Emerging technologies are usually engineering driven, resulting being very technical and not user-friendly. Blockchain has the potential to create one of the largest paradigm shifts in the world however an average person doesn’t yet see the value in them. Wondering why? For me it’s clear — it is just too complex for an avarage consumer. Over the next decade and beyond, we have the power to re-wire operations and processes across the globe if we make it right.

Designing user interfaces for applications leveraging blockchain technology is an exciting challenge and a totally new experience. The closer you get to it, the more it opens up a new set of possibilities but at the same time getting into unknown teritories it is given that we will fail. We play around with new interaction systems which still need to proven. As designers, we’re responsible for guiding our users through those new experiences — people are still trying to learn about the benefits of blockchain and what it means for them. Instead, they should be creating so much value that the discussion shouldn’t be about technology but the usecase and utilty.

In a current environment developers, for example, are not only at a distance from the user they are serving, but they also have very little visibility of the value they create. We reached the point where new decentralised applications are popping everyday thanks to technology advancements, however, they are still having a hard time catching attention of users.

As of today the most used app has less then 6000 daily users. (https://dappradar.com/rankings)

Clearly it is crawling now, but it is just a temporary pain due to usabilty issues.

Design tools for blockchain

If your tool for transmitting user struggles and goals to your team is ineffective, you are going to make products for a user group that does not exist or solves the outcome of a problem instead of the root. I’m a big believer that empowered with this technology we shouldn’t create middle ground solutions but fix the root of the problem to create maximum value for the user. There are no secret formulas how to do it, however, there are few proven design tools that can be useful for in that space.

As humans, we are hardwired to understand and interpret stories. Stories are the way we share empathy in our culture. The great thing about stories is they can capture many different types of situations. Everyone has a story, a set of struggles and anxieties, and we need to capture this information to better serve them.

• User stories: Analysis and visualization of users’ sequence of actions through the experience considering pain points and key interactions.
• Stakeholder map: Understand and visualize the interactions between actors and the exchange of value. Useful to find intermediaries and central players with excessive power.
• Service blueprint — front & backstage: Analysis of the user experience and the processes and operational protocols that support every touchpoint of this experience.
• Board of innovation business design toolkit: Perfect tool to design business models interactively in co-creation sessions with colleagues, clients and stakeholders.
• Flight Plan design toolkit: The flight plan team created a couple of interested canvases ready to test and play with. It combines mechanism design with UX. Very nice material!
• Design thinking for Blockchain: Toolkit that guides the process of designing for blockchain step by step adding several tools already mentioned here. Worth using it!

How does a service designer can be valuable in the blockchain space?

Under every successful innovations there is a team of best in class individuals. The success of the project can only be achieved if right stakeholders can closely collaborate. Service designer should be able to foster that synergy between designers, developers and users to bring interesting ideas and insights to the table to create real impact to the blockchain space.

Service designers in blockchain should be capable of thinking about the whole system of the project and apply their specific skills for each component of the system. For example, if I am designing the incentive system, I will need to use “nudges” examples, empathy and journey maps to understand user behaviors and to find the right triggers to invoke action. Otherwise, if I am focusing on monetization of my project, I will need to assemble the value proposition to each stakeholder and the revenue models associated to them.

System thinker & front-back connector: Ability to connect the nodes of the system and visualize the experience from the user and operations perspective.

Analytical & intuitive: Ability to distill business requirements while create new to the world ideas.

User centered & behavior alchemist: Ability to understand user and stakeholders’ needs and behaviors to design delightful value propositions.

Translator of complexity: Ability to minimize friction between user and digital interfaces.

Co-creation evangelist: Ability to open conversations between professionals from different disciplines to all together generate new opportunity areas.

Service designers are needed to make use of complex concepts in the digital environment, guiding the user through the experience and eventually increasing the user adoption of blockchain applications.

Every design decision has the power to shape real-world products and services designers can literally see the impact of their work in the world around them. Especially when you consider the importance of universal design and accessibility, UX designers can truly change people’s lives for the better.

As a product person with an emphasis in user experience, it pains me to think users might have to go through some custom flow to use that application or get value from it.

