Design and blockchain: it’s time to talk about designing for blockchain solutions

Panel invitation

In March 2018. Academy Xi invited me to moderate a panel of blockchain entrepreneurs on the topic of Design and Blockchain. The panel, in alphabetical order, consisted of the following entrepreneurs:

· Balwant Singh, CTO and co-founder of Velix ID

· Dee Kulkarni, CTO of Reputationaire

· Gendry Morales, Founder of The Flight Plan

· Kiersten Jowett, Mentor RMIT blockchain strategy course

The event attracted about 180 RSVPs in Melbourne Australia and consisted of blockchainers, investors in blockchain companies and designers who wanted to know more about blockchain and how it impacts their design careers.

Panel advertisement

The advertisement for the event was as follows.

“Blockchains are evolving from a simplistic distributed ledger to decentralised platforms for distributing any form of information, including entire software applications.

As blockchains multiply and evolve, designers become critical to their ongoing growth. From communication to education and UX, designers should be central to the blockchain boom, although few are currently actively engaged in the medium.

Join blockchain basecamp as we hear from a panel of designers, developers, and entrepreneurs sharing their vision of a designer’s role in the coming revolution.”

Blockchain and design background

Because of the mixed technical skills of the audience, it was beneficial to give background as to meanings of “blockchain” and “design” to align our perspectives.

Blockchain represents a TRUST MACHINE where trust is manufactured through clever software.

Blockchain is open-source technology that maintains data as a shared record distributed over many computers of people that do not know each other.

Instead of having a central authority, the entire network of combined computers is responsible for the integrity of the data, and via consensus, approves changes made to that data.

“‘Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end” said Sir George Cox, Chairman of the UK Design Council.

“Really great designers care hugely about the real people who will use the product, service, building or experience they are developing. This focus on users inspires great ideas and ensures that solutions meet real needs” said the Chief Design Officer of the UK Design Council.

Why it’s important now to raise awareness about design and blockchain in these early days of innovation

It’s time to raise awareness publicly about issues related to design of blockchains. There are many reason for this such as:

· Need for elegance in design: We want to see elegant design in blockchain solutions because that will encourage and ensure easier deployment and adoption of blockchains

· Skills shortage: There aren’t enough software engineers available with skill set and experience for all the blockchains being developed around the world. There exist about 4000 developers but the industry needs one million

· Leveraging existing design best practices: We know how to do good design for conventional centralized software systems but how, and can we, apply good design to blockchain solutions? Techniques such as Customer journeying, Agile development, UX (user experience) design, simulation and game playing can be used to improve designs but how do we design for trust? What does designing for trust really mean?

· Formation of best practice in design: Best practice is fomenting for blockchain technology in areas regarding blockchain development, services definition, token ecosystem development, and nurturing ICO communities. It’s time now to formally address and articulate this

· Perception affects market awareness: Perception in the business and consumer marketplace is that blockchain is simply a money-making machine. We need to communicate more clearly and prepare the marketplace better concerning the role and notion of blockchain

· Regulation momentum: Regulators really don’t know what to do about blockchain; they need education about blockchain and guidance in regulatory matters.

For blockchain to evolve in a well-formed manner, the issues of Figure 1 need to be tackled.

Figure 1: The time is ripe for raising awareness about issues in designing for blockchain

The above background information formed the context for the panel discussion which addressed five key questions shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Questions for the panel

Q1. What are the challenges and constraints for achieving elegant design of blockchain solutions?

Whatever one’s definition of elegant is, whether it is related to “fit for purpose design” or “modular design” or such, given the state of innovation of blockchain, what challenges and constraints does a group face in designing an elegant blockchain solution?

Panel response included:

· It takes a long time to build a blockchain

· We need to reach a stage where tricky issues become evident early on in a project rather than later

· Tools and infrastructure are currently unstable, immature and changing daily and sometimes buggy but there is just enough that works such that feasible, desirable and viable solutions can be built

· We need to capture and share the learnings (rather than work in isolation)

· Beautiful UX’s (user experiences) aren’t really evident yet

· We need to educate our user/client base better about the state of design and development and the tools available to assist elegant design

· Users will need to become comfortable using wallets with public and private keys and understanding that keys are not retrievable

· We need to create intuitive interfaces for users (the AI and VR communities have done this, why can’t we!)

· There’s a huge difference at the moment in creating interfaces for the desktop versus a mobile phone for a blockchain interaction

· User interface patterns for mobile devices are quite limited: for instance, how much can be seen and presented on a small screen given that a key consists of 20+ characters?

· How do we fit a wallet address on a small screen

· We understand conventional centralized systems which are finely tuned and operate optimally but we don’t have that degree of consistency and optimization for blockchain technology yet

· We need learnings to be captured about developing an MVP (minimal viable product) for a blockchain solution and understand how to deliver that into Live production

· Designs will need to design for non-blockchain savvy users

· Cryptocats (and CryptoKitties) were used to examine digital delivery on Ethereum

· Forking, deploying and changing smart contracts cost currency (such as $ETH); development teams can expend considerable funds learning how to do this and how to lower cost; development and deployment methods are needed that minimize costs

· We cannot do continuous daily delivery into a production platform as we do with centralized system; we need to discover ways of doing baseline production without fees, and testing the solution as well; it could cost thousands of dollars to do continuous delivery the conventional way

· Not enough reusable frameworks exist yet in the open source space; need more especially above the Solidity (Ethereum smart contract language) level

· Developers are not encouraged to write complex smart contracts to minimize costs; cost of transactions is based on number of actions and business rules

· We need cheaper or free-fee blockchains to test run smart contracts

· We cannot easily and cheaply experiment with real solutions; need better prototyping capabilities so we can find significant Use cases from which to develop solutions

· Do we need to use a blockchain — that is still the question that should be asked at the start of a project

· Do we need immutability (which blockchain offers) in a project? Important questions should be asked at the start of a project.

