The Future of Blockchain UX is like uncharted territory. (image: Unsplash)

The Future of Blockchain UX

The Start of a Post Series

As a UX researcher in the blockchain industry, I immersed myself in the field over the past couple of months. From the process, I see how fascinating the world of UX of blockchain is. As a consequence, I decide to write a series of blog posts to share my research findings with other UX designers in the industry and people who are interested in the area.

The New Frontier of UX for Blockchain

UX of blockchain is a very new field. It is the intersection of two prosperous, advanced and fast-developing fields — the blockchain industry and user experience design and research. It is so new that neither blockchain engineers nor UX designers would claim they really know how to do it. It’s uncharted territory that everybody strives to explore.

Current blockchain UX is facing a few problems including bad usability, unreadable addresses, and difficult technical jargon which makes it hard to communicate with users (Current UX Issues of the Blockchain Technology). The article Why design is the killer app for crypto explains why design should play a vital role in improving blockchain usability and how it can make a better blockchain world in general.

As time goes by, the applications of blockchain are spreading all over the world, to every corner and every industry. Technology can change people’s lives rapidly and significantly. But, if a new technology cannot provide great usability and delightful user experiences, it’ll be impossible for it to get closer to people’s lives.

Most articles talking about blockchain UX are written by designers, and all seek solutions based on design methods. However, if you think outside the box, there’s always another way to solve the problem (in this case, besides designing). That’s why in this article, we try to predict future blockchain UX by looking through today’s social behavior patterns to see if there’s any UX actions (solutions) we’re lacking right now.

Contracts as UX to Blockchain

The economist Geoffrey M. Hodgson defines institutions as “systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions. Language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners, and firms (and other organizations) are thus all institutions.”

An institution is a pattern of social order. I believe blockchain is evolving toward this kind of social role as an institution.

If one agrees with this assumption, then the future UX of blockchain will need to resemble the UX of institutions (Blockchain UX=Institution UX). Within current societies, the UX of institutions is constrained by contracts.

Hodgson also writes: “Institutions both constrain and enable behavior. The existence of rules implies constraints.”

The rules here are contracts. Institutional contracts regulate users’ behavior, including what they can and can’t do and should and shouldn’t do. Thus, contracts reveal users’ rights and obligations. They shape users’ experiences.

In other words, we can consider contracts as the predominant UX of institutions.

Further, if we consider the Lindy Effect, which asserts that one way to predict future technologies is to look at which technologies have already survived into the present, we can bet that contract will also be the UX of blockchain as blockchain increasingly assumes the role of social institution. When it comes to unknown prediction, people often use this theory to prophesy what will happen in the future.

Thus, if we want to study the future of blockchain UX, we should look to the present UX of institutions. Since the present UX of institutions is contract-based, a good starting place for understanding the future UX of blockchains is UX for contracts.

4 Common Contract Patterns

If we accept that the patterns appearing in contract will repeatedly appear in future blockchain contracts and build future user experience, then:

Present patterns of contracts = Future patterns of blockchain UX

Since we’d like to have a broader view of the contract patterns — instead of focusing on a specific industry or category — I picked four different contracts from different industries, and different scenarios:

  1. The first contract is the account contract between bank and customer.
  2. The second contract is the working contract between Hollywood movie studio and actress.
  3. The third contract is the flight ticket contract between airline company and passenger.
  4. And the last contract is the contract between Facebook and user — the Terms of Service.

All of the above contracts show some special common patterns. All contracts are fundamentally about property rights. According to Wikipedia, a contract is a legally binding agreement that recognizes and governs the rights and duties of the parties to the agreement.

Under most circumstances, a contract, or “binding agreement,” secures a transaction around property rights. Thus, behaviors surrounding contracts ensure the credibility of transactions and secure property rights so that binding agreements can be smoothly fulfilled.

