# The Human Problem: Is Web3 UX Ready for Normal People? - Jacob Haap | Anomaly Science - Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 20:57 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-yYBpzD1NX-s - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYBpzD1NX-s ## Description The Human Problem: Is Web3 UX Ready for Normal People? - Jacob Haap | Anomaly Science ## Transcript Thank you. So yes, today we are going to be talking about user experience in web 3, particularly the human problem. Is web 3 user experience ready for normal people? And before I get started, just wanted to say really quick, I was quite sick last week and I have a bit of a cough still going on. So if you see me taking any sips of water or I cough a little bit while going on, I hope it's not too disruptive. Just wanted to leave a disclaimer of that before I got started. Anyway, with that said, let's get going. So, first I wanted to put user experience in simple terms because often in web 3 when people are talking about user experience, it is very easy to get into something that is too technical or too specific to one area. So, I wanted to say how I'm going to define user experience in this context. What I see it as, what I see it as not. In the simplest terms, I see UX as being the way that humans interact with technology. I do not have any specific type of chain in mind, any type of decentralized app. It's not going to be too specific to that. This is purely going to be focused on the context as to how any of us as humans can interact with any type of technology and how that might look with web 3 and how it has looked historically with our technology in the past. With that said, how many entities present in the room just by a show of hands right now are human? Just to make sure that we have plenty of humans here. See, we didn't get some hands going up. So, maybe we don't have all humans in here. Maybe we have some reptilian space aliens or something going on. I don't know. But for those of you who do identify as human, I thought it might be interesting to give a brief overview of the history of your species. Around 300,000 years ago is when our species first emerged. I wanted to think about what is the user experience like as a early human hundreds of thousands of years ago. When I think about it, it doesn't seem like there was too much going on then. Maybe you had a pointy stick. You had a nice tribe of humans accompanying you. If you were very lucky, maybe you even had a very pointy rock to put on the end of your stick. Relatively easy to get the handle of. And that's how humans lived for quite some time. It was a very easy existence. We didn't have too much going on. Our technology was simple. I imagine that for primitive brains that was very easy to understand. But as you are well aware, things did not remain like this forever. And our technology advanced. About 12,000 years ago, we had the Neolithic Revolution. We moved from being in these huntergather societies to actually deciding, you know, what's better than hunting our food? How about controlling the food ourselves? We developed complex societies around this and our technology advanced. They see this as marking the first shift in what the user experience of being a human was like. It was easy at one point to exist in a small tribe. Doesn't have to be too complicated to understand how you fit in that social hierarchy, how use the technology available at the time. Uh but then we had a change. You're not living in a tribe anymore. You're living in possibly a city. You don't have to follow the rules of the tribe. You follow the rules of a nation state. Maybe something crazy like paying taxes is now something you have to consider in your mind. So quite a considerable shift in how we functioned as humans. And as with anything, it continues to evolve. And about 256 years ago, we began to industrialize. Another big shift in how humans function in changes in our technology. Now we're not just living in complex societies. We have complex societies that are making more advanced technology and producing just insane things, wild changes in the way that our life goes. At least that wasn't too fast, right? I mean, we have thousands of years between all these changes in our technology, it's pretty easy to think with generations going by, at least one person doesn't have to cope to such massive changes. It was a very gradual shift. I mean, you could live your entire life in a very early human settlement and your life would be very similar to that of your parents, their parents, and their parents before them. Things were relatively static. It's a quick visualization of it. Just look at this circle. All of this right here represents human history before we started farming. That very uh small part right there is how long we have mastered agriculture for. And the very thin red line at the top represents the part of our history that you've been industrialized for. So not very long in our history. Look at it. It's been a very static experience for most of human existence. We didn't have very much that we had to deal with. It was an easy existence. I want to consider what life looked like for someone born in the year 1900. I guess as a quick overview, you could imagine you were born then. In your early childhood, you witness humanity first take flight. You witness the entire world go to war. A massive economic depression. I mean, imagine explaining economics to one of the early humans 200,000 years ago. We go to war again. We somehow invent a portable star that could be used to destroy each other especially efficiently. And then we go to space. That's just an insane amount of changes that one human is able to witness in their life as to how our technology and our society evolves. And still, while that might be a lot of changes, at least it happened over an entire lifetime. What happens if we speed things up a little bit? 53 years ago we had the emergence of the first microprocessor. Sure we had the existence of complex technology before that. We had the first transistors around the 40s. Uh but this is when things really started to speed up. This is what led us into the era beginning with modern computing. The next big relevant change that happened after this 32 years ago the worldwide web was published. Suddenly we don't just have interesting technology available to us. We are now able to utilize a massive interconnected system where all humans can have all of human knowledge to explore. 