Designing blockchain for those who can benefit from it most
By: Ruhi Pudipeddi
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Design, Accessibility, Blockchain, UX

Designing blockchain for those who can benefit from it most

Reconciling a mass-adoption pipe dream with accessibility across the socioeconomic spectrum

We love to fantasize about a world in which the crypto community achieves mass adoption. A reverie in which blockchain systems constitute an invisible ground layer, an underlying framework for institutions that cypherpunks and commoners alike engage with routinely: banking, voting, music streaming, data sharing, healthcare and so on. The idea of mass adoption relies on such a smooth coalescence of interoperability that not everyone will need to be familiar with the technicality of these systems for them to work.

Blockchain will soon power socioeconomic systems, governance, and infrastructure in cities and nations.

However, in moving toward this crypto-charged world, we must accept that mass awareness is critical to setting up sustainable systems. It’s not just the tech-illiterate and cyberphobic who often encounter difficulty in the process of blockchain education. Mass adoption includes all populations, and those that are most frequently overlooked when we discuss the integration of blockchain into daily life are disadvantaged populations — disabled, low-income, non-white, elderly, and rural, to name a few.

Imagine a bitcoin transaction with the illusion of no block confirmation downtime.

In addition to increased awareness, mass adoption also requires a seamless end-to-end experience for the aforementioned populace and general public alike.

One in which a classic crypto transaction is reformed to mirror, say, the swiftness of using Apple Pay at a cafe by scanning a Square-enabled iPad to get your daily oat milk latte.

Enabling disenfranchised populations to engage with blockchain technology necessitates their trust in the systems they use. Designing a trustworthy application can be instrumental two ways: first, in reducing the stigmas, associations, and limitations of the blockchain ecosystem that cause adoption to fail for communities who could use it most. Second, in extending credibility, familiarity, and comfort toward those less eager to engage in distributed ledger technology. This will require a focus on user experience to build trust-enabled transactions, like the one just described, to occur with ease for all populations. Both motives underpin a narrative of making the blockchain design system a subject of trust.

Is crypto really “the great equalizer”?

Unfortunately for crypto activists, the main barrier to blockchain adoption has been extensively researched and identified as knowledge. Expertise and industry exposure remains concentrated amongst white men. This is especially evident in its most widespread application, currency.

A survey by CoinDesk found that 90% of Bitcoin users are men, and 66% of those respondents were white. In a system that enables income inequality, crypto-whales can hoard wealth and saturate it amongst a few holders with no incentive to contribute to the system’s accessibility. Bloomberg Businessweek reports about 1,000 users hold around 40% of all Bitcoin. Unfortunately, this propagates a lack of trust in a network built on decentralized economy, because it lends an ability for the upper Bitcoin bros to manipulate digital pricing and trade only inside their tight circles.

The case for blockchain in disenfranchised populations

In theory, and increasingly in practice, blockchain technology can resolve many socioeconomic barriers with layers of added accessibility. The concept of the crypto economy suggests equality is a natural byproduct of certain elements in combination — like an inclusive consensus model, smart-contracts on anonymous networks, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Consider Sweden’s attempts to build a blockchain-based land registry, which could be instrumental for the 70% of people globally who lack suitable property rights, or the UN’s deployment of a blockchain that allows Syrian refugees to pay for food in Jordanian camps by scanning their eye, which affords a certain level of anonymity and a privacy lifeline. Minority and impaired populations are in an excellent position to benefit from strategic use cases. But the aforementioned causes benefit from large-scale action on behalf of a national government and global organization; encouraging adoption in communities without this type of impetus requires voluntary engagement.

ChromaWay’s report on Sweden’s land registry use case shows promise in eliminating forgery and corruption.

Being a technology not specifically targeted towards minorities, cryptocurrency is certainly not comparable to the efforts of the UN and Sweden, but it’s worth exploring obstacles to engagement in any context. Unsurprisingly, the data on minority blockchain accessibility is incredibly under-researched, and the reasons are under-reported. A 2015 article in The Atlantic entitled “Why Are So Few Black People Using Bitcoin?” interviewed Nicholas Pearce, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, on the adoption of Bitcoin in the African-American community. “The fact that many African Americans don’t use PayPal, or are even afraid to do retail banking”, he says, indicates an overall distrust of financial institutions. Moreover, the WEF’s research shows access to technology amongst minority populations is more likely to be limited due to lower median income, hindering potential interactions with digitized currency.

