UX is about emotion. It's about understanding a target group's wants, needs, fears. The key word in "User Experience" is EXPERIENCE which in this context is the sum of a user's feelings when interacting with a system or brand. It has nothing necessarily to do with what happens on a screen.

Today's crypto world is primarily about tech; cool things quite cryptically called crypto tokens that can do anything from making you instantly rich (or broke) to saving the world or eating all its electricity. Somehow it's not real but you can spend it... sometimes and in some places. It's like a bank but no one knows it's you and if you lose your key all your (not real but very valuable) money vanishes. POOF. Gone. Just like that.

Between the two, good UX and things crypto today, is a vast gap that prevents mass adoption of anything "bitcoiny".

Email Adoption

There are a few of us old enough to remember the world without email. As the medium grew we began hearing bits and snatches about it, often confusing it with other things like bulletin boards and all that other "online" mumbo-jumbo. Most of us didn't have a computer at all and more importantly, had no idea why we would want one. Those who did didn't have it connected to anything except the power outlet. "Online" didn't exist for ordinary people yet. Those "techy" sounding words appeared more and more in the news and occasionally piqued one's curiosity but for the most part just vanished back into the white noise of life.

Most of us had our first introduction to email at work where a tech guy came to set up what was very often our first computer. The set up was difficult, mysterious, kludgy (do the kids still say that?) and a general pain in the ass just to use.

In the early days of consumer internet, Compuserve & American Online days and shortly after, setting up the connection was often problem-ridden - as was everything computer connected. Disks were supplied by those early ISPs but in every case I saw for years, command line intervention was needed configuring the modem, the connection, etc. What did you have at the end of it all? Not a lot. Slow and fidgety connections made nearly everything a hassle and there were simply not may reasons to be online in the first place... well... except the driver of every technology since the of carving stone statues, porn. But even that was slow. Print media still beat it umm... hands down.

Outlook and other desktop clients did a little to alleviate the issue. Improved set up disks and processes from the ISPs helped. But it took a major effort of understanding that for things "online" to achieve true mass adoption it had to be tech-free. The average person simply didn't want to and often was afraid of doing anything that looked like "tech" stuff. Easy to sign up for web-based email was the key. Hotmail was the first to deliver. In the preceding three decades, email usage went from zero to one million. After Hotmail, it went from one million to one billion in about five years. And it's still growing. Obviously, part of the growth curve involved the development of the infrastructure, software and getting people to buy their endpoints and pay for a new service. All that's in place today. But lessons here are still absolutely relevant.

Crypto Mass Adoption

Crypto is in a similar state today as email was in the early 1990's. A large number of bleeding edge adopters and fast followers are on board, many partying hard with the huge profits they've made to date. Big companies are catching on as well. This is all good for the alt-coin world of course. But it's still not anywhere near mass adoption. The barriers for the consumer masses are still very high.

The number of people active in alt-coin is estimated to be in the low 10's of millions. A big number but only the population of a single, medium-sized city.

Crypto looks sexy and profitable but also so mysterious, exotic and dangerous that for most it's just too hard to understand and too frightening to be worth trying. Its far easier to adopt the "wisdom" that it will all fail, wiping out everyone else money.

In UX we design for emotions. A crypto experience design that stands a chance at breaching the barriers to mass adoption will need to reduce the fear and increase the sense of control for the average Janet and Joe who today are interested but afraid. Exodus does a good job and perhaps one of the only crypto products to take UX seriously. But there is vast space for improvement. We have not come to the crypto version of Hotmail yet.

What will it look like? I don't know. There are significant tech and human process obstacles to negotiate and perhaps legal ones as well. If I were leading the effort for a company wanting to be that crypto Hotmail issues I'd look at would include:

Wallet UX

I recently went to a cafe where they only accept crypto. They happened to only take ones that I either didn't have or didn't want to spend on coffee. I put a bill in the fiat-to-crypto conversion ATM and was told to install a wallet on my phone. After doing the first thing I was told to do was to write down my twelve seed words. At that point, I canceled my transaction and gave up. This was simply too fucking much for a cup of coffee.

There needs to be a better balance between security and convenience. I can spend up to $20 on my debit card without a PIN. So can any thief. I don't care. The ease is worth it to me. After leading user testing for banks for many years, I know that a large portion of bank customers feel the same.

Non Volatile Token

Volatility is fantastic for traders. Explosive growth is awesome for investors. Both suck for anyone wanting to spend some dough. For the same reason, no one will spend 0.0746 Google shares on groceries or a cab, any thinking person will balk at it with crypto. I don't want to have to be that in touch with any market, set of markets actually, to spend some cash. In fact, part of the function of cash is to average out the relative values of commodities like coffee beans, crude oil, global labor and my value when spending.

Less Cryptic Crypto

This is hard for many purists to understand but most people are not obsessed with secret transactions. Most people get paychecks deposited into their banks, they happily spend leaving electronic trains visible from space and if they do indulge in a spot of porn of other walks on the wild side they get cash - with the relative anonymity and dangers associated. For these folks the anonymity is either a useless pain in the ass or an outright danger. Also, for those seeking high degrees of secrecy, there are tons of options today.

Easy Access to Profits

Obviously many people want in on those 1000% increases. The exchanges I've seen so far are aimed at knowledgeable traders who are comfortable with crypto security issues. This makes perfect sense if you want to attract expert and people willing to learn about to be conversant in systems and jargon aimed at experts. It's a near complete miss if you are aiming to attract everyone else. Again, I'm not interested in suggesting specific solutions here. I am saying that in order to gain maximum consumer buy-in, a company will need to look at this as a UX challenge rather than as an intelligence test meant to filter out those not worthy.

Conclusion

I work with startups of all sorts. A very common issue I come across is that they early launch crew; the dev team, the marketing people, the executive leadership and everyone tend to be very highly focused in a single direction - very often tech or programming oriented. This is a natural consequence and probably necessary to be able to get off the ground. It's also problematic when the time comes to actually develop branding, look at targetting for specific user segments and their needs. I see this issue magnified, sometimes magnified a lot, in crypto startups. So far the crypto world has been dominated by geeks developing for geeks, seemingly doing everything in their power to keep non-geeks out.