20 years ago we the existence of web 2. This is a big change from the first version of the web that we had when the worldwide web was published. Suddenly you're not just going around and seeing what there is to read on the internet. It suddenly became very interactive. It is read and write. When I consider what the user experience was like then you go on, you have, I don't know, maybe an early version of a Facebook account or you could start publishing stuff on YouTube. You have an username and a password or an email and a password. Well, it's maybe difficult for some people. I mean, who here in the audience has anyone that they know like a friend or a family member who cannot for the sake of them remember how to remember a password or loses access to their account all the time. Like this was 20 years ago as far as technology that's still quite primitive. This might be a controversial point to put it at, but I'm going to put the start of web 3 at 9 years ago. I'm going to mark that with the introduction of Ethereum as a concept with around the point of time when the white paper came out and when Ethereum was first published. That's a major change from the history of web 2. Instead of it being read and write, it is now read, write, own. So where's the problem? As you saw in the first part of this when I went over a brief history of humanity, how we all functioned, it was quite easy to think, okay, at least those changes happened over a massive period of time, thousands of years, generations of humans between all of it. It's only been about 53 years since the microprocessor came around. All of these massive changes with our technology has taken place within one person's lifetime. I mean, even just look at our most recent changes in technology. Can any of you imagine going back say five years to talk to your past self and explain what it's like to use something like chat GBT? I mean the rate of change with our technology has exploded and is difficult for any person to keep up with that is just not working. Reason for this we have very primitive brains. I mean, our species, it emerged, like I said, 300,000 years ago, and the hardware really hasn't updated that much. While our society and our technology has continued to get more and more complex, our physical hardware isn't really keeping up with this. So, the biggest challenge that I see as far as the user experience is being able to address the challenge of a technology that is constantly evolving at a rate that might be too fast for the human brain to keep up with. Now, one thing I hear people mention quite a lot in web 3 is the idea of onboarding the next billion users. And I think this is a horrible lie. Because like I said before, many people know someone in their life, maybe just as a show of hands, who knows someone who just struggles with technology? They cannot remember passwords. They need help remembering things. They just need help using tech. Anyone? Show of hands. Who knows that? Perfect. That's almost everyone. So, point made being technology is difficult. Imagine trying to explain to any of them how they go ahead and install the MetaMask extension, create a wallet, safely store their seed phrase, and then how they could sign up for an exchange to buy Ethereum so that way they could have enough ETH to cover their gas fees to post any transaction to interact with a decentralized app. For people who don't know how to remember a password, that is an insane task. I just wanted to draw attention to something else. 2.5 billion humans or roughly 30% of the human population still remains disconnected from the internet. So while many of us gather at conferences like this one talking about web 3 and what the big technology that we have emerging now is and seeing how we could improve it, we're still seemingly neglecting a massive share of our population that is completely disconnected. So what if the question isn't just how do we onboard existing web 2 users into web 3. What if it could be rather how do we use the technology that we have available now that we are creating to maybe bring people into the internet who have not had the opportunities for that in the past. So how do we fix this? I've spent a few minutes now explaining the history of human technology, problems associated with this rapid change and our brains not being able to cope with it. But what are potential solutions? As a disclaimer, I'm not going to go into any specific examples. I'm not going to showcase some user experience uh changes I've been working on or any specific examples. I'm going to focus on what I think are wider scale issues that impact user experience across all of web 3, no matter what the use case is. And while this might be an unpopular opinion, I think one of the first issues is a social one. And that is gatekeeping. It's very easy in the tech bro, cryptob bro culture to think it sounds really cool to just understand something that many people don't. I have met plenty of people who enjoy using plenty of fancy sounding terms or buzzwords to describe what they are doing in web 3. And I mean, I get it. It sounds cool to understand something that many people don't. But at the same time, if we're going to continue using complicated terms and making this technology sound difficult, people are just not going to want to use it. It's going to sound too difficult. The other point is being able to trust other cubits. Now, as I said before, we all know people who struggle with technology. And while being able to get them to be self-sufficient in their usage of web 3 might be a difficult task, maybe it's okay for us to depend on each other a little bit. I mean, it's we're already helping each other learn how to use things rather than trying to get, I don't know, your old parents or your grandparents or friend who doesn't know how to use tech to learn how to safely manage a seed phrase. What if instead you manage it on their behalf? Point being is we make the technology needlessly complicated when many of the solutions already exist to make it easier. One point with this being is the debate around self-custody versus non-custodial options or custodial options. Sorry. There seems to be a needless stigma around using custodial wallet options because many people are afraid. Oh no, I don't want to put my private phrase or seed in the hands of someone else because you don't can't control that. There's a very big focus in the web3 community, it seems, to be completely in control of your data because you're worried about government or big tech. At the same time, how many of the people who are very skeptic of the government or big tech at the same time have an account with something like Facebook or Twitter, I'm not going to call it X because I just disagree, or just any massive tech company out there, Google or Apple. Yet at the same time, this is a specific issue where they chose that they need to be total self- sovereign with everything. I find that to be a very weird situation to be in. Let's go into a few examples with this. So, in this first example, let's say that a human wants to use