“Good user experience is no longer considered a nice-to-have — it is absolutely critical, and businesses are more than ready to invest.”

As I continue to work in the world of the highly technical and complex blockchain industry, I just hope to make it simply easier to use.

Notwithstanding the hype around blockchain, it is considered as one of the most revolutionary technology in the upcoming decade. Blockchain inevitably will have an influence on banking, healthcare, digital identity, supply chain management, digital governance, and the way we interact with each other in a society. This is when blockchain starts to feel like a revolution. When you take away all the barriers and give control back to the people, the single individual can compete with the big corporations.

As I spent sleepless nights reading about blockchain, trying to crack down the underlying technology and meeting more and more people in the blockchain space, I realized that there are major flaws in the way things are rolling out.

Even though blockchain has been around for almost a decade now (since Satoshi mined the Bitcoin genesis block in 2009), the adoption of it is low, partly because there still is not enough understanding of what and how designers should actually work. My goal is to bring more designers in this space since I believe having more empathy, more user research, more design thinking, and more focus on meeting users needs is going to bring the adoption of this new technology faster.

Now comes the question:

Do we need a special type of designers to design for blockchain space?

In general, the world of blockchain is very technically focused because of the fact that it is engineering driven. As a result, an average person has an overload of unstructured information and doesn’t yet see the value. After a while, I’ve started to see how blockchain is underperforming in the field of user experience design or rather it doesn’t exist. Businesses are focusing so much around technology that keeps forgetting one important ingredient.

And here comes my first insight into the blockchain space :

Users don’t care about blockchain.

Nobody cares what software Netflix runs on. Users only care about what a product lets them do. Focus on value, not jargon.

This represents a massive opportunity for designers to shape this immature industry and enable faster adoption.

But first — what is blockchain. I am not going to try to explain to you what is it, thats the whole point — as a user you don’t need to understand the technical aspect, only the benefits. However, for the purpose of this article, let’s get through some basics.

A blockchain is simply a continuous list of records, which are linked together through cryptography. These records or blocks, all correspond to a distributed ledger, which records transactions. Every block contains a timestamp and transaction data, locking the content and preventing unauthorized modification.

The one thing you need to know is that blockchain technology can minimize the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system.

Since, it’s already difficult to build trust with middle men like banks, realtors or even digital platforms such as Airbnb or Fiverr, blockchain technology aim to eliminate the trust factor.

Zfort Group

Why should we care about blockchain?

New applications made to disrupt entire industries are being developed as we speak — they’ll offer an upgrade in both technology and user experience but most importantly In the way, we interact with our economy and each other.

Any upcoming blockchain based application is going to need to confront the current UX problems such us jargon that complicates the communication, unreadable address or complexity of the transaction.

Overall, the current state of blockchain user experience creates high entry barriers for newcomers, lowers adoption rate and raises more questions than solves actual needs.

This is why I try to pinpoint what we as designers should be paying extra attention while designing for blockchain.

Design principles for blockchain technology

Think about the adoption of computers or the internet.
No one would see the value in using the internet if no-one would be using it. It takes time, interactions, failures and mistakes to create something that actually has value.

Well, blockchain UX is currently facing similar issues. With blockchain, we are in the early stages of a technology that people don’t quite understand how to use, just like we were with computers and the internet. It’s not until we make blockchain more accessible — with applications that have clear value — that adoption of blockchain technology will increase significantly.

1. Design for trust.

Be transparent — visualize the process,

While using blockchain there is a lot of actions happening in the background which user might not need to know however if it brings a calm consider showcasing it.
A great example would be visualizing how far in the process are you. It is critical to show them the transaction’s progress and provide feedback on its status.
To solve this use clear and persistent navigation to actively guide them through the task. Until the ecosystem develops robust scaling solutions, designing around the machine part of trust also means appreciating how much time transactions take on the blockchain. We have to pay attention to the user experience of these pending states: we’ve been trained by technology these days to expect immediacy, so even if we know a transaction will take a while, it still won’t stop the feeling of frustration or panic. Therefore, we need to set expectations up front and clearly inform the wait time.

