Building a DApp: Design Principles for Dapp developers

Ethereum's Alex Van de Sande presents on Design Principles for Dapp developers from a UX perspective

DApp Design Patterns

Joris Bontje presents on DApp Design Patterns - the best way to build you DApp.

BUIDL a Mesh Network of Human Beings

As the Ethereum community doubles down their focus on creating usable dApps, its important to remember that we're designing for 3 dimensional humans.  How do these humans organize, and how will their organizations be different from the hierarchical organizations of yesteryear?  What are best practices for organizing groups of humans in a peer to peer way.In this devcon4 lightning talk, Gitcoin Founder Kevin Owocki will talk about best practices for creating intrinsic motivation that creates collective action in p2p networks of human beings

DApp UX Design Awards

Enter, the DApp UX Design Awards!  The DApp UX Design Awards recognizes the talent and effort of the most ingenious DApps from developers and designers; voted by the community, for the community. DApps Awards fall into the following categories: 1) On-boarding 2) Key Management 3) Login 4) Transaction Experience 5) Visual Identity 6) Overall UX

ENS Ethereum Name Service On-boarding Booth

The Ethereum Name Service is one of the key projects that aim at simplifying the use of Ethereum by converting long and complicated hashes (user addresses, contract address, IPFS url etc) into simple memorable short names. Instead of writing 0x123...ABC the users can simply write “me.somedomain.eth”. Although the result is simple, it requires some complicated interactions to register a domain and assign it to the user’s desired address. The aim of the on-boarding booth is to help as many people as possible to start using these names right away guiding them through the process of: - Registering a subdomain (free or paying) which is an instant process - Pointing it to their address - Set the reverse address so that Dapps can show their name instead of the address - Eventually explain and guide them through the initial phases of registering a full .eth domain that requires to go through the 5 day Vickrey auction process that is the most confusing step for every user

Ethereum Mist - Progress and Challenges Ahead

In this talk, the Mist team shows the year in recap, with milestones and interesting challenges ahead.

Evolving the Ecosystem & a Metamask Roadmap

The maturation of dApps has progressed significantly compared to two years ago, especially in being mobile-ready and end-user friendly. MetaMask has a story to tell about this progression first-hand and the new challenges that 2018 brings us. In this presentation we will alert the community about upcoming features from MetaMask such as IPFS support, signed type data, our new web3 injection model, MetaMask-as-a-light-client, mobile support, and multi-chain support. We will also take a critical look at how different actors are attempting to improve on the bridge between users and dApps that is the Ethereum browser.

Getting to a Million DApp Users

DApps are the future of the web but only thousands of people are currently aware of this future. How do we get millions of people to use DApps? Do they even need to know how DApps are different than other apps? Sid Coelho-Prabhu, Product Lead for Coinbase Wallet, will walk the audience through what is missing today in DApps and user interfaces, and how we can overcome these challenges. He will also cover how Coinbase Wallet enables both developers and users to leave behind what’s complicated about DApps and focus on what matters - developing products that add value to people’s lives all over the world.

Gnosis Safe - Make dealing with crypto a less scary thing

The Safe is the first smart contract based multi-signature wallet targeting mobile users. Using smart contracts as proxies between users and dApps opens the door for many usability and security improvements. New access control schemes can be implemented to allow for 2FA and recovery mechanisms making private key management redundant. Transactions can be sent via relay services, which can be paid in any kind of token. Users won't need Ether anymore to interact with the Ethereum network. Usability and costs for dApps can be improved by batching transactions together making user flows simpler and more intuitive. The presentation will give a detailed overview about the Safe implementation of the different features and how they can be used for future dApp development.More information and a download to the testnet beta can be found here: https://blog.gnosis.pm/announcing-the-gnosis-safe-beta-personal-edition-19a69a4453e8

