3 pain points DeFi UX should take care
DeFi dApps is touching the mass but couldn’t be ready for them.
During the well known sad year called 2020, crypto fans had seen DeFi trend and dApps market explode so much that people expected to leave out ‘d’ from dApps as if they were saying:
Hey, dApp users don’t need to be differentiated anymore: we are like app users and the critical mass is finally landing on blockchain.
As crypto follower I couldn’t be happier than this, but as product designer I noticed some concerns collected by personal experiences and social groups.
Here I introduce 3 main pain points noticed in most dApps:
1. Wallet delays in balance updating
Everybody in this space is aware of risks, sometimes the user is identified as risk taker but, as said before, the critical mass is landing in Web3 space.
Accepting mass users mean DeFiers can no longer hide behind general excuses like:
“we’re building the next financial future give us time”
“DeFi is for power user only”
“Code is law”
“User must deal with inefficiencies in name of decentralisation”
etc…
Mass users are used to have smooth experiences, fast loadings, help chats, ability to recover from any issue thanks to centralised systems and mostly they aren’t nerds and won’t spend their time checking wiki guides and solving problems.
In few words if you want to achieve the mass you need to deal with their mental models.
Most decentralised wallets incur in the same issue, due to moneys invested in lending protocols, AMM pools or vaults, they struggle showing updated balances in fast time. This issue is caused by different reasons such as lack of communication between smart contracts and price oracles but I would leave this for technicians.
From user perspective the result is obvious, he’s scared, heart is pounding and he starts wondering whether the wallet was hacked or protocol had been. Personally I often encountered in this issue and I’ll never get used to it. The user mental model still shows an obscure and pessimistic perception of the crypto space, user is skeptical and it’s too easy trigger his feelings with this issues.
As fast growing space we need to find fair solutions to avoid this patterns and achieve the best possible user experience switching DeFi perception in optimistic, reliable and secure.
3 possible design solutions:
- Improve the network performance working on SC and price oracles, this requires lot of efforts within a workspace that still need time to face many other challenges.
- (Recommended) Pay attention to UI, inform the user about slowdowns, which protocol is not well communicating and provide time estimation for updated balance. In this way user has buffer before worrying or taking actions. Even small dialog messages are useful and appreciated, people are willing to inefficiencies if they’re in the loop.
- Work on prevention. Recently I discovered an interesting project called EPNS, aimed to provide decentralised notifications. Surely I consider notifications as the missing part for Ethereum ecosystem and I wish to see many improvements on UX side. Just think on being able to receive notifications when your wallet does transaction or when a protocol had been hacked, the user confidence will increase significantly.
However, the recommended suggestion N.2 is easier to implement and requires less effort. Every digital product should aims to establish relationship with its users and reliability will grow automatically.
2. Less known tokens search
Last summer DeFi users saw the huge governance token wave stand up. Basically the liquidity mining boosted the space dozen times than before and the space evolved quickly bringing innovation and real use cases for DAOs.
In parallel many people had the chance to do big gains and the ‘fair launch’ concept rose the prominence boosting AMM markets and DEX’s uses. Since the ICO phenomenon was abandoned and labelled as scam, gov. tokens and fair launch brought new lymph creating more equality and awareness on user investments.
In few weeks multiple DAO and token were launched, following the DeFi dogma called ‘money legos’ where new projects comes from previous branches. This created a real hunt for gov. token airdrops, essentially people were rewarded simply to be DeFi users…amazing!!!
Here we go to the point, once user claimed his tokens by the thousandth new dApp, he wants to monetise with DAI or get ETH and so DEX is the needed place, in other cases users cut out from airdrops are interested in purchasing gov. tokens looking for gains.
DEXs are powerful and they revolutionised DeFi UX, but an huge iceberg is still there and it’s represented by tokens search and addresses verifications. Uniswap, the most popular DEX tried to solve this issues with token list implementation.
Unfortunately token list tool requires external actions by involved communities or companies. They need to link their tokens to the list and DEX experience is still poor and penalising for consumers. It must be acknowledged, wallet as Rainbow managed this issues quite well but I’m confident to say, there’s still room for improvements.
On the other hand, experienced users know the openness value of blockchains and they’re aware, this issue is avoidable directly pasting the smart contract address on DEX, anyway, who wants deal with this? Remember, we want to achieve the mass and people won’t loss time searching into long lists, imagine if they’re willing to go on Etherscan looking for the right SC address.
Let’s talk about solutions, it’s not easy here, there are different aspects to consider and security is surely the most important. Many fake gov. tokens were created to confuse and scam users, and the exponential daily birth of new ERC-20 token it’s not gonna help.
