You haven’t been bullish enough on how unexplored UX for crypto is.

We have been designing for cryptonatives and it’s been fantastic. The technology has become so advanced that our products have gotten to the early majority radar. But for some reason, UX design is still a hot mess with no consensus and rationale to design.

Consider this:

Design 1. If somebody clicks ‘max’ on a native token, as with current practice, they will be inputting the maximum amount of tokens that they have. But then if they proceed, they wouldn’t have the gas to pay for the transaction, which is bad because you’re leading your user to a dead end. So let’s try another option.

Design 2. If somebody clicks max on a native token, system automatically deducts the estimated gas fees to it. This will lessen the cognitive burden for the user as they will no longer have to compute for gas. It is all good and efficient and less explaining to newcomers. Except that you will be deviating from how it works with other existing dexes if you do it this way.

We can continue using Design 1 widely, but that will train users to get used to the tedious process of mentally accounting for gas and manually rewritting the values in the field to deduct it. If they form it as a habit, it will be a debt to get past before anyone could implement the more efficient Design 2.

Imagine us having industry-wide UX inconsistencies when the non-cryptonative app user, the so-called ‘mass consumer’ has started using our infrastructures and products. There will be a lot of confusion.

We need a consensus on standard interaction patterns in crypto applications and a free and easy way to build on publicly available tools and knowledge. Hence, the WAIFU project.

The Web3 Adoption Interface For UX (WAIFU)

WAIFU is an open-source knowledgeware and software that any developer or product designer can use to quickly create good web3 experiences.

The aim is to set standard interaction patterns across the industry so that users can form habits with dApps much like how everyone eventually did with regular web apps.

Currently, crypto UX is thought of as something that should be delegated to specialized agencies, if not an in-house experimental team (rare tho).

But nimble projects would naturally prioritize engineering first. And even if they do pay for a UX agency, agencies will design for the specific application needs. So the interaction design approach for every web3 application is different, even while serving the same functionalities.

The WAIFU project can remedy the coordination gap for product designers. Or at least fill the need of solo hackers and small teams to have prototypes and MVPs with decent UX patterns.

As more devs and builders use it, people can start to learn and intuit across different dapps.

Waifu is Calling for Frends

We have ERC standards for composable EVM software. And now that we’re aiming for a much wider, non-cryptonative adoption, we need to equip shippers with open source knowledge and tools to implement predictable crypto UX design patterns.

It is an ongoing project and I’m working on it alone as of today, so this shall come in drops. As more materials are released, I’ll open it for more to get involved because crypto’s UX standards should be a community-wide effort. Anyhow, we just gotta start somewhere. WAIFU will have more frends soon.