Guerrilla user research for dApps: Step 1 to mainstream adoption

Today, the most prominent dApps struggle with daily user counts in the low hundreds. We have some work to do in terms of widespread adoption. And because of bureaucratic financial systems and increasing smartphone adoption, a lot of that growth will come from the 6 billion-plus people outside of North America and Europe. You’ll learn how a variety of factors, including but not limited to sociocultural and language differences, carrier ecosystems and internet speeds affect consumer behavior in different countries with regard to talking to friends and family, purchasing things, making payments and paying their bills. You’ll learn how five thousand-person WhatsApp groups in Brazil, 100%+ carrier surcharges in Kenya and the popularity of voice messages in China all relate to how you iterate and grow YOUR dApp. This is from an ex-Facebooker who’s driven research for and shipped to hundreds of millions of users in 100+ countries. And yes: a lot of this will be in the form of hard, quantitative data! By the end of this session, you’ll know how to analyze a new market, conduct UX and usability research unique to the area and have the nuanced perspective necessary to disrupt global legacy institutions.

Human Centered Identity: We are more than keys

Much of the discussion around identity in our industry is centered on specific identifiers, authentication standards, open protocols, etc. However, I think we need to consider identity from the human outward. What do we care about when we talk about identity? How does identity relate to reputation? What does self-sovereignty actually mean? And of course, what do we need to consider when designing experiences to support the most fundamental aspects of ourselves. Privacy, security, accessibility and flexibility become increasingly critical in this context. The goal of this presentation is to first establish a shared understanding of the fundamental concepts and behaviors we are trying to translate online. To do this, I draw on philosophy, psychology and sociology. Then, an examination of the current state of digital identity and it's many design flaws. And finally, a road towards a solution. Where are we so far? What have we learned about addressing the privacy and security concerns of people through design? What are the current best practices and thinking around designing experiences for interacting and managing your identity. It's been said that money is the killer app of crypto, but what is worth more: you money or your identity?

Jaguar. Tinybox. Strawberry.

It’s been nearly a year since the first wave of dapps, and while we’re still reeling with excitement, we’re also looking to the future. How do we bring the next generation of users to the decentralized world? How do we stop thinking in terms of thousands of users, and start thinking in millions and billions?We start thinking less about ourselves as developers, and more about the user experience. Until now we’ve been working around onboarding limitations, trying to create as smooth a UX as possible. A year later, and the time has come to stop overcoming limitations. We plan to remove them entirely.In this talk, we’ll focus on some of the biggest pain points that users face, how we’re solving them, and the impact those solutions will have on growing the ecosystem. We’ll explore parallels with previous big inflection points in tech, and how to draw on the past to help make decisions on where to go next. You’ll leave with invaluable tools, tricks, and strategies that will help you build your own successful dapps on the blockchain.

Recurring meta transactions to power l33t subscriptions!

Dapps require way too much on-boarding. The Ethereum ecosystem needs to push toward mass adoption by allowing new users immediate access to functionality and interactivity without all the hoops to jump through. This means paying the gas for first time users' transactions.  Thanks to public/private key pairs, users can sign meta transactions and incentivize desktop miners to pay the gas for them. I will demonstrate how etherless accounts can craft and sign transaction off-chain and send them to a relayer. The relayer, incentivized by the a reward in the transaction, submit the the meta transaction to a bouncer proxy and pay the gas.  This also works great for Universal Logins where you have an identity proxy that your etherless devices can transact through.

Unintended Consequences of Product Design

The little choices we make when building a product—regardless of how much thought we put into them at the time—can have long lasting consequences. I'll cover lessons learned while building MyEtherWallet & MyCrypto, why we decided to ultimately make the hard choice to remove private keys from MyCrypto.com and move people to the desktop app, and how others can be more mindful while building great products in this ecosystem that promote a secure and decentralized mindset for both product creators, their teams, and ultimately their end users.

