# TOKEN2049 - Building User-Friendly Solutions for the Real World - Brian Norton (MEW)

- Channel: [TOKEN2049](https://streameth.org/token2049)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-xs6uy2MaO0E
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs6uy2MaO0E

## Transcript

I'm Brian from you how are you so yeah yeah so we're not creative with naming at my ether wallet that's why we're called my ether wallet so yeah this is token 2049 presentation no it's a UX decision we we decided like let's not confuse the issue no this is a it's called the actual name of this talk is building user friendly tools for crypto user adoption dad I'm not sure how the phone cut changed on that though but yeah so what I'm gonna be doing for the next ten minutes or so is kind of giving telling you the story of MU up into this point because it is a story of UX it's a story of the evolution of UX so for those of you are not familiar my ether wallet launched in 2015 in August of 2015 for context in theory and was a main net in at late july 2015 which means we are were practically twins we were but we were born at the same time and we like we came out as just a side project it was just two people coding throwing a link on reddit and then going back to their day jobs and this ever this started an evolution as aetherium grew as krypter interest in crypto grew so did interest in my ether wallet and it could became organically user acquisition began organically and it wasn't until the ball really started getting rolling that we that we had to actually think about okay what use what is it that users need from us because we were learning on the fly now this right here where did this bond come from this is great the this right here is my ether wallet version three now if you participated in the ico boom in any capacity in 2017 you probably encountered this page more than once and depending on your level of technical sophistication you like that might have been for better or for worse this was a tool and it's a it's a workhorse it's a tool by developers for developers to do to solve what is a technological problem of a key generation and key storage this I'm gonna give you but I do not come from a technical background I am in tech I am NOT of it and I'm gonna I'm gonna make a confession so the first time I started when I started researching crypto my research led me to my ether wallet and I when I was making the decision whether or not to to invest in etherium I typed in my ether wallet comm into my browser this popped up and I said nah nah and then I exit out and I never and I didn't go back yeah I didn't get back I didn't really go back until until I started collecting paychecks from my ether wallet and then it became then it became my mission to fix this because this appears to be a rather simple tool but what isn't but if you're gonna go a new user what is what is a wallet you don't you don't even understand what it is that you're generating how you're using it how you're onboarding if you click through these links half of the pages look exactly the same as the other one so what how functionally are they different and so when so at the beginning of 2018 we found ourselves at a crossroads we found ourselves at a crossroads we needed to build a new team and we needed this how we're moving forward and what we decided was we're gonna do a studs up reinvention of this tool something that addresses the needs of the users that we are getting flooded with tickets how does this work where okay I've made I've created a wallet how do where do I get Eve how do I buy it all of these qualities questions we try we decided that we were going to build a product that allowed people to move through the etherium ecosystem simply and easily and we brought we did it based on these three really simple principles of UX philosophy that the every every decision that we made on the site had to educate the user had to work to keep the user safe and I'll go into that a little in a minute and and it had to be interoperable it had to be a lot that the site had to be elastic enough to evolve with the etherium ecosystem it had to be elastic enough to accommodate the nude apps that we're going to that were going to be made it had to it had to be able to follow the straight follow the stream of it the etherium wherever it take it and then allow us to interact with the ecosystem as a whole so we started from the outside in so all of them are developed up into that point had been focused on the site itself but how do people come into it so as we brought in a new team we also brought in UX design designers and mobile designers and I it was our our mobile designer a gentleman by the name of Alex Komarov who decided that what we are that that the design philosophy should be tested in our first mobile product so we introduced mu connect mu Connect is a hardware wallet style mobile application for Interac with Mew from an onboarding perspective what we wanted to do was it was we wanted to keep users safe give them a safe way of interacting with the site without having to deal with private key management and still keep it free we didn't want you to have to buy $200 worth of hardware before you even to some new if you even really want it if this is something you wanted to do if you just wanted to play a game a trial try out a game and you needed some tokens to do that do you really do really want to go invest in this hardware before you do that so this became a our our low cost option because everybody has a smartphone now and it'd be proved to be a great testing ground for how we interact with users and and I just want to show you something real quick so and I will now now I'm not okay that doesn't dad that doesn't appear - there we go mm-hmm and that's it and now your wallet is created that is a super super simple animation and for some reason it is the thing that people talk to me the most about I was getting pulled over at Def Con it uh uh in Prague people saying oh my god that animation where it just tells you what it's doing like it was an inspiration to people that was like oh we started do we started doing that that was that was fantastic the fact that nobody thought to just tell somebody what it was doing doing is mind-boggling but it goes against some people's basic fundamental philosophies of how UI is supposed to go you're supposed to get to the thing very simply but if you just take the time just a second to tell people what is happening even if it's already happened by the time that first those first words appear on the screen you like your keys have already been in your possession for like for like 10 seconds but taking that time really helps to ease the users mind and give them a say a grasp of what has happened what is happening behind the scenes here and they can move into this more confidently so now this appears on the screen and you have the by ether button right in the beginning it's like okay now I have a wallet and there's my on-ramp and it's right there and so far you haven't spent a dime and and you're confident that you can move through through the process so based on that based on the sixth day the response that we got from this we figured we were on the right track so we took that we took that design philosophy of educating the user throughout the process as we built up the new site now this is but this is new version five we just launched last month we moved out of beta last month and what we decided to do is to take that little bit of friction that we've you got from the animation and apply it everywhere that we could so that we were guiding the user towards best practices what were the best behaviors to go through through this so as opposed to like having a landing page where you just where it just says create wallet or or or worse a bunch of a bunch of options