Sakky

Posted on Jun 05, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

The UX Tipping Point is going to kill Web3 products

I was speaking to some co-founders when I was in San Francisco recently for Startup Grind, mainly around ZeroToDesign and how we help startups.

The co-founders were on opposite ends of the outsourcing scale for their Product & UX design. One was very chilled about the idea of Z2D coming in and owning their Design function — let’s call him Dude1. The other,* let’s call him Dude2*, was completely against it, as he wanted to have a proper in-house team to handle their Product Design.

We’ve seen these two personas from the very beginning of Z2D. It’s a founder conversation, and how happy they are to have what on paper is an outsourced function for their product (we don’t work like an outsourced function but that’s a topic for another time).

Our conversation then took a turn when Dude1 made an interesting point. He said:

There’s no problem in outsourcing when the product isn’t your entire business.

When your product isn’t the entire business. Interesting. What he was saying was that when there are other USPs in your business, beyond just the (typically SaaS) product you are creating, then outsourcing isn’t a problem, because it’s not the be-all and end-all for your business, there are other things customers care about that you provide.

(I disagree with the idea of outsourcing being appropriate for non-primary products — but I do accept that many startups feel they need to control their experience in-house to make it great. I don’t think it needs to be this way but that’s my biased opinion while I create an awesome agency)

I didn’t have an opinion when Dude1 spoke, I wanted to let the point settle in my head, but my gut said that makes sense. I’ve worked in many startups that didn’t care/invest much about their Product & UX Design but still were great businesses that would be profitable, funded multiple times, and even turn into unicorns.

As much as I want to drive for a great user experience in products, the reality is that it’s not always necessary for every company. **For a lot of Web3 products right now, the focus is on functionality, not usability. **So it got me thinking about the reasons why and how this occurs…

A Twitter thread

Daniel Rhodes responded to a thread on Twitter recently:

‘How does good UX make banks more money?’

It’s a great question, and to me, there’s a simple answer:

Competiton + easy transferability.

It made me think there’s a matrix of some sort for products across these two variables. So I created a chart to illustrate some types of products/platforms, and where they sit.

Transferability renamed to Switching.

As we’d expect, there aren’t going to be that many products that sit in a low competition zone. In this day and age, low competition will not last for long. That’s the key, you can feel this sense of invisibility when there is nothing else out there for your customers to just switch easily, but that day will come. Let’s call this transition (dashed line) the** UX Tipping Point**.

This is where not caring much about your UX really falls apart.

Web3 products haven’t hit their tipping point yet in 2022, and they’re operating under some pre-tipping point scenarios, but I predict come 2024 they’ll be well inside.

Pre UX tipping point scenarios

I think there are 3 main scenarios that mean for a period of time you might not have to worry about a user’s experience that much*.*

Multi-product offering

This is from the example at the start of the article. Where your business doesn’t solely rely on one product to generate revenue.

An example from my past is Goodlord, which is a real-estate management platform primarily but offers alternative products to its customers like insurance and contract signing.

This allows the primary SaaS product — the management tool to not be in the spotlight for their customers and ultimately their balance sheet. So the UX takes a back seat because the whole product takes a back seat.

Monopolies

When you are the sole owner of your space/niche, what will customers do if your UX is trash?

Footyaddicts.com and Spareroom.co.uk are good examples of this. Both are 2-sided marketplaces in the UK, and absolutely dominate their individual markets, football games, and renting respectively. Their experiences are sub-par in the grand scheme of things, but we as customers have no alternative options for signing up to football games and renting easily (in London) so we live with it.

Early-adopter customer base

I touched on this in a previous article about the challenge for Web3 products with UI/UX.

When you have a product that makes a quantum leap in technology and thus 100x’s the complete *experience, *not just the digital product experience, then simply put, people are willing to take a poor UX. This is because whatever they were doing before, would’ve taken so many more steps and hours that it’s figuring out the new product while it's still not intuitive.

Crypto FX is a good example of this. Cryptocurrency allows you to send payments instantly to anyone (their wallet) in the world. Pretty powerful stuff.

But it can be a bit of a hassle to take money from USD to XRP to GBP using wallets, not all the experiences that exist today are super seamless at converting using crypto. However, if you try moving money from USD to GBP and you’ll either get hammered with fees ($40 wire transfers) or it’ll take 3–5 business days.

So the quantum leap is worth a weird experience for early adopters.

This won’t last forever though. Eventually, players will see the potential and build similar products built on the improved technology, and this is already happening.

For Web3 products right now, Early-adopter customer bases and Monopolies are the most common scenarios. These 2 do have an overlap period because by its nature an early-adopter product might be a monopoly as no one else has created its quantum leap product yet. Within these scenarios, it can feel like UX isn’t a priority, but that can quickly change…

Example— Sketch

From the UX Tipping Point chart, you can see UI design tools in 2021 sit inside the tipping point, but they weren’t always like that. It was a very different story in 2015, competition was much lower, as Figma and Adobe XD hadn’t launched.

Sketch was a UI design software from the 2010s. It was a quantum leap in software for Product & Visual Designers relative to Photoshop and occupied a nice monopoly in the mid-2010s.

But their UX had big holes, like no real-time collab, lack of community, and a heavy native Mac application. There were plenty of other issues, like platform updates being once a year. Then Figma launched in 2015, then Adobe XD in 2016, and these started to gain traction. The monopoly Sketch enjoyed faded as more tools came, and then the market share drastically changed…

From Sketch at 7x that of Figma in 2017:

To Figma being 3x Sketch in 2021:

Figma at almost 3x Sketch

It’s a crazy fall from grace for what once was the darling of UI design.

Don’t be Sketch, invest in UX.

5-year Google Trends graph for Sketch (black) and Figma (blue)

The survey was run by UX Tools which has over 14k subscribers on its email list and had >3k respondents to their 2021 survey, a fair sample size for designers and their tool choices.

With Web3 products right now, it’s either so early that there are early adopters willing to take poor UX because it's a quantum leap in technology, or they have a monopoly, such as MetaMask with non-custodial wallets. But MetaMask has players like Argent.xyz which has a tremendous UX, and I can foresee a similar fate from Sketch & Figma in a few years.

To avoid a fate like Sketch, startups and their products will need to focus on making good user experiences before they reach their UX Tipping Point, rather than scrambling for high-quality and expensive designers when they suddenly get there.

That’s where I come in.

Sakky B

Zerotodesign.com

Web3