesign with clickable prototypes to create a brand new onboarding experience and a brand new staking platform.
3) Results
Our A/B test of the prototype showed a significant improvement in the amount of time it took for users to go from signing up to staking token. 60+% participants were able to complete the new staking prototype in under 5 minutes*!
*Given that the user has already installed a wallet and have acquired Livepeer token.

Speaker(s): Adam Soffer, Xuan Yue
Skill level: Beginner
Track: UX & Design
Keywords: onboarding, livepeer, apps, ecosystem, PoS, adoption, general

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

thank you everyone for for joining today we're gonna talk about how to onboard ace taking user in under five minutes but first a quick introduction my name is Adam I grew up in New Haven Connecticut I currently live in Brooklyn I got involved in live pier pretty early on building products and tools for the community and these days I'm doing product engineering and design with a real focus on the token holder experience hi I'm Swan I was born in China I grew up in Texas and now I'm in San Francisco and how I heard about the blockchain world was at the end of last year and I really got involved in life here earlier this year and just never looked back so now I'm working on a life here research and design under the community grant actually license mine so we got a couple really exciting things on the agenda for you today first we're gonna delve into what are some of the onboarding problems across the entire ecosystem because this is really not an isolated incident and then secondly we're gonna be really excited to share with you how life here really imagined its own sneaking out redesign cool so there's a pretty decent amount of you here quick show of hands who here runs a mining operation okay and who here has recently staked token on a prove mistake Network okay so a lot more hands I think I think is perfectly illustrates basically how much brute mistake has really lowered the barrier to entry to participate in these these open decentralized networks so in the case of live peer that's a video infrastructure network but there's lots of really exciting proof of stake networks being being built out today that we think will be really integral to our everyday lives as really citizens of the internet so here's a short list this is really just the tip of the iceberg but there's a public proof of stake network for smart contract platforms for value exchange for data query processing for blockchain interoperability so yeah we think staking is here to stay and we believe strongly it's yeah it's here to stay we think it's pretty cool and we're looking forward to seeing the first million users on boarded and participating in these networks but there's a problem staking user interfaces so the gateway to to participate in securing these networks kind of sucked for the for the most part and that makes onboarding really hard so studies have shown that if it takes more than five minutes to onboard a user they'll most likely the most likely drop off or give up so we're gonna have a real hard time onboarding the first you know million staking users if it takes more than five minutes to to stake so so why do who's taking apps suck we surveyed this sort of burgeoning landscape of staking apps and we surfaced really four main problems that have really been impeding the onboarding process and for users and nearly all of them so problem number one is a really verbose and inconsistent language system being used so staking bonding on bonds on stake baking cycle around era epoch delegator there's a lot of jargon and I think like these words are great but they're pretty reverse verbose and often redundant like stake and bond really mean the same thing and they're not being employed consistently and this is leaving users pretty confused number two it's really hard to evaluate delegates so in most proof of stakes systems a delegate is represented by their very dress so this is just a randomly generated string and so the absence of a social identity layer for example a name a bio or an avatar or URL makes it really difficult for users to evaluate who to stake towards and this is like you know web 2.0 this is like a given but it's in a lot of these apps we saw there it's not available problem number three it's really difficult to evaluate the benefits of staking so staking apps are not effectively showing users what they stand to gain by staking staking represents an opportunity to own equity and voting influence in public networks that you know we think we believe strongly our society will will run on one day and it also represents an opportunity to do work and potentially even earn a living on these networks whether that's validating blockchain transactions or in the case of live peer transcoding and distributing video so these are awesome opportunities but staking apps are not doing a good job communicating them before user users actually stake and finally we notice a really disconnected onboarding funnel so most staking apps suffer from non integrated complex onboarding or no onboarding at all so there's a lot of steps connecting your wallet acquiring tokens staking apps you really need to lead users through these steps in applica like a good salsa dancing partner so this is an actual conversation I had with a friend of mine he asked me how to stake on live here and I didn't feel really confident in the the onboarding tutorial on the staking app so I just sent him step by step instructions and I'm sure many of you have gone through this process you know step one get a wallet step two from the wallet step three acquire a token step four the proof tokens for staking step 5 evaluate your your delegate step 6 make sure to manage your awards you know sign up for notifications so my friend he did give up and like I don't blame him it's like come on that's a lot of steps so yeah I think the stakes are too high no pun intended the stakes are too