Thoughts and Findings from the Web3 UXUnconf

Web User Experience
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(Note: this post is in “wiki mode” and can be edited)

The Web3 UX Unconf was put together by Derek Chiang @derek of Thunder Token and Dan Tsui of Kyokan. The brief / working document was shared by them ahead of time and they reached out / recruited people ahead of time with a web form and direct intros. Many people heard about the event last minute while in Toronto and ended up attending. Please use this to collect links, notes, and other facts of interest.

Have a lot of personal things to say? Write a forum post here or external article, and add the link to the Follow Up Posts section at the end.

Abstract

from the brief

Web3 is facing major UX challenges. To list a few:

  • DApps are slow and expensive.
  • Users are getting hacked, phished, and confused.
  • Wallets and dapp browsers are struggling to support all the new sidechains, plasma, and state channels.
  • Developers are overwhelmed by support requests.

Let’s sit down and fix this. We invite developers and designers of wallets, dapp browsers, and blockchains to join us. The unconf consists of presentations and unstructured discussions.

We hope that by having everyone in the same room, we will be able to have productive conversations and work on important issues together as a community, both during the unconf and afterwards.

Sponsors

Derek & Dan and the sponsors should be thanked profusule. They rented the venue, provided catering for all meals, and had projectors and live streaming set up.

Stable Fund by L4 Ventures

stable-logo

https://stable.fund/

Kyokan

kyokan-black

https://kyokan.io/

Thunder Token

thunder_token

https://www.thundertoken.com/

Attendees

Cut / paste from the original Google Doc. Feel free to add links to your company or project, any other additional links and please do add yourself – and please include your local forum handle if you have an account!

  • Panashe Mahachi (L4)
  • Dan Finlay (MetaMask) @ danfinlay
  • Dan Tsui (Kyokan)
  • Tom Creighton (Reactive Arts)
  • Richard Burton (balance.io) @ ricburton
  • Sid Coelho-Prabhu (Toshi / Coinbase) @ sid-toshi
  • Stefan George (Gnosis)
  • Martin Holst Swende (Ethereum Foundation) @ holiman (remote participant)
  • C. Jordan Muir (Frame) @jordan (remote participant)
  • Daniel Ternyak (MyCrypto)
  • Viktor Radchenko (Trust Wallet)
  • Fredrik Harrysson (Parity)
  • Philip Lucsok (Parity)
  • Andy Tudhope (status.im) @ andytudhope
  • Jeremy Welch (Casa)
  • Robin Clart (OmiseGO)
  • Thibault Denizet (OmiseGO)
  • Derek Chiang (Thunder Token) @ derek
  • Alex Van de Sande (Ethereum Foundation) @ alexvandesande
  • Luis Cuende (Aragon)
  • Alex Komarov (Minimum Inc.)
  • William Dias (modular.network)
  • Ligi (Ethereum Foundation) @ ligi
  • Mia Alexander (MyCrypto)
  • Peter Jihoon Kim (Cipher)
  • Will O’Beirne (MyCrypto)
  • Maciej Hirsz (Parity)
  • Don Ho (Quantstamp)
  • Danny Skubak (MyCrypto)
  • Anna Rose (Zero Knowledge Podcast)
  • Lane Rettig (CryptoNYC) @lrettig
  • Zac Morris (vault.io)
  • Michael Sena (uPort) @ michaelsena
  • Cassandra Shi (Ethereum Community Fund)
  • Beltran Berrocal (independent + ENS) @lyricalpolymath
  • John Egan (vault.io)
  • Daniel Bar (Tenzorum)
  • Jonny Howle (uPort) @ jonnyhowle
  • Yiseul Cho (Perceptra)
  • Thomas Jay Rush (Quickblocks) @ tjayrush
  • Ed Mazurek (Quickblocks) @wildmolasses
  • Niraj Pant (Polychain Capital)
  • Philippe Castonguay (independent) @ PhABC
  • Kelvin Fichter (OmiseGO)
  • Kasima Tharnpipitchai (OmiseGO)
  • Jack Huang (MyEtherWallet)
  • Rouven Heck (uPort) @rouven
  • Boris Mann (Frontier Foundry) @boris
  • Bryant Eisenbach (DappDevs, SecurEth) @fubuloubu
  • add yourself!