User Experience of Aragon

Problematic user experience of decentralised applications has been a major factor in slow adoption of them. We think this is attributable partially due to incomplete technology, but also to lack of established design patterns and design systems in the space. Through the work we have done with Aragon, and other open source projects like Ubuntu and Matrix/Riot redesign we think increased attention to design can really help push these important technologies to wider audiences. We would like to share learnings from these projects. Additionally, we are announcing a new open source design system and UI component library - Lorakeet -  for decentralised applications, using React and Styled Components for theming. We hope it will help developers and designers build dapps with a good level of baseline design choices and code quality, and that the community will adopt and contribute to it.

Web3 Design Systems - components and design standards for better dApp UX

As a continuation of the Web3 Design Principles, our group has launched a community wide research for the most common UX problems in the ecosystem, with the objective of creating a Web3 Design System that includes: -The Web3 Design Language: that will research and consolidate a series of guidelines and Design Principles, (similar to Google's Material Design minus the styling suggestions), focused around the specific UX needs of distributed applications, as well as producing a series of proposals to map and solve some of the open-ended design challenges of this space (ie. key management, "login" patterns, asynchronicity etc). -a Web3 Design Library of components, a bootstrap like library for quickly developing dapp front-ends that implement the principles of the guidelines and give consistent UX across dapps. Although at Devcon the interviews will still be happening, we would like to share some initial insights that will emerge from the interviews. The objective is to share with the largest possible audience some of the most common and urgent UX problems and some ideas about how to solve them.

A journey to the center of the eth: How the Gas Station Network improves the UX in Ethereum

The Ethereum developer ecosystem is in constant change. Undoubtedly, teams have started to leave the development of Smart Contracts in the background to focus on the development of decentralized applications, and on how to eliminate friction points between users that might not know anything about Blockchain but still need to interact with it. But developer tools are still important and they have to be simple and secure to use. In this talk we will explore how the Gas Station Network is implemented to redefine the interaction between users and DApps in a way that they don't need to have any knowledge on mnemonics, private keys, transactions or gas costs. Moreover, we will go through a set of tools that the OpenZeppelin team developed to make this transition from regular DApps to gasless DApps in a super easy and fast way.

Universal Ethereum Logins

A modest proposal to improve usability in Ethereum apps by removing a lot of the friction created by the usual login system: Your users can use your app without needing to install anything, buy ether or even type a password -Users are identified by a ENS username, and not a hex address -Users can use tokens to interact with your app, and you can even give out some of them free to encourage usage -Users are in control of their identity and any assets that are tied to them, and can take them to other apps -When users log into their identity with other apps, these act as second or third factors authenticators. While the app relies on a server, the server’s only job is to relay messages to the chain and pay ether, and the user can use any server they want. This is all achieved by using client side signed messages and multiple standards. Live code will be presented.

Beyond Burners - How to Make Web3 Feel Like Web2

While working at Spankchain, James experienced firsthand the difficulties of creating a Web 3 product that users felt compelled to return to. The fact is, there is an incredibly high dropoff rate for dapps today. A large part of this issue revolves around key management. Austin Griffith put the onboarding technique of using a burner wallet in the spotlight half a year ago, and has proven to be the most effective on-boarding solution to date. In Beyond Burner, James will expand on an idea he began building in early 2018 describing how to create an intuitive account management experience by utilizing a contract that contains multiple ephemeral (burner) keys. He likens this method to the Impossible Burger narrative, where environmentally friendly meat alternatives have become as good or better than the real thing. Beyond Burner describes the way counterfactual account contracts and burner keys can create an intuitive Web 2-like experience while keeping the benefits of Web 3. Come learn about the future of dapp UX!

