By Jonathan Laird

Originally published on The Block, July 15, 2020

Quick takes:

• Usability is a critical requirement for cryptocurrency adoption.
• New technologies need to be easy enough to use that people will be willing to try them.
• Cryptocurrencies need to be designed for ease of use to 
• Cryptocurrencies need to be designed as mission-critical systems with both ease of use and error avoidance.

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 with the increased media attention.  Much of the industry excitement since then has been due to technical developments such as the Lightning Network, but despite the technical progress, the experience of using cryptocurrencies is not radically different today than it was several years ago.  However, given the complexities of cryptocurrencies, the industry needs to maintain a sharp focus on usability.

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).  He points out that “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.  The benefits of decentralization will be lost.  Therefore, a critical question is how user-interface (UI) designers and developers should think about usability in the blockchain space.

Lessons from history

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

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 has 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 it exactly.

In contrast, a graphical user interface (GUI) is far more intuitive.  The basic actions (clicking and dragging) are analogous to how humans push and move objects in the real world.  A GUI is virtual, but it maintains a sense of familiarity that the CLI lacks.  Today, most users depend on GUIs, which 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 e-mails and Signal messages perform similar functions and operate with end-to-end encryption, but Signal is easier to use, which has encouraged adoption even by less technically inclined people.

As simple 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 that “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.”  Amanda B. Johnson made a similar observation in 2016 about how cryptocurrencies need to be as simple to use as online banking.  Otherwise, cryptocurrencies may never grow beyond a tiny niche market.

Cryptocurrencies, however, are unlike conventional financial instruments.  They are, as Andreas Antonopoulos says of Bitcoin, “the internet of money, and currency is just the first application.”   And as Matt Hougan writes in Forbes, 

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 technology 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 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 that protection 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 technology 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 rapidly.  These days are still early for the industry.