The shallow, damaging reputation of Bitcoin precedes it. Largely associated with illicit marketplaces and volatility by mass media, Pearce suggests African-Americans avoid Bitcoin ‘so as not to introduce it into a community that has enough issues with alternative economies’. It’s true that public stigmatization at large likely impedes the usage of Bitcoin in many minority communities. Given that the average black household owns 5% of the wealth owned by the average white household, the risk tolerance for cryptocurrency — seen as volatile and speculative — may be lower among this population.

The underlying associations with Bitcoin as a means for purchasing drugs, guns, and other black-market goods is unfavorable for populations that already face enough institutionalized reproach. Naturally, mistrust harms the overall dependability of blockchain technology amongst minorities.

Design as a means for creating trust

“Nobody cares what software Facebook runs on. Users only care about what the product lets them do and how it makes them feel.”

Inherently, the user experience of a blockchain is remarkably inaccessible. Consider a non-currency application in which a user keeps a 256-bit hexadecimal string as a private key, something like 28e4b82c52f060c12b3702f8b8c167dc7525410d0fc6b0f52620fc816eaf0bfa. It’s a monstrosity that’s impossible to memorize and clunky to store.

Sheri Byrne-Haber, head of accessibility at VMWare, suggests turning these strings into QR codes for increased user-friendliness, a simple conversion — one that can prevent potential eye-straining, screen-clogging, alphanumeric chaos. Which brings us to the broader idea: blockchain services need to focus on the needs and values of users before they continue to restlessly add features.

Let’s talk about that hexadecimal key. For something securing a myriad of digital assets and intimate confidentialities (think votes, healthcare info, personal data), it feels cold. It might imply security, but barely conveys it. Especially in a decentralized system where no authority exists to assure users of their safety, a system must consider that users need a sense of familiarity and solace in order to benefit from its protection. Simplification in the onboarding process and consistency with patterns in familiar environments can heavily increase user comfort. Turning to inspiration, this podcast features Argent’s head of UX, Graeme Blackwood, who discusses Argent’s Ethereum wallet — an excellent example of extreme simplicity. Celo, an organization whose mission is based in financial accessibility, also pays commendable attention to detail in creating comfort and ease in their onboarding process.

Another example is the retitling of jargonistic terms like public address, private key, and gas with username, passkey, and transaction fee in a top-level interface. This simple change ensures these features now automatically fit within common mental frameworks built from systems people already use.

Let’s zero in on the perspective of the new blockchain designer as the engineer of comfort.

“These are real problems that many in the community are not thinking about and as empaths, we need to design products and services that will not merely have safety nets thus reverting right back to our dependency for centralization (think: too-big-to-fail), but rather equip our new, fragile ecosystems for sustainability on their own.” — Chris Palle

Reconciling the “trustlessness” and “transparency” of blockchain at a programmatic level is easy, but dissolves at the end user experience unless tactically planned. Masking the ambiguity, uncertainty, and disruption that comes with migration during mass adoption requires a disguise that still imparts the aspects made meaningful, useful, and perhaps enjoyable. We can draw these fundamentals from blockchain designers like Ariel Hajbos, who reminds us that “with blockchain apps, you have to signal to the user and say ‘hey, you’re fine, your assets are fine, everything is happening as it should.’” The true essence of an ideal UX will ensure the user doesn’t have to understand the complex technological processes underlying a transaction, or even interact with them — they just need to know it’s completed, more securely and privately than had it occurred on another infrastructure.

In conclusion

Mass adoption necessitates conversation concerning populations without traditional access to blockchain systems. Though design should not be touted as a catch-all solution to rampant inaccessibilities, it can realistically resolve significant blockage that currently exists with appropriate measures and thought.

This is not a step-by-step guide for inclusive blockchain design or an exploration of specific configurations that can solve the problems mentioned. This is a call to action for developers and companies to earnestly dedicate efforts in their blockchain production toward designing for accessibility, adoption, and trust. And in the meantime, we can work on collecting more data about disenfranchised populations alongside the blockchain to bolster our tools for mass adoption.