Creative Constraints for DApp Development

Can the challenges of blockchain development — gas limitations, storage scarcity, and decentralized computation — create conditions for creative DApp development? Are the parts of Solidity that often confound developers actually starting points for creative thinking? 20 minutes: Survey of Creative and Whimsical DApps We will review games and whimsical DApps, from CryptoZombies and CryptoKitties, ERC721 collectables, to some of my personal projects, including a fruit-backed cryptocurrency, and a blockchain treasure hunt. 20 minutes: DApp Idea Generation We will brainstorm how to make fun and whimsical DApps. The room will break into small teams and draw random cards as idea prompts. One set of cards will contain Solidity features, others will contain game types and themes. 80 minutes: Build-a-long The next 80 minutes will be a hands-on DApp build-a-long of a Japanese-style treasure hunt known as a “Stamp Rally” in Solidity. (Sample code: https://github.com/ann-kilzer/blockchain-stamp-rally). Participants will build key parts of the app in Remix, and interact with a publicly hosted version of the UI. If participants want to continue learning and experimenting afterwards, there will be extensions in the repo. My goal is to show participants that blockchain development can be fun, creative, and approachable.

Conversational design: the low-cost way to design your dApp

Have you ever been told that your dApp is difficult to use or understand? Have you had to write a tutorial on Medium or Kauri just so users can make it through a flow? Well it's time to put an end to that. In this workshop you'll learn how to quickly and cheaply ensure you're building something that your users will really understand. By starting with a script as an early, low fidelity prototype you'll realise your interface is more than a container of content, it's a conversation between your system and the user. This will help you: - appeal to more users by removing the jargon and technical language from your front end - build interfaces in a more logical order with clearer content hierarchy - identify edge cases before development even starts - reduce iteration in-browser - get better feedback from usability testing We'll go through the entire process: from some quick guerrilla research through scripting onto sketching and iterating. So you'll get a chance at levelling up some of your other design skills too. You'll leave this workshop with both a new way of thinking about products and a powerful new tool for designing and building one.

Decentralized UX Problem-Solving with The Bounties Network and Rimble

The Bounties Network and Rimble are kicking off an experiment in decentralized problem solving. The Rimble team continuously researches critical UX problems that are hindering dApp adoption and usability. Through this initiative, we are incentivizing the generation of creative and effective solutions to dApp UX challenges through the use of bounties. Rimble will validate and iterate on the best solutions, ultimately incorporating them into open-source resources that make it easier for developers to build dApps for broad usability. This session is for developers (primarily front-end/React), designers, and anyone interested in contributing their ideas and concepts with the aim of advancing the dApp experience with accessibility in mind for new and current users of the decentralized web. We will be offering bounties as an incentive for participation as well as for providing feedback about the session and and the resources/tools used throughout. We want to see designs, prototypes, and working demos addressing some of the most critical segments of the dApp experience: On-boarding new usersSmart contract interactionTransaction statusAddress exploration Important aspects we will be considering are accessibility, color contrast, and error handling. Specific criteria will be posted on each bounty for participants to fulfill. The challenge doesn't end during the workshop. The workshop bounties will be active for the duration of the conference, and possibly beyond. At the conclusion of each bounty deadline we will determine winners and/or submissions to award based on criteria that we define, and based on the quality of execution and content of each submission.

Designing before building - Find out if you're building the right thing for users before you start to build

Blockchain development takes longer than Web2 product iteration cycles. This means teams don’t know if they’re building something users want until after a costly and time consuming development cycle. We use Design Sprints to prototype, test and learn from real user feedback — fast. Bringing product design methodologies to Dapps and DeFi developers. At Deep Work Studio, we've used the Design Sprint process to find out if a product is worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort, or if the value proposition is really valid. With teams from ConsenSys, Molecule, Wyre, Hummingbot, Ramp, Pillar and more. In this talk, we'll talk through the process. Showing how any team can design, prototype and test a product within a few days. Too often we've seen extensively build products launch to little user or market need. At the end of the talk, teams will have insights on how they can: - Validate products and features before a costly building phase. - Increase speed to market. - Increase chances of product success. With real user feedback in days not years!