Agenda

cut / paste from brief, so won’t be quite in sync with what actually happened. Edit away! Also please add links to your presentation or other links of interest, and ideally we can link in live stream video captures too

9:00 - Venue opens

9:20 - Opening remark

9:30 - Tom Creighton – UX lessons from successful startups
10:00 - Dan Finlay – MetaMask’s new UI
10:30 - Daniel Ternyak – Tools and strategies MyCrypto has developed while revamping the wallet interface
11:00 - Richard Burton – WalletConnect: connect to web-based dapps from the phone

11:30 - Lunch

12:30 - Alex Van de Sande – Universal logins for Ethereum
13:00 - Philippe Castonguay + Panashe Mahachi – Smart Accounts
13:30 - Viktor Radchenko – What I learned from building Trust
14:00 - Sid Coelho-Prabhu – Toshi
14:30 - Andy Tudhope – Thoughts about UX at Status and what we have been up to
15:00 - Beltran Berrocal – Web3 Design Principles
15:30 - Lane Rettig – Towards an open data marketplace
16:00 - Martin Holst Swende – The new Ethereum signer
16:30 - Maciej Hirsz – Parity Signer
17:00 - C. Jordan Muir – Frame, a cross-platform Ethereum provider

17:30 - Dinner

18:30 - Michael Sena – Privacy Preserving User Identity Systems for Ethereum dApps
19:00 - Jeremy Welch – Casa/Multisig/Multilocation
19:30 - Luis – Radspec: a safe alternative to Ethereum’s natspec to make transactions human-readable

A dozen or so of us went along to @ricburton’s Balance meetup at the Queen & Beaver Pub afterwards.

Social Media Bites

Discourse will automatically expand individual tweets if there are ones you want to highlight – just paste in the link on its own line

Thread Reader App version of Boris’ live tweets from the event by @boris

Tweet feeds:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/web3uxunconf?f=tweets&vertical=default
https://twitter.com/hashtag/uxunconf?f=tweets&vertical=default
https://twitter.com/hashtag/walletconf?f=tweets&vertical=default

https://twitter.com/licuende/status/993510293102825472

Lyricalpolymath: “ethereum is entering it’s design era”
referencing Chris Remus’s twitter poll :point_down:

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Follow Up Posts

Have a blog / forum post or other long-form reflection on the event? Add the link here

  • awesome post recapping the event goes here
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There are also:

https://twitter.com/hashtag/uxunconf
https://twitter.com/hashtag/walletconf

(note to future self: mandate a hashtag)

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Here’s an “unrolled” version of my tweetstorm that is a little more readable:

Hey @jpitts can you please make your first post a Discourse “wiki post”? Then we can have one main doc that everyone can edit and add links to.

I started drafting one, but realized I didn’t have a trust level that would let me turn it into a wiki page.

@derek yes! One of the things I’m writing up in my “how to organize a working group” meeting. Thanks so much for organizing and kicking off this first one.

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Great idea, I just wiki-ized the initial post.

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@derek, I added these to the initial post.

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Perfect – I pasted in the brief and attendees and agenda and such and did some light editing.

I wasn’t able to link everyone’s forum names here because it said I could only mention 10 people in a post. I added spaces to a couple just so I could save. Don’t know if you have mod powers that can fix that.

And on further thought, twitter handles probably useful as well. Please add yours!

Now on to writing up a “How to run a working group”

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Amazing event.

My biggest takeaway:

Transactions are just actions are just signatures.

We need to make it easy to iterate on new signature types (each new network is a new key/signature type).

Once we have agreed on protocols for rendering signature types, we can also iterate on how comprehensible we can get them, with tools like radspec etc.

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Transactions and Interaction are how we separate them.

Can we get the videos of the talks?

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Someone from Kyokan is helping us upload them to YouTube. I will post here once it’s done.

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Typing out some of my learnings + thoughts:

  1. So many things around the topic of ‘Transactions/Interactions/Actions/Signatures’ that will be relevant to Kyokan’s clients and I’ve yet to have time to watch the talks. :slight_smile:

Personally: Beltran’s talk, Finlay’s talk, Burton’s talk, the EF presenters, and radspec stood out to me, in case anyone is looking for highlights. Was also nice to learn more about Casa (their demo was sweet, not sure if anyone else tried).

Also, Ric’s comments on funding dynamics for early stage projects will influence how we roadmap/structure our own projects as well. Thanks for that.

  1. As this was a bit of an experiement, we’d love feedback on how it was run, attendees, how content was curated, etc.

If it’s better for that to be private, please send DMs to Derek or myself. As for me, I feel like there are two directions we could take it. One: open it up as a larger event to be inclusive of everyone who wanted to attend.
We just didn’t have space this time around.

Two: contain it to a maximum of 30. Say, 12 teams with demonstrable progress + active work in the space, each bringing a maximum of two people: that could help us focus the discussions.

  1. Ending earlier in the day and coordinating an official post-event meetup would have been cool – would have loved the opportunity to hang out more with @ricburton but we had to clean up and catch a flight. Shorter talks, making more time for discussion might have been better.
  1. If anyone is interested in helping facilitate future events, our ability to do more on this front is limited (Dan running Kyokan full-time, Derek as well for Thunder as it hires/grows/pushing things to prod).

Vision would be a coordinator who helps secure funding and plan the events (including post-event tasks like posting the videos). With the funding, we could find 1-2 volunteers from the community to help run the event, these could even come from the participating teams. Optimizing for ‘easier to have productive conversations’ about these topics.

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