2. Stop talking about tech — usability is what counts

Ruthlessly Break Down Barriers to Entry

Most of my attempts of explaining the groundbreaking technology is meeting with questions about technology and the fact that it's not needed because our banking system works. The market is full of people inside the bubble, people who understand why we need this technology in our future however to outsiders, it’s an unwelcoming, impenetrable bubble lead by tech maniacs. Unfortunately, if you want to get involved, you really need to be determined. You’ll probably have to battle through terrible UX and spent nights reading to grasp the basics steps. There’s nobody to easily explain core concepts, or walk you through the daunting process. It’s like the first generation of the internet. Where it’s technically there, but not very usable.

In order for the user to have frictionless and smooth experience, designers must first understand what’s going on behind the scenes. It helps to speak the same language with developers to design for the users.

Adoption would never happen. Without proper product. It has to succeed and overtake traditional systems structure on many layers in order to be successful.

We will only achieve mainstream adoption of blockchain if we deliver great user experiences.

Blockchain is in a weird space: as consumers, we’ve become obsessed with understanding how it works, which in turn makes it a much more intimidating product to adopt. The thing is, blockchain isn’t a product by itself — it’s a technology to build products.

My role as a UX designer

With the vast majority of people thinking blockchain is still only about cryptocurrency and bitcoin, users aren’t paying attention to blockchain-specific apps — they care solely about solutions that can solve their everyday problems. As designers at the forefront of this new technology, our role is so important in defining problems and making valuable products, that solve real problems and educate. Investing resources into delivering a user-centered app that will actually serve the user’s purpose can go a long way in addressing the challenges of blockchain’s mass adoption.

That’s why UX designers need to understand who’s involved, how it works, and how to design the experience of highly disruptive technology, in order to create an experience that is 10 times better than the one provided by the technology being disrupted. The UX on so many blockchain websites and exchanges is frustratingly bad. If blockchain is to become mainstream, we need an army of designers to work on radically simplifying everything. Designers are key in bringing usable and valuable blockchain products to the real people and organizations.

In the long term, the change is going happen and it’s only up to us how fast we can adapt it. I believe blockchain will make big changes in many industries, but some work still needs to be done. As I continue in the world of the highly technical and complex blockchain industry, I hope to make it more user friendly.

In today’s world we are fully taking advantage of the recent technological discoveries, which become embedded in our daily routine. Often in a passive and thus, a destructive way for our personal development. Being constantly connected with your friends online and checking every little update of their life, while sitting at the office desk, ultimately makes us feel like we are missing out on something and feel disconnected with our inner self.

However, it’s easy to forget that the most distracting thing in our lives can also be the most helpful tool for our productivity. Once you learn how to harness the power of technology for good, you’ll feel like a will-power superhero.

Life Hacks

Life can serve as a bundle of unexpected obstacles. We, humans, tend to search for relevant solutions and hack the problems to make our life easier, due to our inherently lazy nature and inner drive for development.

Life hacks are uncommon solutions to common problems; unusual ways of using everyday objects to make life easier; simple and practical tips that are far from obvious. I found many of the lifehacks truly useful, such as using Google Maps tracking to know exactly where I have been and how much time I spent in a certain place, or how to make your iPhone battery last longer.

Meditation App, Time management app, Social Media disconnect app, focus app all of those

Clickbaits and all that crap

The popularity of such lifehacks, especially digital, turned into an overwhelming number of bombarding clickbaits, tempting us with a thought that they can cure our life issues or make our dreams come true.

There are even articles out there offering you some quick and easy life hacks to cure depression. I found myself rolling my eyes a few times, because even though the Internet is one of the best things ever to exist, it is also guilty of hosting content from sites that treats their readers like idiots.

Of course, we can try to save as much time through the day as possible, trying to disconnect from all the unnecessary distractions . However being focused on the wrong things is the worst thing that you can encounter since you see that something is valuable for you once it is not.

Have you life hacked your life into so many little pieces you no longer recognise yourself?

