I’m an old UXer - old enough to have worked in product design during the dawn of personal desktop computing - even before internet mass adoption.
I’m much more interested in emotions, users’ motivating a blocking issues, than I am in pixels and workflows. The key is to discover what a user wants and how to deliver on that. To do that it’s important to identify target groups since “users” aren’t a single mass with the same wants, hopes, fears, etc.
This thread is about gathering basic research & sharing info to help crypto mass adoption.
I think there are a few factors that can increase mass adoption to a certain limit.
Price factor; ultimately we are all in it for the money incentive. Higher price drives higher interests, efforts, and involvement.
Institutional factor; if the retail level cannot take lead, then the adoption will need to be driven by institutional participation.
In term of UX, how simple can it really get? Ultimately, the users need to be aware that they have a significant responsibility to secure their private keys safely. (Are they going to let their smart phone do it for them? Of course, but make sure they never lose their smart phone. Is the protocol going to change whereby private key is no longer necessary? Sure, I always believe having a central authority can sometimes still be the best solution.)
But if having such control and responsibility is a massively tall order, then giving such control and responsibility away to a 3rd-party (which is no longer trustless) to manage the private keys, then that really defeats the main purposes of having blockchain in the first place.
Having mass adoption is probably never going to happen. At best there will be mass adoption among those whose occupation is very closely related to blockchain technology or stand to benefit greatly from it and those whose occupation is unrelated but they are personally motivated enough to get involved.
We cannot expect everyone to be in the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain just as we cannot expect everyone to be in the stock market and futures market. There probably will remain a significant segment of the world population that will just not bother because they are not tech-savvy, or because their occupation does not require such involvement, or because they just don’t care.
Do not waste time on such segments of the population. Instead strive to improve on the needs of the segments of population that choose to get involved and choose to care.
On this separate post, I can think of one way to make things more user friendly. As a user myself, I can see a major hurdle is in securing the private key. If getting rid of the private key is totally defeatist, then I can only think of a solution and that is to link up the private key to the identity of the user, but isn’t this is what EOS and ONT are doing, at least at the primitive level? Next problem to surface will be identity theft and how to prevent that.
I believe if you can take away the hassle and complexity of having to secure one’s own private key(s), then UI/UX can easily be made much simpler and friendlier.