Snackable UX insights

Testing Bitcoin Core App, Summer of Bitcoin and a bunch of other stuff :-)

Jumping off the deep end? Its been an exhilarating week to put it lightly. A lot more things going on than usual and so I will already state that this post is slightly longer than usual. 😅 I always intend on these posts being snackable and then I don’t see the snackability once I’ve reached the end. :🕶️

Lets dive in!

🧪 UX Research Toolkit

Worked this week on the UX research toolkit by creating content for the repository section of the kit. Had a quick chat with Johns to think through this one. One of the problems that a lot of open source projects have is that the data or user feedback is scattered and comes in from many different sources. Sometimes a user posts an issue on Github. Sometimes we conduct UX research and so pooling together insights from all of these sources is pretty important. I ideated on creating a “living” repository for Bitcoin Core App and exploring how research insights could be bucketed into there based on the part of the user interface it is referring to. Will test out how this works out practically.

🔶Fedimint

The community also jumped on a call with the Fedimint team on Thursday and they are keen on having some designs built:

• A UI for the lightning gateway

• UI for setting up the federation

• A mobile app in the future.

So a new project that has come into the community and keen on seeing how that one evolves.

🕹️Saving Satoshi

Andrew the project manager from Saving Satoshi and I also jumped on a call. We ideated on how the team can set up a process that brings the UX Research process closer to the development process. There are a lot of teams in the space that have this same question and so it was good to ideate on this together.

👓 Bitcoin core app guerilla testing

We jumped on a super insightful call this week as well for Bitcoin Core App. This was about as hands on UX research as you can get. We did some live guerilla testing. Let me say that I initially spelt the word guerilla…gorilla and Christoph was very polite and sent a DM and saying “Mo I think it might be guerilla testing”. I had to laugh very hard. And so the cover image of this call was as you might have guessed is a gorilla.

Gotta have some fun while you work :-)

I have to say I learnt so many things from this live testing session:

• It’s good to test out your product on a small audience before the larger launch. There will always be some small intricate insights you can gain which can then be solved before launching to the wider public.

• Allowing the team of builders to see how someone else experiences the interface is a really valuable exp for them, they get to see hands on how people use the application they’ve built.

⛱️ Summer of Bitcoin

Next to that the Summer of Bitcoin Students have been powering away and working on both the Accessible Lightning wallet as well as a UX research plan for Saving Satoshi. So far what I have learnt from reviewing their proposals is that:

• Accessibility wallet: Focusing on one user group would be a good angle to go with to hyper focus on one group and really build for them. Since there are varying levels of visual disabilities they will mostly focus on the fully blind person.

• Saving Satoshi: The students here are very much looking at the UI itself as well as the interactive experience.

  • How accessible is the UI and how can we make it more accessible?

  • Some of the students have already done a competitive analysis as well as a heuristics analysis of the interface and included that in their proposals.

Heuristics is designing the interactive experience for the user:

• When a user clicks on the send button what is it that they expect to see there?

• How does the interface react compared to other apps in the space?

• Error messages as well as help messages.

• How well does the interface provide clear expectations for what is about to happen next?

Wallet Scrutiny

We also had a call with the Wallet Scrutiny team and are moving forward swiftly with the homepage design. Some areas to move this project forward will be also looking at the copy of the methodology page as well as the about page. You can read up about the collaboration here. Or sign up for the bitcoin design community calender and hop onto one of our upcoming calls.

Last but not least also helped out with the BTC Prague organization as the Bitcoin Design Community will be there as well.

Also chatted on 2 podcasts, one about working in Open Source Design and I also had a lot of fun with the guys over at Connect the World.

As always thank you so much for reading, I really do appreciate you reading me ramble on about various topics.

Feel free to reach out anytime if you are working in the space, always happy to connect with fellow builders.

Have a good one!

Mo.