Cryptocurrency designers should focus much more on usability

The 2017 cryptocurrency bubble revealed weaknesses in the industry: emotional trading, technical difficulties like scaling, the prevalence of scams, and more. 

While these issues were not new, they were thrown into sharp relief as media attention rose in tandem. Much of the industry excitement since that time has been driven by technological developments such as the Lightning network. 

However, given the complexities involved with cryptocurrencies, the industry itself needs to maintain a sharp focus on usability. Because despite the technical progress, the experience of using cryptocurrencies is not radically different today than it was several years ago. 

What is usefulness? 

Dr. Jakob Nielsen, a well-regarded expert on human-computer interaction and cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, describes usefulness as a combination of utility (whether an interface performs the needed functions) and usability (whether performing those functions is easy and enjoyable for the user). As he points out: “On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave.”

The same could be said about cryptocurrencies. If they are too difficult to use, most people will continue to use the conventional financial system or rely on centralized exchanges — thus losing hold on the benefits of decentralization. Therefore, a critical question is how user-interface (UI) designers and developers should think about usability in the blockchain space.

Every new technology has a learning curve that exists in tension with its utility. A new technology needs to be both useful and usable in order to see widespread adoption.

Consider the personal computer. Early computers required users to interact via the command line, and while the command-line interface (CLI) is a powerful tool, it brings with it a steep learning curve. Nothing about the CLI is particularly relatable to how people interact with physical objects. Users must memorize or look up every command and input them correctly.

By contrast, a graphical user interface (GUI) is far more intuitive. The basic actions (clicking and dragging) are analogous to how humans handle objects in the real world. A GUI is virtual, yet it maintains a sense of familiarity that the CLI lacks. Today, most users depend on GUIs that make human-computer interaction easier for the vast majority to understand and manipulate.

Similarly, OpenPGP (the standard based on the original Pretty Good Privacy or PGP) has never gained widespread popularity, despite the advantages of its encryption. In a post-Snowden world, privacy-conscious users have gravitated toward projects like Signal. PGP-encrypted emails and Signal messages perform similar functions and operate with end-to-end encryption. 

But Signal is easier to use, thus encouraging adoption even by less technically-inclined people.

As "learnable" as online banking

Nielsen defines usability as a combination of learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. All of them are important to understanding a user’s experience with a computer interface, but because blockchain technology is relatively new and unfamiliar, perhaps the most important usability factor is learnability. 

With learnability, Nielsen asks: “How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?”

Billionaire Mark Cuban, who is notably skeptical of Bitcoin, recently commented: “It'd have to be so easy to use it's a no-brainer. It'd have to be completely friction-free and understandable by everybody first. And then you can say it's an alternative to gold as a store of value. . . .  You're going to have to make it friction-free so Grandma can do it.” 

Cryptocurrencies, however, aren’t like conventional financial instruments. They are, as Andreas Antonopoulos once put it, “the internet of money, and currency is just the first application.” 

As Matt Hougan wrote in Forbes in August 2019:

“We can, for the first time, program money. Instead of using lawyers and investment bankers, you can create any contract or trust or entity or set of financial instructions . . . for free . . . with code. That means disrupting services like escrow, debt issuance, derivatives, trust creation, fundraising, and more.”

The disintermediated, programmatic abilities of cryptocurrencies allow new use cases that people will somehow need to access. Like the Internet, blockchain tech may eventually have applications that seem only fanciful today — and somehow, users will need to be able to control those capabilities in ways that feel intuitive.

Design goals for cryptocurrencies

Consequently, developers and user-interface designers have difficult jobs in this space. They are introducing radically different technology into critically important areas of daily life, particularly finance. Yet despite the complexities, a couple of reminders may prove helpful.

First, developers and designers need to prioritize learnability (particularly with user interfaces) in order to lower the barrier to entry for new users. Cryptocurrencies need to be accessible and reasonably understandable to non-technical users, even as new capabilities are added.

Second, that accessibility needs to be safeguarded by mission-critical design. Developers and designers need to build error avoidance and fault tolerance into the networks and user interfaces, and those protections must be more robust than what customers have come to expect from conventional banks. 

With cryptocurrencies, users are their own banks. They must assume the responsibility for their actions, but cryptocurrencies must also be designed to fail safely and minimize risks.

Making cryptocurrencies user-friendly may seem to be a daunting task, but it is also a solvable problem. Over the last decade, blockchain tech has grown from a single prototype to a vast array of new ideas and possibilities. Some will work; some will not.  

But cryptocurrencies are still moving forward — these days are still early for the industry.