Partial solutions to complex problems

Following such examples, those lifehacks can only solve a very specific and partial problem. Our life is much more complex and reading “5 tips for better life” kind of a life hack serves as a rather limited solution to the variety of our issues. I don’t think it is possible to hack your way through life, when it comes to personal growth, relationships, careers. That view therefore also holds true, when it comes to reading a of a few ”quick solutions”, that have no power to actually help you solve the addressed problems.

In order to actually solve, any of our more complex problems, that do not involve opening a cartoon of milk — we need a much more customized and adaptive advice.

Independent Millenials

In recent years, the Millennial generation has been on everyone’s mouth not particularly in a good opinion. Namely they’ve brought quite a few stereotypes — the good and the bad ones. One stereotype that seems to stick with them the most is the fact that they can do everything themselves. Whenever they are looking for solution, they reach out to Google even prior to their closest friends. They avoid personal confrontations and prefer to accomplish their tasks over the internet. Social Media and other internet websites became an ultimate source of knowledge but it is often low quality and not tailored towards specific needs.

Throughout my life I was always looking for people who can teach me specific skills. These days you can basically learn anything from YouTube tutorials, which has become my daily dose of knowledge. Anything about photography, using Adobe programs or personal development — I crave it easily digest it and come back for more. However, such independence leads to a huge disconnection between the Millenials and the older, more experienced generation. The integration between the young and old is not seen as valuable these days, and yet we seek contact with people wiser than us, such as coaches and mentors. We still hold the inherent need of being guided and taught by someone wiser, because nothing can beat a one to one connection and mentoring suited just for your own struggles.

The ultimate life hack — Mentor

“Your chances of success in life and in business can be amplified by having the right mentor. The valuable connections, timely advice, occasional checks — together with the spiritual and moral guidance you will gain from having a mentor — will literarily leapfrog you to success.”

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280134

The people you spend the most time with have more of an impact on your life than almost anything else. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs. Jobs was mentored by Mike Markkula — an early investor and executive at Apple. Want to find the ultimate life hack? Spend your precious time with people who make you feel better and do better.

Meet the online mentor — Weerpe

I have learnt a lot from my mentor on the internet. He is a bit grumpy but I hope he is not going to be too patronizing. After all, I owe him a world for what he taught me.

I would recommend you to talk to him! Maybe he can help you to put your life on the right track and guide you through your problems.

https://www.facebook.com/weeerpe/

SUMMARY

In sum — slow down, learn from others, reconsider, and question your stereotypes. What stands out is the rare advice in our busy life hacking get-things-done world to actually take a moment to slow down and think.

Always play on the edge of your comfort zone — thats where you really develop.

Surround yourself with people who are better than you!

That’s why I am moving from comfortable, nice full-time job in Copenhagen to pursue my dreams and get challenged again. I believe Hyper Island Design Lead program can help me strengthen my concept development skills with a business perspective. Furthermore, I find it exciting to find more creative mindsets to mentor me throughout my journey.

See you soon

With the current centralized business model we are paying to protect our data or to secure our money transfer. The decision to choose one company over another is based on trust. The best company is ultimately the most trustworthy.

According to the study by Frank Bonker and Klaus Muller (Postcommunist Transformation and the Social Sciences: Cross-Disciplinary Approach): in economic exchanges there are three kinds of trust : institution based, process based and characteristic based. However maybe now comes the time when technology can undermine this theory and add one more category to the equation — protocol-based trust. Nevertheless, trust is fundamental to all businesses and with the rise of a new technology called blockchain we can enable entities to establish trust and transparency in a secure way at an unprecedented scale.

What is Blockchain?

The blockchain phenomenon is a paradox, on one hand it is becoming noticed by mainstream media but on the other not completely understood — at the same time it is considered the biggest technology innovation of our time.

Blockchain is a digital log file / public trusted immutable ledger, cryptographically protected, that secures online transactions. Every block contains a timestamp and transaction data, locking the content and preventing unauthorized modification in another words — every action, information can be recorded and cannot be changed afterwards.