In considering the four types of contracts listed above, I’ve identified four common behavior patterns:

  • Verifying identity
  • Creating account and password
  • Signing
  • Authenticating

And three common necessary things needed to accomplish the patterns above:

  • Identity
  • Signature
  • Password

Verifying Identity

When entering into a new contract, parties need to provide personal information including first name, last name, age, birthday, gender, nationality, address, email address, occupation, phone number, emergency contact, and national ID card Number or Passport Number to prove they really are the certain individuals they claim they are. This step, identity verification, allows institutions to trust the identity of the other parties and agree to enter into a contract with them. Identity documents that record the above information are usually government-issued and include ID cards, citizen cards, driving licenses, and passports.

Creating Account and Password

After providing personal information and identity documents, users can create an account in the system. Regardless of whether it’s the bank system, online airline booking system or Facebook, users all need to create accounts and use them to interact with the institutions and represent themselves in the systems .

During the process of creating an account, users also need to create a password. Since the password should be something only the owner knows, the next time users only need to provide their password and the system will allow them to regain access to their property.

Signing

According to Contract Signing: Everything You Need to Know, signing a contract means:

  • You’ve read the contract
  • You agree to the contract’s terms and conditions
  • You intend to enter into the contract
  • You’re legally authorized to sign it
  • You’re mentally competent to sign it.

Our four cases of contracts all contain the behavior of signing. Signing shows the user has full understanding and informed consent to accept the contract’s terms and conditions and also indicates that the user intentionally agrees to enter into the agreement. After signing, the contract becomes legally effective.

There are a variety of different forms of signatures including handwritten signatures, name seals, and fingerprints. In our four scenarios, a bank contract requires a user’s handwritten signature on a paper contract — sometimes more cautiously — along with name seals to provide two-factor authentication. A movie studio’s work contract also requires an actress to sign with pen on paper. Yet, flight ticket contracts and Facebook have another form of signature. They demonstrate the terms and conditions of contracts on the internet page and ask if the users agree. The checking of an “I agree” or “I accept” box on the screen serves as the users’ consent and signature on contracts.

Authenticating

Authentication is to verify if something is authentic. In contracts, it means the institution wants to know who the user is — if the user is the person who is a party to the agreement or if the user is the owner of a specific property. When authenticating, institutions and systems usually ask for passwords, which function to protect privacy and prevent unauthorized operations. The purpose of this process is for institutions to authenticate that you are the person who owns the property and whether they should give you access to the property. For example, people need to enter their passwords when logging in Facebook accounts or airline ticket system accounts to get access.

Someone might see a password as a key to a house (like I did before). However, two things are not equivalent. The easiest way to differentiate is that, by having a password of an account, a person can perform all the bundle of property rights behaviors for the account, but by only holding a key to a house, without having the title of the property, he can’t perform all the same behaviors with the house. Also, don’t misunderstand identity verification for authentication. The former is for institutions to trust users are really the people they say they are; while the latter is for institutions to know the users are parties to contracts. (See: Authentication Vs. Authorization Vs. Identity Verification)

Usually in the digital world, passwords are composed of letters, digits, and symbols. Each system requires different formats of password with instructions like “a combination of 6 digits and letters, at least one upper letter and one lower letter”, or “a length range from 4 to 18 digits.” Passwords for blockchains currently consist of private keys whether represented as a string of characters or a list of mnemonic words.

Conclusion

Overall, we believe that the future of blockchain UX will look like the institutional contracts in today’s world. Further, the future UX to blockchain will likely adhere to all of the above patterns of behaviors. Especially, the actions of providing personal information, signing, consenting, and verifying identity in contracts will persist. The forms and items used in modern world might change over time. For example, signing with a pen might convert to an electronic signature. Yet, these action patterns would endure as long as contracts continue to constrain the UX to institutions.

Many thanks to caseyalt for polishing the story and Sean Moss-Pultz for discussing the idea with me.

Welcome to send an email to me to ellie@bitmark.com if you have further ideas to discuss :)

Or you can view Bitmark’s medium page English/Mandarin for more articles talking about data, digital property, and other things we care about!

Prototypr

Prototyping, UX Design, Front-end Development and Beyond 👾

Ellie Yang

Written by

UX Researcher at Bitmark Inc. with a background in Ethnology. I love human beings, and wanna create amazing connection among art, technology and humanity.

Prototypr

Prototyping, UX Design, Front-end Development and Beyond 👾

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