The case for UX design in the future of web3

Web3 UX Design is in its nascent stage: web3 products, currently being built by crypto-native developers and builders, are vastly inaccessible to non-crypto native users. To enable users to enter web3 securely and comfortably, we must activate, rethink, and augment web2 UX best practices. UX Fundamentals like usefulness, usability, accessibility, and enjoyability should be implemented with effective onboarding processes and by-now basic features that fulfill users' expectations. To help some non-designers understand what UX Design is, what it stands for, and why it is so central to creating successful products with effective experiences, I wrote this little blip on the topic.

What exactly is UX Design?

UX Design is the location where an emotional human-computer interaction is to be put in the foreground, centered, and zoomed on. UX Design is a vast domain, naturally inter-disciplinary, and benefits from diverse expertise, backgrounds, and prior experiences.

UX Design stands for User Experience Design, meaning the experience actualized or “made real” in the human using the computer’s software (or any other digital and physical tool) by its visual, audible, or tactile interface; or any other forms of human perception. Designing for an experience in the singular is an exercise in impossibility since humans are inherently different beings by virtue of their subjective nature.

Designing with, not for humans.

This means the entirety of virtual possibilities in any human-computer interaction is naturally infinite. However, the skillful application of many of the human sciences — psychology, behavioral science, and sociology, mixed with the empirical research methods from anthropology, ethnography, and the natural sciences — enables us to work with a science-backed and research-filled focus on the experience we as UX designers aim to realize for and in our users.

By designing with the human and not firsthand for the human — learning from users and receiving feedback critiques, reiterating our approach, and iterating the design — we can reach the end goal of inducing a pleasurable, enjoyable, and useful experience for the users by creating great products, whose greatness lies in successfully achieving these goals. All of this is why I understand UX Design as a vast area of expertise necessary to create useful and usable digital products; by zooming in and out on any given design problem and making use of inter-disciplinarity in the most effective way possible.

UX Design will undoubtedly become one of the central pieces in the future of web3 adoption. To onboard “the first billion” users to the future of the internet and blockchain technology, teams and businesses, from crypto-wallets to DEX, from DeFi to NFT marketplaces, must observe and listen to their users in this unification of web3 technology with user experience design.