Fish Out of Water: My Experiences Joining the Crypto Community

Fish Out of Water Series
Part 1: New Beginnings
Part 2: The Community Shows Up
Part 3: Ethereum Personas
Part 4: The Standard for Crypto UX
Part 5: Product-Market Fit+

Hi everybody! Gabriel Golcher here again! Last we spoke was a couple of months ago and it is high time for me to touch base with y’all.

My experiences these first few months have been amazing. For starters, I’ve learned a lot about the crypto space. For example, in my previous blog post I shared this tweet as something I did not understand at all:

A new Gnosis Safe App is live! Users can now trade ETH and ERC20s straight from their multisig using @1inchexchange. 1inch achieves the best market rates by splitting orders among multiple DEXes in one single transaction. 🔒🔄 Try it today atgnosis-safe.io/app pic.twitter.com/GAmXomWw4j

— Gnosis Safe (@gnosisSafe) Jul 8, 2020

Today I can proudly say I understand it! 🙌 I’ve really learned a ton about the Ethereum platform and many of the technologies that build on top of it.

Second, and more importantly, I’ve been able to see firsthand how seriously amazing this community is through our user research efforts. We undertook two studies already. The first one is currently ongoing and consists of in-depth user interviews that will allow us to learn about Ethereum users and develop user personas. The second one, already completed, helped us test early design ideas for a part of AKASHA’s UI using a clickable prototype.

In both, the results have been nothing short of spectacular! For the first one, we’ve had as of today 44 interviews with 31 different people (it’s a two-parter). We’re estimating we’ll reach around 50 interviews with 35 people all told.

For the second study, we had over 200 unique people run through our clickable prototype, with many running through it in both our mobile and desktop configurations, and thus reaching over 350 results.

The sheer number of you who have generously dedicated your time and effort to help us is nothing short of unprecedented. 💯 I seriously have never had participation numbers like that in my professional career (even when participants were paid!).

I learned early on that this community is enthusiastic, energetic, and idealistic (in a good way). I have now witnessed for myself how y’all walk the walk besides talking the talk. Thank you!️ ❤️

Beyond our gratitude, your efforts will be well worth it. Besides helping make our product better, and thus benefitting the entire Ethereum ecosystem, we’ll also be sharing the findings of our in-depth user interviews here. We’ll share our analysis and the personas we develop so that you can use them in your Ethereum-based projects.

One piece of feedback we heard repeatedly during our user interviews is that the UX of Ethereum projects needs to be better. Thus, I’d like to contribute back to the community and offer to give you UX consultations for your Ethereum-based projects. If you have a full-fledged company or project, just an idea, or something in the middle, I want to help you. Please reach out to me through the AKASHA Discord and we can set something up.

Thank you all again!

Continue to Part 3: Ethereum Personas