Ethical design practices for web3

In this talk, we'll share the MetaMask Permission System, a set of agreements between web applications and users that could help make new/emerging web user experiences more trustworthy.  We now have enough evidence that illustrates how users’ trust is being broken by today’s web, and how user experience is fundamentally broken due to lack of user control, lack of choice, unethical data sharing practices, and use of dark patterns by websites. Web3 has attempted to address some of these issues, but so far our user research points to a lack of maturity in creating useful & engaging experiences. We'll share applied design practices that help keep users in-charge (e.g., design suggestions for informed consent, aid decision making, privacy & security by default, etc.), without interfering in enjoyable browsing experiences.

Grantee Exposé Lightning Talk 1 - Sustaining Open Source Software GITCOIN

As end-users join us on the journey from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 they will encounter a new suite of tools, terminology, and ways of thinking. The way you architect your app will have massive implications for your users, and developers need to balance the tradeoffs between decentralization and maintaining a good user experience. In this talk, Gitcoin VP of Engineering Dan Lipert will discuss the tools and techniques Web 3.0 developers can use to make their users' lives easier, while still maintaining decentralization and privacy. He'll go over the advantages and disadvantages of tools like decentralizated storage, blockchain metadata caches, running your own nodes, and using public blockchain explorers. As you create your next generation web application, you'll need to decide how to keep your userbase's data safe and private, without sacrificing usability - come to this panel to learn about the tools available to you and how best to utilize them.

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.

Layer2 Design Patterns - (enhanced from previous submission #1251)

Continuing previous research I’m interviewing all Layer2 solution providers, exploring current solutions, their problems, the UX patterns and user-research being done. The interviews are focused on extracting knowledge from the companies own user-research, if available: only a few of these projects have actually launched and have real users and even less have performed real user-research. The only company I’m partially affiliated with, Abridged, will launch 7 apps by EthBerlin and there are 13 more launching in September. For once Layer2 tech allows to have direct user contact since most flows ask for user emails.I hope there will be enough users to gather some data which I’d like to share at Devcon, although at this time I can’t guarantee it. Even so, this talk will allow viewers to quickly learn about all Layer2 UX patterns in one session, learning about the differences between the UX mechanics of payment channels, Plasma, (Generalized) State Channels, maybe sidechains, their pros-and-cons, how users enter and exit these systems, how and what they understand about decentralization, what are the open design problems of the space, and accelerating their knowledge of Layer2 solutions which hold the promise to onboard real users onto the decentralized web

Opting Into The Surveillance State: The UX of Informed Consent

There is a saying among IT security professionals that the most vulnerable part of any system is the human. Additionally, it just so happens that when you want to exploit human behavior, product designers can be the most effective attackers. We have seen this be the case in such high profile instances as the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, and with Libra looming on the horizon, the situation is only becoming more dire.As we move into a future where digital identities can be sovereign and people truly have both the power to control the the data they share, but also the responsibility that comes with this power, what role do product designers play in helping to bring about the future that the self-sovereign identity movement promises?This talk will will explore the importance of ethics in design as it relates to data sharing and also examine some of the common "dark patterns" that are currently exploited. It will also present examples and suggestions for best practices when interacting with user data, how to gain informed consent from users, how to solve the "privacy paradox", how to design dApps that are GDPR compliant, and other related topics.

Psychology of UX and adoption

This talk is aimed at bringing depth to the conversation of mass adoption by defining concepts such as ‘UX’, ‘Education’, and ‘User’. It is commonly pointed out that in order to drive mass adoption, “UX is critical” and “We need to educate users”. Is this true? What does this look like in practice? And what can we do to get the UX right? In this talk I’ll provide actionable suggestions based on stablished frameworks on the psychology of technology adoption as well as anecdotes from UX research at Status; where over the last year we have surveyed over 300 people, talked to ca. 50 people in usability testing and field research, and received numerous valuable requests in Status’ public channels. Suggestions include for example how to design user interfaces in which people can safely learn from mistakes and interactions that satisfy the human need to connect with family and friends.