high for to allow users to drop off like this so you know how can we help how can we design for these problems how can we help onboard new staking users in under five minutes I'm so glad you asked Adam because that's exactly what we set out to do in reimagining the life he's sticking up yes and we're super excited to share with you also our results so maybe before we get into that what is life here anyway and for those of you who don't know life here is peer to peer live video encoding and what that means is we are a protocol and open source protocol that any video developer in the world can use to incorporate live video into their project or app now how does staking play a role in life here to understand that let's just go through a scenario pretend you're watching a streaming version of the World Cup in 2020 or traveling time you know traveling into the future and between the camera and Qatar that's on the football field and streaming that live to you your device there's this multi-billion dollar market in ensuring this quality video streaming experience for you and now how that happens is there's a footage of the vo football game playing out there and it has to be reformatted in order for it to work on all these different devices and that's called encoding the current services that are centralized make this insanely expensive now what life here does is take unused infrastructure that's out there and make the computation so cheap that it's just a fraction of the cost of what it is today and we use a delegated proof of stake system so when you stake like your token you ensure the quality of the service and you secure the network okay so let's take a look at the current seeking experience this here is a previous Explorer and what you do here is you stick token you manage your rewards etc etc and there are over 2,600 token holders currently participating in every day there are more people but there are still a lot of problems with the sinking Explorer and as I mentioned we don't really are we're not really exempt from all of the you know same the problems that are going on in the ecosystem so currently more than 70% of the users don't make it past the first page so we know this from our analytics and more than 90% the users who are staking had to rely on the community and some human input to even just get through the staking first experience probably something else is more shocking is the first steak experience can take anywhere between 30 minutes to upwards of three days for some unfortunate users who are truly lost so that's not acceptable and that led us to formulate these two North Stars for where we want to be so the two key targets for us in our staking a design would be we want all of the users or sorry eight out of ten users to be able to complete staking autonomously supported by the interface alone and that means no human intervention they just figure it out the second thing is that we want more than 50% of the users to be able to stick in under five minutes and as we said this is a really key thing for us so how do we go about accomplishing this right these two goals well as a good human centered designer we asked the first question first which is for whom are we designing anyway and we went to our community for that we did generative research with 30 community members who are currently stickers and figured out that our audience really has this investor mindset and we further sub segmented them and figured out who our early adopters are in the community and another way to resent this audience is to look at their experience with staking in general because we want to design for multiple levels of experience so we have new users and experienced users which we'll share with you how we factor that into the hoenn boarding ok a second category of information that we looked at is what are all of the other apps doing right because we don't want to reinvent the wheel want to take what's good some of the apps that we looked at our cosmos Tazo some of the bigger sticking apps that we know but we also looked at investment apps which are relevant to what our users are already familiar with we looked at the UI relate to the onboarding flow we looked at the information architecture and also the sticking interactions and thirdly and most importantly we really wanted to figure out what are the user pain points and that's key to all of the designs decisions that we made so we went about constructing the user during from beginning to end and that means when they first got involved and engaged with life here as a brand all the way to the end when they State took it and some of the problems we surfaced are pretty similar to what's going on out there on all the other sticking apps people don't understand the ROI like what am I even getting out of the stick and they don't understand how to evaluate who to stick towards anyway they don't really they can't finish the first sticking experience which is a huge problem and lastly the confusing terminology detracted greatly from the experience awesome so based on these these user pain points that show on just described we identified really five areas that we felt we could really improve the onboarding experience for this this new staking app so I'll go through them so number one we introduced a more intuitive information architecture that really Shepard's users to where they need to go so they're over like 14 views but if you really boil it down there's like three high-level views so there's the orchestrator is list view which orchestrators in the live peer protocol are the delegates there's the orchestrator profile and the token holder profile a key takeaway here is that you'll notice there's a call to action to steak or on steak on each one of these views so whether you're evaluating transcoders or managing your your existing steak that core value proposition is always available and highly visible so this was just an important design consideration in getting users staked in under five minutes we established