For the sake of this article, let’s keep web 3 explanation super simple. Web 3.0’s decentralised protocol will enable people on the internet to own and be compensated for their time and data of all forms, whereas today, all of these data are being exploited by centralised giants.
We might have seen different posts talk about how this could change our society. While these new dimension of products have hard to understand mechanics and you could lose money due to the poor design language of these platforms.. let’s take a step back and see what could web 3 be expected to bring in terms of better user experience, usability of products in the long term from a systems point of view.
The three areas I’ll cover are:
Single Sign on
Cross-border transactions
Access and control
Single-Sign on has taken the world by a storm. Can you remember the days where you had the same password and email for all the websites you used (which were a handful back in the days) until single-sign on came along with google and social media platforms.
The SSO was revolutionary in helping users get through the annoying process of
And replaced it with
These companies entrusted users to take the final decision as to what level of personal data would be shared with the services.
They promised they would take your basic information and share it with the service you are signing up for but in reality, these services exploited this function and collected identifiable personal information if you clicked “agree” in an instance. Users were clicking without reading much because this user flow was supposed to be quick. It was supposed to get them into the website or the application without much fuss.
Many people were using their main google, facebook and twitter accounts where they had credit card information, work emails, business information, Date of birth, addresses that could all point to a single person and identify them. They were sharing all these personal information through the single-sign on sites which otherwise they would have never shared with anyone on the internet.
Millions of emails and personal information were leaked in numerous attacks as per Have I been Pwned
This eventually led to the leakage of emails plus all the personal information users shared with internet services. Single-sign on which google and other social media started as a way to help users sign up to their favourite websites and apps quickly, would not have expected users to disregard permission warnings about the information that they share.
Web 3 products use a different method to what we have today with single-sign on services. Users don’t need their personal data, email or password. Here, users need to just link their wallet and they are good to go. For the first time in history, we have something called web 3 super app that promises interoperability, security and usability.
Introducing Sign in with your wallet. Imagine seeing this on your favourite multiplayer game, your grocery store checkout flow, your music subscription. Can this super wallet app take away all the risks of single sign on and give back security without risking usability. Now you are not sharing your personal identifiable information but also you are good to go with one tap. Is this the future of our authentication interaction?
For people who do cross border transactions, the user experience of traditional banking apps especially in third-world countries are abysmal. Millions of users still have to go to their branches physically and submit transaction orders that gets processed within 3-5 days. Even those with a “digital app” might not support certain countries due to whatever reasons.
The time it takes to understand cross border transaction, get details like bank account, SWIFT code, branch detail and enter them while waiting for the recipient to receive it is not a smooth experience.
Let’s look at it from an experience perspective.
The user has a goal of sending money abroad
User has different questions to answer before using the app
User has to find if the particular product / bank supports international transfer to the particular country they want
User has to get familiar with waiting time even after sending a transaction since they have no idea how many banks / financial organisations are acting in the middle
Web3 apps again, will have one entry point that the user needs to think about and focus on. The wallet address. As time goes by, the wallet address can be tied to a person’s unique personal naming system like anonymous.wallet
People just need to know this simple wallet address and the transaction distance does not matter since it is all done on chain. No more fiddling around with account number, sort code and other codes. In theory this sounds great, but how these interfaces are designed to take the user cautiously will be a huge factor in providing good experience. The risks are higher in web3 because the transactions are immutable. They cannot be reversed once it is on the ledger chain. How can we as product designers ensure that users are safe and doing transaction without slips or mistakes?
Today, as users, we are not in control of our own data. The content we create, the pictures we upload are all controlled by companies that own these remote servers. They can lock you out of your account when they want and generally, its not anyones fault but due to poorly designed edge cases.
Various products restrict personal data access outside a particular geographic location. Health-care providers have different rules regarding the use of patient data outside their home countries. Even if its being requested by the owner themselves. Is there a way that web 2 products could be designed to better accommodate these edge cases or is it better for us to transition to web3 and give people complete ownership of their data?
In this case, the only person who is capable of locking themselves out of their wallet / data is themselves if they forget their private key / seed phrase.
As designers, we could soon be ideating different solutions for different industries like banking, gaming and consumer tech to centralise certain parts of a product and giving rest of the power in the form of decentralised on-chain data to users directly thereby having the best of both worlds. It would be interesting to see new use cases come up for existing products as more and more data becomes decentralised in our lives. Imagine your supermarket shopping data and your personal health data can be automatically processed without a third party provider to give you relevant recommendations.
How these solutions are implemented by design teams play a crucial part in the adoption of these platforms. We are at a stage where the products that sell, are products that are designed with meaning, delight and security in mind.