Product and Usability Challenges of Decentralized Services - Part II
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It’s probably not hot news that the user experience across blockchain-based services and applications is not great, yet.
Part of the reason for this malaise is such that entrepreneurs in the space still mainly build for nerds and themselves. This fact in turn is due to the current technical fundamentals that make it very hard to actually design and build on-par experience for the mainstream.
In this second post I like to further explore the fundamental reasons for the above and the implications for the user experience. Today, I will explore an alternative to the very conventional sign-up pattern used in centralised services. You can find the first part here.
The ongoing challenge herein lies to bring decentralized experiences on par with their centralized counterparts, in terms of overall UX and usability in particular.
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You may wonder why the fuss? In fact, on the surface it looks pretty much the same. Below the surface, it ain’t. In general, the first part gave bit of a technical backdrop to understand the difference between decentralized and centralized web-based software and services. This difference is crucially important to understand. As the name implies, the main difference is: decentralized services work without a central server. Therefore, a lot of logic is moved to the frontend, ie. the browser.
Where’s the logic?
Technical differences inspire new approaches. Crypto software designer and developers must adhere to different technical paradigms. On the other hand they, too, must simplify their approaches in order to widen their products’ reach and gain mainstream adoption.
The first part went into explaining the implications of conventional sign-up methods deployed in decentralized services. In this second part we will take a look at a new sign-up pattern for the decentralized future: the so called mnemonic or seed phrase.
We will explore the benefits and potential pitfalls.
New approaches to old problems
Due to its technical differences to centralized services, the crypto industry uses various methods for user or account creation. One method in particular is deployed frequently…
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