Rimble presents: the state of transaction states

Whenever we speak to builders they say "the most pain-in-the-ass part of making dApps is those pesky transaction states" (paraphrased). So we decided to do some of the work for you and now we want to share it. Over the last few months we've been turning transaction states inside-out to grasp the do's and don'ts of keeping users in the loop about their on-chain activities. And what this means for how you should build them. We asked ourselves: What do users want to know? What are they thinking after 2 minutes and it looks like nothing's happened? Should we use blockchain lingo? Do users actually trust dApp transaction messages? And what happens if you run out of gas? Plus, plenty more. Then we interviewed, designed, tested, demoed, iterated and repeated in order to get the answers you and every dApp developer needs. At this talk, we'll share everything we've learned and show you how you can turn these user insights into great user experiences for your own projects.

Seeing in Systems: Sketching A Native Ethereum Design Language

We often lament how the "UX of web3 doesn't work more like web2". Those are easy fixes. What we really need is a native web3 design language. One that guides us to design with Ethereum, not against it. To achieve that, we must learn to see in systems. Our world is a complex collection of natural & artificial systems. Our software are systems, too: networks of dependencies, features, users, incentives & interactions. Yet none of our design tooling or "best practices" is designed to help us work in this mindset.  Let's invent the “Third Layer” of the design stack: A systems-first approach that goes deeper than "UI" or "UX", in order to: 1. Create a safer & more inclusive user experience.  2. Understand our work as one part of a larger ecosystem. 3. Develop adaptable interfaces that shape themselves to local culture. 4. And give us new tools & mental models to solve major usability problems.  Seeing in systems won't only help us. It may even enable today's legacy online platforms to solve their major challenges: against attention hijacking, mass data collection, state propaganda, racial violence, radicalization, harassment & exploitation.

State of the ENS 2019

Nick Johnson, lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service, gives an update on ENS - what we've achieved in the last year, where we are today, and what you can expect next from ENS.

The UX challenges to build on top of a light client

In the past year, we have been building Fether, a wallet based on a light client. Although the connection to a node is a fundamental part of building a DApp, it is often considered secondary as connection can be achieved for free using a 3rd party node. We will present the UX patterns that we have developed in Fether to allow for a great UX, without necessarily have access to a full node.

Universal Login Progress: results in on how to make ethereum on boarding much simpler

This is a followup on last year's Devcon about Universal logins and how we can make onboarding much better by getting rid of private keys, seeds and passwords. I will present progress on the Universal Login standard and how it can help ethereum apps to reach mainstream audiences.

UX Awards

Amy Jung, Alex Orchowska, Graeme Blackwood and Benny Giang present & take part in the UX Awards.

When blockchain meets legal design: UX challenges in the world's first decentralized court.

Legal technology guru Richard Susskind said: 'Online courts are not an alternative to the justice system. They are the justice system. In 10 years, more cases will be settled online than offline'. Decentralized courts built on blockchain technology will play a key role in this transformation. But this will pose great challenges, as people aren't used to online trials. This talk will explore the role of UX design to contribute to this transition. In particular, it will focus on the intersection between UX design and legal design, a breakthrough method developed at Stanford’s Legal Design Lab which advocates the use of design thinking principles into legal software products. We will illustrate concepts with examples of UX challenges faced at Kleros, a blockchain dispute resolution DApp, and discuss the design decisions, what worked and what didn't. Finally, we will distill some UX insights for creating user-friendly, accessible, and engaging solutions for the coming age of legal Dapps

Will Design Ethics Save Software?

Cade Diehm presents his talk on Design Ethics & Software.

Adoption Day

Open-source design unconference and working groups helping to drive improved User Experience and usability standards forward for the decentralized eco-system. Enable cross pollination of fresh perspectives and emerging UX methodologies. Bringing together developers and designers in the ecosystem working at the various layers of the Web3 Tech Stack to share their unique solutions and encourage interoperability amongst various systems.