any type of cryptocurrency and they do not know how to use that cryptocurrency and they have a friend who knows how to use it. So, what should the human do? Should they go online to watch tutorials as to how you manage self-custodial wallets, how you can use an exchange like a decentralized exchange, how you manage what gas fees are, how you learn about the different coins that exist just so you could do everything on your own, or maybe should they just depend on another human, use existing UX solutions that make things easier and not have to worry about all the needless complexity that we've thrown into it. How about the second example? Human wants to use a decentralized app, but at the same time, they are afraid of the government and big tech. They do not fully understand self- custody. Should they put their own assets at risk? We already have plenty of technology available that makes it easy to do something like a social login or logging in with pass keys. Well, you don't directly manage your wallet yourself. These tools just make it easy to bind it to some things. That way it represent or rather emulates the web 2 experience. This is a very big point. Web 3 does not have to look different just because it is web 3. We have plenty of web 2 technology that is able to be adapted to at least look web 2 on the front end yet in the backend run something web 3. Yet like I said before for whatever reason we are just not doing it. We are against it. the focus on self-custodial options is very harmful. I think this might be a very unpopular opinion, but I think if it comes to the choice of being able to make web 3 very userfriendly and onboarding many people or having everyone control their full assets and not have to worry about any other players besides themselves, I think we should focus on making it easier for everyone. Now, what do I do? I've just spent the last few minutes explaining user experience, all of this history behind it in ways that it could work, but I haven't explained anything about who I am or what I do. So, my name is Jacob Hap. I am a software architect based in Berlin, Germany, and I've been in the web 3 space for as a developer about the last six years, though I've been interested in technology for much longer. I started trading around seven or eight years ago and been following it for about the last 11 years now. With my professional work, I have focused on developing tokenized solutions for software licensing. In free time, I have also contributed to other projects such as a web 2.5 solution for cloud authentication. And one personal project that I work on that I guess is relevant to user experience in this case because why am I up here talking about web3 user experience without actually showcasing a solution or showing professional uh skills related to it is while I work a lot with this technology I experience the user experience issues quite often. I mean I myself encounter issues being able to use the tech all the time. I mean, I would be lying if I said I fully understand it. I'm pretty sure many people here too also have issues being able to understand things all the time because it's constantly changing. So, one user experience solution that I've considered is why not rely on already known behavior. [cough] Biggest issue with the web for user experience in my opinion is that we are trying to introduce complex terms and ideas that people don't understand. People are used to a world where they can enter in a username and password and they will be set. If they forget that password, they can reset it. But suddenly we are shifting to a world where you have to use hardware wallets or manage seed phrases and if you lose something, it is gone forever. So why not rely on existing human behavior to make things more secure? And what do I mean with this? So one project that I've been working on is it is making seed phrases recoverable with human biographic information. What I mean by this is the idea that you can take something like a passport or an identity document, anything that has information about who someone is, and use that as a source of pseudo randomness when you combine it with something like a pin or a passphrase to generate something pseudo random that could be used to seed the creation of a monotic phrase. Very simple concept in of itself. And while many people might disagree saying, "Oh, no, deterministic cryptographic principles might make security a bigger issue or that what happens if someone's document gets put at risk." Point with it rather being is that this is trying to challenge the way that people consider the user experience. It's one thing to think that you have this piece of information that if you lose it, it's gone forever. It's another thing to make a short sacrifice on security in exchange for recoverability. If there's one main point that I want to get across with this is that humans can be very stupid. I mean as I have made clear in the last few minutes is the fact that we are not ready maybe not the people in this room but overall as a society we are not ready for web 3. People are forgetful. People do not recognize the importance of many things. Web 3 is difficult to understand. Yet many people don't understand the cryptographic nature behind many of the complex things that they are interacting with. Utilizing already known behavior, whether it be through technology that we already have or adapting web 3 to match human natural behavior in a better way, can make a massive difference in how we interact with this new technology that we have coming around. We don't have to use what we have today or adapt it just because it's what we've known. We can introduce entirely new ideas that better match the human experience. The point being with this is like I said before, the hardware that we're running on is quite old. Human brains difficult to adjust to rapid changes. So the best solution that I could suggest when it comes to the web through user experience is being able to slow down the massive rate of change that we are experiencing. Like I said before, there's solutions like social login. You could use things like pass keys. You could introduce something entirely new. The main point I just want to make is why not consider new ideas that make it very easy for people who may not understand technology better to at least have a chance with it. Now if there is time I'd be happy to answer any questions if there's anyone who has some >> second time >> solved. In that case thank you very much. This has been the human problem. I hope it was at least helpful in some ways to all of you being able to show an overview as to the history of how humans interact with technology in ways that we can consider alternative approaches to what we are doing in web 3. Thank you for your time.