Blockchain is like the TCP/IP protocols on ARPANET in 70s’, that formed the backbone for the creation of the Internet. For the first 15 years of the Internet, its only application was e-mail. Not until everyone had it, we had seen the second layer emerge that has created mass adoption. Currency is the email of blockchain. Payments are fundamental pillars of blockchain that will enable mass adoption. It would be cliché to say that “This is about so much more than money” but it is. In a long term the vision of this technology is far beyond money. Right now that’s what creates security, the velocity and liquidity of the entire economic system.

Why Blockchain?

I am confident that blockchain has the potential to solve and prevent many problems we are dealing with today including: inefficiency in production, transparency in supply chain, unequal wealth distribution, intellectual property rights, voting frauds, governments responsibility, abuse of identity usage, censoring of historical events, global financing, trading and the list goes on and on. Instead of fixing the symptoms we can fix the root cause and prevent those problems before they even happen.

If that hasn’t convinced you yet on the importance of this new technology, well.. then there is much more.

Democratic — the decisions made by reaching consensus, decentralized — the ledger is distributed globally, efficient — you can get back through the whole ledger and see different information instantly without costs, and secure. Trust is not established by intermediaries but rather by mass collaboration, clever code and cryptography.

We mostly hear people talking about blockchain within the world of cryptocurrency, but its applications are actually far beyond that.

I am a strong believer that the world is facing the greatest invention since the development of the protocols underlying the Internet, that is going to allow us to inherent trust as a basic value in our daily life. It will change the way we interact with our products and most importantly — with each other. The trust no longer has to be assured by a middleman (which always take a profit) but it will be a part of the protocol to facilitate human economic activity.

What is really exciting is the possibility of fundamentally changing the way we allocate trust on this planet. Opening up the ability to collaborate, transact, engage on the global level with everyone. Simply by downloading an application you can become a part of a giant platform of trust which does not care who you are or where you came from. It does not matter if you are a mother of six children in Vietnam, twelve year old boy from USA or teenager from Sudan, everyone can now be a part of global economy.\

In the end, disruption of the traditional businesses is inevitable. However, this is not a disruptive technology but it is a fundamental technology. It is not going to happen overnight but gradually blockchain will find its way to be broadly used by all of us.

Since the list of use cases of blockchain is the topic for an article on its own I will only scrap the surface.

Blockchain does offer some serious improvements in terms of its identity management potential. If you’re able to segment and dictate which data third parties have access to, you can manage your online presence and privacy much more effectively. In a nutshell, using blockchain as an identity management solution allows the user to take control of their own data. By controlling and tracking how their information is distributed, citizens are able to pick and choose who they opt to provide their information to. At its core, blockchain technology offers us the opportunity to take control over the circulation of our personal data.

Blockchain seems to be particularly useful for monitoring the movement of goods. Now that every transaction goes onto the ledger, and because every node in the system keeps a copy of every transaction, it allows multiple partners to collaborate in one single shared view of a transaction, which would remain private, confidential, and unchangeable. The platform could help provide more transparency, simplicity, and security to international trading and shipping. Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, has started testing the blockchain, to track its shipments and coordinate with customs officials.

The crypto-anarchist Sterlin Luxan wrote: “Bitcoin is the catalyst for peaceful anarchy and freedom. It was built as a reaction against corrupt governments and financial institutions. It was not solely created for the sake of improving financial technology. But some people adulterate this truth. In reality, Bitcoin was meant to function as a monetary weapon, as a cryptocurrency poised to undermine authority. Now it is whitewashed. Its purpose is sometimes concealed in order to make the tech palatable to the unwashed masses and power elite. However, no one should forget or deny why the protocol was written”.

At the end of the day bitcoin might be a bubble, but blockchain is definitely not.

Despite almost utopian and anarchistic use cases in countless industries, the future of blockchain technology is unknown. Its radicalism and complexity may negatively impact the adoption time by masses. Moreover the behavior that fosters the trust has to be reconsidered in order to carry out the benefits the technology.

Thus you may want to pay attention and think — how can You adopt and implement blockchain in your field as quickly as possible. The truth is, this technology is in its infancy, and we’re going to need to see a lot of experiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of the use cases of this technology for our economy.

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Meanwhile we can look back at the mainstream media coverage of early adaptation of the Internet.

1994: “Today Show”: “What is the Internet, Anyway?”