What am I wondering is whether solutions like ENS domains can take the field providing self-explained address for tokens. Would be 10x easier looking for token-xyz.eth instead of long address. Domains are unique by nature, avoiding possible misuses.
Other possible issue prevention comes from UX information architecture:
What if, DEX is able to provide top traded chart for new tokens by last 24h/48h?
Think about the user behavior, many time highest volume of trading are recorded through first days of launch. Seeing featured token list proposed by UI, I will be more open to trust and volume or liquidity could be the KPIs to bring out new tokens. Surely, this type of solution can’t be consistent or standard and there’s still room for scammers, anyway it could improve the experience definitely.
Other suggestion comes from Web2 UX. As we know Web3 aims to be better, taking care of privacy and architecture of blockchain is an amazing benefit.
Think about Netflixation of DEX user experience. What if, once connected my wallet, DEX is able to read my balances and suggest recommended pools, favorite tokens or notifying good opportunities of earnings based on slippage, liquidity and volume?
OK, maybe this is too Web2 but as DEX I would bet on this to increase critical mass engagement and trust in DeFi.
3. KYD Know your dApps
Last week went down in history for new hack happened to Nexus Mutual, yes an insurance protocol that aims to protect you from hackers and exploits has been hacked.
This hack made noise because of its sophistication and novelty in the industry, however, it states that even the most power user can be hacked, in this case the founder, and pushes out a certainty, phishing is still a problem for Web3 users.
I won’t bore you with technical details, below the hack recap.
https://twitter.com/NexusMutual/status/1338441873560571906
This event confirmed one of my biggest recent concern, Where am I connecting my wallet?
Wallet connection is one of the most stupid, easy and undervalued feature for dApp. The flow has been improved over time. It usually takes 3 steps. We click on ‘connect wallet’ button then we choose our wallet from a featured list and typing password or not, in case we already have been connected before, we’re in.
The most concerning stuff is users are completely not aware of what actually they are allowing and what consequences there may be. Even while user is signing transaction most wallets display numbers and letters without providing any explanation.
Ok, I admit I don’t know exactly what a malicious dApp could do with my connected wallet anyway, as noob user I would like to know what am I doing.
Here, possible improvements.
- UI side: keep the user informed of what system is doing. Work on UX writing with simple messages aimed to keep the user in the loop of what’s happening. This is also critical when user is signing transactions. Let’s inform and educates user on what is he signing.
- Empower user in order to be able to decide what type of access give to dApp. Imagine a control panel with multiple toggle buttons to enable or not. Of course, this settings must be stored avoiding tedious setup for user each time then keep consistency within the user journey reminding whether specific actions can’t be performed because of that enabled/disabled options.
- Design experiences that avoid wallet connection. This is a growing trend I noticed especially for LP monitoring or wallet trackers tools. Basically you’re able to avoid wallet connection, pasting your public key. This allows you to check funds or liquidity performance without giving any authorization. The biggest iceberg here is that solution works well till you’re simply performing monitoring actions and currently I don’t see any way to implement something like this for actual dApp purposes.
Final thoughts.
Highlighted points could represent minor challenges for builders focused on engineering and performance. Being an active DeFi user and working with a bunch of startups I noticed several times, they tend to minimize this aspects and sometimes I’ve seen too much closure to newcomers, seems like they want to affirm that this space is only for professionals. Also, I often noticed DeFi products tend to cut out beginners and little savers simply because they don’t bring huge amount of moneys like big players as VCs or institutionals.
A quote I like to mention, comes from Steve Krug’s popular book “Don’t make me think”. He affirms that even the most power user will appreciate a self-explain UI, it allows him to not think and overload his memory retrieving information every time.
Personally, I have confidence in DeFi because of its democratizing value and the chance to give financial freedom to everyone. I believe critical mass is something physically required for new markets and technologies in order to achieve greater awareness of their goals.
I have to praise and say thank’s to many protocols and dApps pushing very hard to improve UX . The whole ecosystem did enormous steps forward during last 18 months.
In conclusion, I’d clarify that suggested solutions must not be taken as definitive and fully practicable, I urge any dApp in user research, discovering people feelings, mental models and above all I recommend to do usability test. You can’t imagine how many good insights you can receive from your users.
Thank for your precious time, I’d be very happy to read your feedbacks and discuss together.
I’m Christian Cerullo, UX/UI designer, decentralisation lover and active Web3 contributor.
Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/johnnymalandras