Asset Rights Abstractions - a Case for Smart Contract Wallets

Smart contract wallets (SCW) have a potential to streaml UX and increase compatibility of asset and dapp contracts. Well positioned SCW can overcome needs for devs to integrate increasing number of standards. Instead SCWs can improve composability between dapps and decrease the amount of TXs needed, enabling dev to focus on core features rather than handling custom or niche cases of asset contracts. PWN Safe is an example of such wallet enabling selfcustody of lending collateral.

Dark Forest: Lessons from 3 Years of On-Chain Gaming

We'll present an overview of learnings from 3 years of building and running Dark Forest, the first fully decentralized MMORTS, including: why ZK is important for games, what a crypto-native game is and why we should care, designing for emergent player behavior, pushing the limits of Ethereum devex, and social consensus and legitimacy - why is Dark Forest more like chess than League of Legends? We'll also hint at 0xPARC's next crypto-gaming experiments.

Data + Empathy: How to Approach UX Decisions in Web3

Data has been useful in Web2 UX/UI design for quantifying user actions to understand what’s working and not working, but it doesn’t tell you why they’re doing that. When you pair participatory design with data design, you can get an effective picture of how and why people use the product. But, the problem is user research is becoming increasingly data heavy. Web3 enables more participatory design because people are aware of their data and are conscious of this type of exploitation.

DEVA Awards

DEVA awards are simply a fun way to come together to celebrate and allow the community to signal their appreciation for the amazing work that has been done in the ecosystem since last Devcon to drastically improve the utility and usability of Web 3 technologies for the masses. Come celebrate community achievements! These awards are not meant to be taken seriously in any regard, Project nominations were gathered through community input of over 2000 unique nominations.

Education as a Public Good: Past, Present & Future of ethereum.org

Content as a public good attracts less attention vs. protocol infrastructure yet is a critical resource for our community. See an overview of the mission, progress & evolution of ethereum.org as an educational public good. As the "front door" to Ethereum for many web users across the globe, ethereum.org currently receives ~20 million visits per year across ~50 languages. It continues to expand & grow thanks to thousands of open source contributors. Let's dive into what's next for ethereum.org!

Going on Safari: Researching Users in the Metaverse

A research study was conducted to understand the experiences of users in the metaverse. The deep conversations with participants in that study inspired the researchers to explore how web3 interactive platforms could act as a tool for qualitative ethnographic research in their own right, using 'netnography' to uncover behaviors and cultural learnings. In this talk, Georgia will share what can be gained by 'going on safari' and observing users in this new social ecosystem.

How to Talk to g̵i̵r̵l̵s̵ Users at p̵a̵r̵t̵i̵e̵s̵ Your App: How to Do User Research in a Remote Environment

We often rely too much on our instincts about how our product work or prior knowledge on how it should be read. More often than not, we are wrong. Newcomers will always use your app in the "wrong" manner and talking to them will reveal many ways in which you can improve your product. I've worked many years in many web3 projects, from the Ethereum Foundation Wallet, to ENS and specially a full year at the Defi protocol Balancer as a User Researcher. I would love to share what I've learned.

Participant Experience Design

User experience design is traditionally focused on driving user engagement and behaviors that serve business goals. How do goals and processes change when designing for commons or public goods? How does conventional design wisdom help us, and when can it lead us astray? What new patterns, strategies or challenges emerge when we consider the user as a participant rather than a customer?

Positive Framing and Communication for Web3

The Ethereum ecosystem was, in some ways, born out of rejection of legacy systems. This is often reflected in the way we name and describe our projects and tech, names that are at best edgy and irreverent, but more often are obtuse and unhelpful. In this session we'll look at a number of examples, from the simplest of technical concepts to the most far-fetched DAO and token naming schemes, and see how by casting them in the positive rather than the negative, we go from hindering to enabling.