a language system so this was I mean it's small but important so this was really just an exercise in reaching consensus with the team on on you know vernacular so removing certain words and renaming others we introduced opt-in identity using using a project called three bucks so this accomplishes really two things so number one it helps users evaluate who to stake to and then it gives orchestrators campaigns greater visibility into the app so they don't have to go digging off app we introduced what we're calling a staking widget so this really accomplishes three things number one it it allows you to connect your wallets number to it it it helps you understand what you're getting from staking before you actually stake so in the case of life here that's projected rewards projected earned fees voting power and then thirdly it leads directly into the staking interaction so this is kind of like a mini app in and of itself and we really like it because it it I think lends itself to embedding in other applications so if you're an Orchestrator running a note in a live care network we can see you you know embedding this on your own site to campaign for for a token holders now that we've seen how the information architecture have been reorganized and how the UI elements have been really designed to support onboarding and understanding let's see how all those elements kind of pulled together into a cohesive onboarding experience and what we did here was creating an onboarding tutorial and as Adam mentioned we always have just one call to action there's no distraction but for the onboarding we give people a place to start and that is over there so once you've launched this tutorial we kind of learned this key lesson which is you can't have the same onboarding experience for everyone so as we remember we had two key audiences experience levels that we wanted to sign for and that is new users and experienced users new users really can't do without a lot of hand-holding but experienced users are boggled down by all the explanations that they don't need so here's how we solve for that problem once you launch the tutorial which is for everyone then you get a choose-your-own-adventure so for the experienced users they get a quick guide really really quick out of glance you know for what the four steps are onboarding and then for the new users who really need a lot more support they get a step-by-step walkthrough to help them completes taking interaction for the first time so let's take a look at how that works so this is the first step we'll just enter the amount that you want to stick in the sticking widget and also figure out what the ROI is for the experienced user it's a very simple suggestion and showing you where to you know input that information for the new user would give a lot more in-depth explanation so this way they understand what they're due okay step two we want to choose an Orchestrator from the list so we explain how to choose the orchestrator and that you can also click here to go into the detail view and further evaluate yes further evaluate the orchestrator and all of their activities to see their campaigns there because the identity and this just like really helps you contextualize who you're evaluating so the third step is a really important step which is we tell them explicitly to go ahead and stick the orchestrator that they chose and after this step is where all the fun happens we get this huge yay you have completed staking lots of confetti user delight so people love this and voila we have now completed staking for a new user and then lastly but not least we finished strong by helping people understand that the staking fund continues on you still have a management app basically where you can see you're seeking activities how did that change over time this anything change what your rewards are over time etc so that concludes our onboarding tutorial thank you so yeah results really quickly we did find in our early usability testing that 8 out of 10 users were able to complete staking autonomously so that means just really without asking any questions and he was old number to 60% over 60% of users were able to completes taking in under five minutes and this particular stay car actually completed in under one minute so you have future challenges you know obviously onboarding is just one piece of the puzzle how do you help retain users after they've staked and and really encourage active participation staking is not a passive activity you have to be really vigilant and you know make sure your delegate is performing up to par and playing by the rules otherwise you like them risk losing some of your stake designing for governance interactions so in life here and in most pre Pacific protocols your stake also represents your voting power so you know for future governance proposals how can we design to encourage this type of participation in the network and finally you know in a world where there's hundreds of staking protocols it's going to be increasingly important to make it as easy as possible for users to really jump from one staking app to another and still feel at home if you have it feel familiar so this is gonna require reaching consensus with other staking protocols and other projects and really coalesced around proven design patterns and a shared language and we're really looking forward to to working with you guys and and other teams in the space and to make this a reality and help onboard you know the first million staking users huge thanks to the live pure team and community without whom this talk would not have been possible and also a huge huge thanks to you the audience members and as Adam mentioned we really want to collaborate with you to make staking better for everyone so if you want to take our challenge we have this challenge out for everyone at Def Con to stick like your token in under one minute so if you're curious about that come find us afterwards thank you so much come find us on Twitter and yes hurrah you