with esoteric language and name brand name brand hardware wallets that as a new user you are not familiar with it all you have no idea which one you're supposed to be using so we just boil it down to what are the key one of the key things that you would be here to do you're either here to get a wallet or to access the wall that you already have and for a new you for a legacy user you can just click through and get started and you can move through all the core function at functionality but for a new user this helps because it will put you on a path it was the same thing with the access my my wallet pay we used to come up with very very big scary warnings every time you tried to do something that we didn't think you should do like put your private key into a browser we decided to move away from that because there's no sense in scaring users like me having been the you a user who was potential user who had been scared off that's the last thing I wanted to do so what we decided to do is just make it like just make it inconvenience just put that little friction there putting your cry private key is the easiest way to access your wallet it's also the worst one and so we could have deprecated it entirely we could have said no you can't you can't do that anymore because from our perspective there's not really any good reason why you should ever do that but I'm not you and I don't know what your needs are I don't know your individual needs are at every individual moment and because we consider crypto still to be a gateway to economic freedom we're not going to take this authoritarian stance that says you can't do that we're just going to take it very inconvenient educating the user every step of the way this is not the best way of doing it and if they ultimately decide to do it because that's what they have to do then so be it but we're reinforcing best practices as you move through through the website and I'll just the transcend transaction page it's just an easy-to-use dashboard that lets you know where every where everything is what is these are the essential pieces of information you need to transact on the blockchain and that's all and that's all and that's all there is to that um I think there's some word missing so I want to talk a little bit about safety safety and security are not the same things as a matter of fact they're kind of opposing forces the immutability of the blockchain is its primary security feature and for a new user that's what makes it dangerous it's precisely the thing that they have to be a new user has to be wary of because if they make a mistake there's no way to undo it and this is something that's harped upon a lot this is a heart something that's hard upon a lot but I when we talk about security it was in blockchain it can be a detriment to UX so the to frame it in terms of a safety a safety issue abate evolve is secure but if you don't know how to use a vault if you don't know that you're supposed to keep your combination if you don't know how to keep your combination if you don't know how to use a combination you don't know not to share your combination then the security of the vault is the vault is secure but it's your funds are not safe and we're essentially we're essentially asking people when they come come in to blockchain to figure it out you to just know how to use it and it's you know relying on its security but security is a safety is security plus behavior and that's where all their the educational initiatives based that we have based the of the site are so important because it reinforces all of these good behaviors that allow users to prevent from them for making state mistakes to prevent them from exposing their private keys to fishers and because at the end of the day users are their own best protection like we can only put into place put it in a place the the framework in which behavior good behaviors are reinforced but we can't by ourselves keep you safe and so as we built so as we've built it built out there as we built out version 5 we have focused very very heavily on on education as a way of keeping users safe so I want to talk a little bit so once we've gotten to the point where we know how to keep users safe now now now the real the real work comes in which is what the hell do you use this stuff for because because yes there's a there's been plenty of speculation and there's plenty of investment but most people are not investors they want to do something you can make a pretty website and you can give them a lot of charts and you can I can pick nice colors and create great animations but at the end what is what is this all for and so one of the things that we wanted to do was be able to be able to I keep develop the the platform as flexible as possible so that we could integrate new use cases as they arise well now we've always started now our first foray into interoperability was always the swap page you've always been you've been able to swap on my ether wallet for a while but we decided that that because because we wanted our users to be able to kind of go through the entire initial life cycle of entrance into crypto that that we would make our swap page into something of a mini crypto marketplace so we've partnered with several different partners simple simplex for on for the on-road into a into crypto we've have we have partners of our partners bitty our partners change Li and Khyber network all supply different types of of token swaps and we've structured it so the three of those three competes on the platform for the best rates for for our users and because of a that allows allows them to a get in get in get acclimated to how how competition within the space actually works it makes them feel like they're like they're getting a deal because they can seat shop right on the platform and when it comes time to uh to to offload some of your crypto we do have an exit to fee adoption through our partner bidding so really you can go through in a half hour if you wanted to if you were really on a blitz if you wanted to get in and get out you could do the whole thing in a half hour I have it's weird but don't recommend I don't recommend it but but it's something that you're something something that we have allowed the users to do and it makes it when you have that entire circle there it allows the user to feel secure that if I don't like this if this is not something that's for me right now I have I have an entry point and I have an exit point and that creates user confidence and we're expanding so we're expanding the philosophy that have gone into our SWAT page into our depth page so this is a newly introduced portion of the website that is meant to to do two things one it's to give users users more options for things to do with their crypto and to educate them about different projects that are going on in the etherium ecosystem where we have four depths currently on the page we all be planning on adding them at about a clip of one to two a month over the Pasir of foreseeable future and we have decentralize finance steps coming in coming in on the plate so please do please do check this out and we are actively looking for developers who who are are looking to raise their profile we have about a million unique users a month to come to my Uther wallet so it's a great plate place you can you to to both get some exposure and to use our take advantage of our interface I've been told that I have to wrap up so I just want to say that the bravest you are UX tool in your toolbox is a diverse team that this is a team of P of of people who are crypto crypt crypto aficionados crypto skeptics developers all of what all of whom are just trying to solve real world problems in their own lives using this technology and there's really no substitute for it I hope this was helpful thank you very much [Applause] you