Why UX and marketing is critical for web3 adoption
The majority of web3 users today are tech savvy people who willingly spend their time and attention understanding web3 applications. They can lean on their technical expertise to easily see the wider benefit of these tools. I’ve spent a couple years in this space trying to figure out how things work and it hasn’t been easy. It’s taken a long time for me to figure out how I can use applications, transact between wallets, manage assets, bridge chains, and all the rest. It’s too hard.
Web2 has a significant leg up on web3. Everything is easy to use. If I find an interesting website or application I want to try, I expect to be up and running within minutes without having to search for explanations. Web2 excels over web3 in this domain. In fairness, this is in large part due to a longer track record. We’ve spent years building, testing, and refining with the user in mind and it’s worked a treat. We’re currently far off from that same experience in web3. There are two key things we can learn from web2 to achieve mass adoption in web3.
Web3 Mass Adoption
Why do we want mass adoption in the first place? In short, it’s because we believe that crypto and web3 will have an exponentially positive impact on every facet of life as we know it. Because of this incredible potential, it’s imperative that we take it upon ourselves to enable mass adoption.
Not only do we have inherent flaws in web3 that are preventing us from achieving this today, but we’re also faced with the challenging narrative portrayed by mainstream media which instills a lot of fear and uncertainty around crypto and web3. As natives of this space, we need to take ownership in directing that narrative and educate new adopters.
Achieving mass adoption of any new technology requires two things:
- An amazing user experience ✅
- A clear and compelling use case ✅
The majority of web3 natives understand the use cases well. In fact, we rave about them. Once you’ve been “green pilled” (a term borrowed from Kevin Owocki), a whole new world opens up in front of you. It’s a beautiful moment. But it requires lots of enthusiasm, energy, study, and experimentation. Furthermore, it requires a willingness to understand the space and keep an open mind to new solutions. People don’t care about any of that. They care about things that make their lives easier right now, regardless of what underlying technology makes that possible. So what can we do to help onboard the next billion people to web3?
It starts with the story
As a growth marketer, I’m always aware of the stories businesses tell to entice their customers to purchase. Any marketer worth his or her salt understands that it’s all about the customer, not about your company. How will your product or service make your customers’ lives better? That’s all that matters to them. The technology you use to do that is irrelevant. We need to learn how to tell a better web3 story.
Let’s use NFTs as an example. Consider the following two messages:
- I’ve got a solution that will allow you as a creator to achieve global distribution in seconds, obtain perpetual royalties on your work, and create one-of-a-kind content that will serve you and your family for the rest of your lives.
- Non-fungible tokens are blockchain-based digital tokens that each represent a unique asset as an irrevocable certificate of ownership. NFTs are designed to be cryptographically verifiable and easily transferable between digital wallets. Through cryptographic signatures, one can easily verify the origin and ownership of the token in question. Thanks to smart contracts, we can encode royalties and rules around secondary market sales in mutually beneficial ways.
Which explanation do you think will be most interesting for a content creator who has no familiarity with blockchain technology? People want to know the benefits, not the features.
What’s perplexing to me is that we would never dream of doing this in web2. If we’re trying to onboard customers to a new platform, we would never tell them about the technical architecture of that platform. They just don’t care. So why are we doing it in web3? I think it comes down to a couple reasons.
First off, web3 technologies are technically complex and therefore, attract a lot of technically skilled people. These individuals are great at building impactful tools but weak at communicating its benefits to the end user. To get over this hurdle, we need a lot more people who can bridge the gap between the technically complex and the end user. People who can tell a compelling story and help educate the rest of the population on the benefits web3 technologies and tools have to offer. This is going to be imperative if we want to achieve mass adoption within the next 5–10 years.
Second, we’re still super early in the age of blockchain and web3. We’re still rapidly innovating on the tech, battling regulation (or lack thereof), experiencing violent market cycles, and trying to combat the mainstream narrative of crypto, all at the same time. Just like with the internet, we need time for the space to mature and people to get used to the technology. However, this doesn’t diminish the need for skilled communicators who can bridge the gap between the tech and the end user quicker. We can’t simply wait for the technology to mature and hope that people will come. We have to facilitate the story. But telling great stories is only the first step to get the user in the door.
It ends with the experience
Most products running on crypto rails today have a major flaw. They seem to be created for the web3 native without any regard to the user who’s new to the space (which will ecompass the vast majority of users). The user interface and user experience is focused on functionality but fails to tell users what they need to do and why it’s awesome.
Last week, I was exploring Optimism, a layer 2 solution on Ethereum, and wanted to purchase an NFT on Quixotic, an NFT marketplace running on Optimism. Layer 2 solutions like Optimism are described as the easiest and cheapest solution to use apps across the Ethereum ecosystem. For web3 natives, this process might be intuitive, but for the regular user, it’s anything but. Here are the steps I have to go through to purchase an NFT on Quixotic as a new web3 user.
- Purchase ETH on a centralized exchange such as Coinbase.
- Transfer funds to my MetaMask wallet.
- Bridge my ETH to Optimism. This involves switching the network in MetaMask from Ethereum Mainnet to the Optimism network.
- Go to Quixotic and connect my wallet.
- Select the NFT I want to purchase and approve the transaction in MetaMask.
- Transfer my recently purchased NFT from Quixotic to my MetaMask.
If you’ve never done any of the above before, it’s a good bet that you’ll get stuck as early as step 2 or 3. Nowhere along this journey are there simple tips or explanations for what you need to do next. You have to trawl the web to understand each step and how to proceed. Here are some screenshots from my journey on Optimism.
At no point can you find any guidelines on what to do next and what is happening. It’s assumed that you know how to proceed. We need much more clarity and guidance at this stage to help people along the journey.
I’ve got nothing against Optimism and I don’t want to single them out as a poor experience. In fact, it’s my number one choice of Layer-2 for exploring apps on Ethereum and I think it’s probably one of the best user experiences out there. I love using it. But that’s because I understand it. This kind of experience will never enable mass adoption, no matter how good the tech is. Compare the above experience to your most recent purchase from a web2 eCommerce store. Pretty different I imagine?
At this stage, there are plenty of technical problems that need to be solved in order to make the experience better and I know that engineering teams out there are working on this day and night. In the meantime, however, there’s an urgent need for skilled product marketers to join forces with web3 engineers to enable more customer centric user experience. It’s a game of marginal gains and we need to start implementing elements of guidance, support, and explanations through the entire user experience.
I named this section the way I did because the user’s experience is the final straw in this process. Thanks to decades of user centric development in web2, our tolerance for a poor user experience is almost non-existent. If a user has a terrible experience with a product, that’s usually the end of their journey. They will not come back. It doesn’t matter how much you try to convince them that decentralization and self-sovereignty is the way to go. The bottom line is, people just don’t care about this. They care about what makes their lives better. This is why it’s critical that we give work on this in parallel with engineers developing the next evolution of the internet. For those interested in going deeper into UX in web3, this medium article by Sakky B is fantastic.
Conclusion
We need to build and communicate with a non-native web3 user in mind if we want to achieve mass adoption. The web3 lingo needs to remain within technical teams and the narrative has to change to focus on the benefits to the end user. We also have to find skilled product marketers that can work with engineering teams to ensure products are built with the end user in mind. If web3 tools are even the slightest bit more inconvenient than web2, we won’t be able to onboard the next billion people.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we as marketers and communicators can help onboard people and make web3 the best possible experience. Drop me a message and let’s chat! 🙌