Social Composability Design: How DAOs Can Leverage It for the Future of Work

Effective communication is a strategic advantage that DAOs are failing to leverage due to a fragmented and inefficiently designed tool landscape. Let's explore how social web3 primitives may unlock collaborative network effects. Imagine knowing if you can trust someone at a glance, without knowing anything else about them. We'll tie social theory of Bourdieu together with User Experience Design into a neat little package and see how it can herald a new era in working together.

The Future of Web3UX - a Paradigm Shift for a Better Collaboration between Design and Development

70% of UX design on Ethereum is defined within the Smart Contracts. So why are so few UX experts involved in Smart Contract design? It’s time for a shift towards better crypto UX. The future of a better web3 UX will rely heavily on a paradigm shift. The necessity of change in the way we work and the way we look at how products are designed and planned is more and more needed. So are you ready to embrace the change?

The Original Sin

No one expected MetaMask's userbase to grow from 300k to over 30 million during this last bull run. It was an incredibly optimistic time filled with boundless creativity but it was also a chaotic time that led to many having a negative experience with web3. With the market cooling and the merge complete, let's look at how the early choices at the protocol layer shaped the user experience today and identify what's worth changing for the user experience tomorrow.

Tokenizing Brands: 3 Key Learnings

Tokens are a unique way to generate Brand – Users connections. There is a world in terms of what users can do with tokens, and leading Brands such as La Praire, Hugo Boss are already exploring this world with us. Connections are the key. We have realized that the value of the token comes from connections, together with goods and services. It’s clear for us now that tokens are the integration point for web3 and token technology should be built around this concept.

A Playbook for Product Development in DeFi

I’ll cover frameworks and useful tools to help emerging DeFi product development teams: 1. understand how to set product strategy and establish protocol + user-level goals 2. build an MVP 3. conduct 'what if' analyses – using simulation-based modeling to optimize incentives 4. use a data-driven approach to understand product market fit – tracking the right on/off-chain metrics to identify growth levers 5. understand common web3 nuances that can impact UX

Understanding Latinamericans to Design a Local Flavour DeFi Platform

From El Salvador to Argentina, passing through Colombia, we applied local UX research iteratively with our own methodology TUD "Tropykal User Dive" to define specific financial needs across different countries in Latam. This process has helped us to define a DeFi product designed for the needs of Latinamericans and with a highlighted local flavour. We would like to share our method openly to be replicated in other emerging economies around the world.

Why Account Abstraction is a Game-Changer for Dapps

Native account abstraction on L2 is a breakthrough for the usability and security of crypto. It’s also the only way to scale self-custody. This talk explains what account abstraction is and why it matters for Dapps and their users. We’ll provide specific examples of features that it uniquely enables, such as session keys, fraud monitoring, multicall, social recovery and more. The end result is the unlocking of new experiences and use cases that can move the needle for crypto’s adoption.

Building Consumer Facing Interfaces for Trust in Supply Chains

Provenance is building a platform to make consumer product supply chains more transparent. Taking advantage of Ethereum and IPFS, we’ve been iterating through a number of pilots in different industries, from organic bacon to fair-trade coconuts to enable a simple shared and trusted way to share the proven claims behind our products e.g. organic or proof of payment of fair wages, and link that to the flow of batches of product. Throughout this journey, we have learnt a lot about industry needs, working with both small and large retailers and brands. We’ve also forged partnerships with sustainability standards e.g Soil Association organic and other data systems that we can connect to enable verification of claims and inputs for our Ethereum based app e.g. Sourcemap. User centred design is core to the work at Provenance – exploring how we can make blockchain backed data appear differently on the frontend and provide accessible links to inspect the chain. As a social enterprise largely built through grant funding and with the support of academia we are keen to share our learnings with the developer community and gauge interest in forming a group around the development of blockchain backed interfaces for trusted data sets.