Navigating the complexity of Web3 to help take an ambitious startup’s vision from 0 to 1.
- User research
- Prototyping
- UX design
- UI design
The business had exciting plans to create a family of decentralised apps. Our challenge was simply to get an MVP in the hands of customers and find product market fit.
A big question right? The kind of open-ended challenge that I relish. The team had a grand vision for the product but it was important not too pull in too many different directions.
My first port of call was to listen to my team member’s articulation of the vision, understand the business model and hear where they thought we should start.
As much as want to dive straight into user research I first needed to get a good handle on what exactly the business wanted to achieve.
I simply spoke to as many team members as I could and then ran a small workshop session to ensure we all had alignment on the goals.
Some workshop content is anonymised/omitted for privacy
The biggest outstanding question from the team conversations was: Should we start with direct messenger (think WhatsApp) or communities (think Discord/Telegram)?
My primary goal for the initial user interviews was to gain insight into our target customers' behaviours and identify the most significant problems we could address. After the 10 conversations I noticed a pattern.
Scams in the web3 space create anxiety and caused some people to not engage
“There are loads of scammers on Discord, I’ve been caught out before. It’s makes me super weary and distrusting of people.”
Admins are forced to implement clunky third party apps to get Discord to work how they want
“We’ve tried 3 token gating bots the server. Even the one we’re using now has problems reading some NFTs.”
Disconnected systems cause people to miss out
“We use discord for chatting, snapshot for voting, Gnosis safe for treasury. People miss things all the time. Important updates get lost in all the notifications”
My proposal to the team was to focus on communities before individual DMs. Communities seemed to have the biggest pains with their current platform of choice (discord). They explained that they have actively looked for solutions. This is always a good signal to me.
However due to technical constraints we collectively decided to focus on the messenger first. Looking back on it now, I feel like this was the right call as it allowed us to nail the core messaging experience first before releasing to a wider audience.
The desktop app
0 to 1 jobs are inevitably going to start with some assumptions. It was important for me to capture these ensure my testing plan was setup to either disprove or build evidence to support these.
As we discussed the strategy, these key assumptions appeared:
• People will know how to store the passphrase
• People will be happy to connect their crypto wallet
• People will understand how rewards work and value them
The team valued speed so I opted to skip wireframes. Instead I got straight into creating Figma prototypes to get in the hands of users. I needed to test those assumptions we outlined to avoid costly development rework.
Our success hinged on a user friendly onboarding. For our first attempt to solve this problem we tried a passphrase. This is a standard account backup method within web3. I created a prototype and tested the flow with our target market within a few days.
First attempt at the onboarding flow:
When testing the prototype with a set of users we realised some key issues:
"What if I lose this? Am I locked out forever?"
"I can’t deal with another passphrase"
"Feels like a lot of effort for a messenger app"
"What if someone finds this phrase? Can they steal my account?"
The negative reaction to onboarding led us to rethink this approach. This kind of issues could be make or break for an MVP. We made this much more user friendly by allowing users to save the passphrase to their keychain. Essentially taking all of the complexity away from them.
Updated onboarding flow
The test proved significantly more positive with the majority of users completing the onboarding.
This is why getting it in front of customers early is so important. Testing throughout the design phase saved us so much development time later down the line.
The majority of users were more interested in the remote bath fill option so this led us to prioritise this over the showering function. We also introduced a bottom navigation bar as we observed some participants struggling to navigate to certain areas of the app.
We wanted to keep the actual messaging experience familiar possible while apply a distinctive UI. It was already hard enough to coax people over from their preferred platform, we didn’t want to make our users have to relearn this process.
The launch of the desktop app followed shortly after. This provided seamless communication across all of the users devices.
Constant feedback was really important. It was essential to keep us moving in the right direction. I introduced a few methods to create our continuous feedback ahead of launch.
Dogfooding
Everyone in the business started using the product as soon as we could. The feedback came in thick and fast!
Gathered a panel of users
We opened the messenger up early to a select group of community members. These people were an excellent source of feedback.
Open feedback
Once the app was up and running we had a feedback mechanism where users could easily contact us. This became another great source of insight.
There was only thing that mattered at this stage, product market fit. How did we measure this?
Daily active users - How many people were using the app
Daily active conversations - How much were they actually using the app
Zero has done a great job building a Twitter following before launch and this was huge inbound marketing source to begin with.
We opted for invite only to begin which allowed for a soft launch and created an air of exclusivity around the app. However, we knew that this was temporary approach and keeping the app invite-only restricts the network effect.
Working with Zero was an incredible experience. Collaborating with a team spread across different time zones really sharpened my asynchronous communication skills.
The biggest thing I took from my time working with Zero to pursue simplicity. It's so easy to overcomplicate things in product. The leadership had a brilliant way of distilling things down to their simplest form and get to the core of a problem. I've taken this and applied it throughout my career and it's helped me enormously.
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