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

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.

Money is the killer Ðapp: crypto in Venezuela

We want to talk about real-world cryptocurrency use in avoiding forex controls, preserving one's wealth while fleeing an authoritarian regime, and escaping hyperinflation. Venezuela is in a deep economic crisis of its own making: relentless money printing and disastrous fiscal policies have brought the country to the edge of collapse. Eduardo will tell his own story of people using cryptocurrency as an unstoppable store of value and medium of exchange. Alejandro will recount how the crypto community, including projects like Zcash, BitcoinVenezuela.com, and MakerDAO, are researching how to allow Venezuelans to gain access to open money that, unlike the dying bolívar, will not consistently depreciate 50%+ each month, and that anybody could use.

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.

Competing With Non-Crypto Products Without Losing Crypto's Philosophies

Taylor Monahan discusses competing with non-crypto products and keeping crypto's philosophies in place.

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!