So many brilliant projects hate their users.

And no, working on a nascent technology isn’t even an excuse. We have the tools and knowledge available to make these products less painful, and zero efforts are made to use them.

You made a fully onchain game, and you deployed it on L1.

You created a lending protocol based on someone’s onchain activities, and you never showed the credit score.

You made a decentralized PGF, and you’re making aunties figure out on Etherscan whether their donation for hippos in Thailand has been sent or not (ain’t gonna happen).

And so, this is how inceldom spreads in crypto.

How incels never get a girlfriend

Nobody thinks about getting a girl more than a blackpilled incel, but no one has been more unsuccessful at it.

Bro could have solved it with some user research. Here’s how:

• Get some initial data from successful competitors or other researches

• Set aside assumptions about what women want

• Start testing your approaches

• Analyze your findings

• Create a strategy that works best based on findings

Same with crypto applications, employ similar methods but for users.

The important takeaway is: you and your users are different people. If you build with assumptions on what they want and how they will interact with your product, you’ll be missing out on very important information needed to onboard more of them or keep them.

How to measure UX maturity

Flash news: we are in our ugly dev-centric UX era.

So if you’re building a product, remember one thing: you are the most native user of your app. But your users will be on the other side of the spectrum.

Want a way to measure how good is your UX? There’s a framework for it:

Most web3 products will fall somewhere between limited and emergent as they recognize the need for good UX and develop some form of interaction language, but it’s definitely nowhere the consistency and system that a large and diverse set of users will require.

Anyway, the take is if you want to achieve this consistency, it takes empathy to understand that intuitive experiences are made by throwing assumptions about your users out the window and observing the emotions they experience as they access and navigate the product.

And it takes an even bigger, industry-wide coordination to reach user-driven maturity.

Just a few years more, anon. We’ll have enough data to produce a proven standard that will shape crypto user habits and interaction patterns.