Q2. Can best practice, design principles and good software engineering become part of blockchain theory and practice?

It appears that best practices in software engineering aren’t being applied to blockchain development. We know from bitcoin’s development that global, distributed development via remote programmers does work and the global peer and open reviews are effective. But that is just one technique in the software engineering arsenal. Can we tell, or do we know, that software engineering practices being used on blockchain development teams? Not really.

Also, when using blockchains today it is clear that the user experience is below par (compared to centralized systems) and it is not obvious whether good design practices have been applied to developing and maintaining blockchains. Further, perhaps traditional software engineering techniques need refinement for development of de-centralised solutions.

Panel response:

· It’s not clear what the right techniques are for blockchain design and development yet

· More research is needed and now is the perfect time to tackle this

· We have the opportunity to create the patterns and techniques for the blockchain community to experiment with

· Best practice in UX at the moment seems to relate to Google Chrome Metamask and popups as to how much Gas is needed

· There are many gaps today in techniques and tools

· But improvements have happened which can be seen in the design of wallets

· We need to define better UX via customer journeying and participation in the design process

· Timing of transactions is an interesting issue: how do we design an interface if we know a transaction is going to take 10 minutes — what will the interface present in that 10 minutes of waiting to the end-user as the pending states progress

· At least with blockchains, we can monitor the progress of every transaction such as via Etherscan but non-blockchain savvy users will not likely know this

· Users don’t really want to be viewing long keys

· We need to explore best practice for Ideation techniques and prototyping capabilities

· How do we prototype distributed trust?

· How do we code for Append-only blockchains when we really only understand changing code and creating new versions of code and baselines?

· What are the production and delivery operations needed?

· Design Ops, Ideo and Mashups are very good approaches for blockchain design

· Slice your blockchain idea as “thin” as possible and then develop and test it

· The user shouldn’t really need to know that there is a blockchain in the system; they just need to know that the data is secure and verified on the blockchain

· Reusable frameworks are being captured in open source sites and more is needed

· There aren’t enough good examples or patterns of how to do things the right way

· We are starting to see business intelligence layers such that we can talk sensibly about monetization

· Testnets don’t cost money so alpha versions of blockchains are tested there

· Once code is on the MainNet, it’s there forever.

Q3. What responsibilities do we have towards customers, industry, government and academia as entrepreneurs of blockchain solutions?

As entrepreneurs, we are all busy developing new solutions yet we are part of a blockchain community that is evolving. WE are determining what solutions are being developed and also, what tools and infrastructure we want. Surely we have responsibilities to the community as well as to our clients, but further, to government who wants to regulate and to academia who wants to help upskill the community?

Panel response:

· Given the perception that blockchain is a money-making machine, we need to alter that and remind the business world that blockchains solve real problems and we can build beautiful and safe solutions

· We need to educate our users/clients

· ICO white papers don’t focus enough on the blockchain solution itself

· Whilst Bitcoin has spurred the world towards blockchain solutions, it doesn’t mean that each solution will make money

· Ideally we should hide the complexities of blockchain from the users

· We must encourage the community to expand

· We must encourage best practices

· What does it mean for humanity to be able to distribute trust and what are the benefits and opportunities that will flow from that?

· We should create a concept of shared value across the community; let’s build a foundational basis for this

· Let’s bring more people into the blockchain space with different perspectives about how humanity can benefit and leverage from distributed trust.

Q4. How can we ensure, and speed up, adoption of blockchains …. or should we?

Depending on one’s perspective, the deployment of blockchain solutions is happening too slowly or too fast. It’s too slow because the users and developers have to take risks given the immaturity of the technologies. It’s too fast because the industry, academia, government and skills acquisition have not kept pace. Hence, should we force the adoption or let it happen at a natural pace?

Panel response:

· It was a mixed reaction: some want to let blockchain evolve at its own pace whereas others want to speed it up

· Blockchain should only be used when appropriate (rather than enforcing it)

· Let’s understand blockchain in relation to AI

· Universities can help with education as could more government support

· Fintechs has significant funds which means we can speed it up

· Let’s focus on the non-risky areas at first so that we can experiment quickly with minimal risk.

Q5. What skills and new roles are needed to support blockchain technology?

We ran out of time for the panel to discuss this question but in general discussions, we find a need to fill new types of roles such as: blockchain architect, blockchain UX designer, blockchain cost modeller, mechanism designer, blockchain systems designer, crypto economists and cost testers/simulators.

We need roles such as that which exists in marketing which have “focus groups” where designers can watch the focus group to get immediate feedback and ideate with the users for immediate feedback.

Conclusion

Designers are very interested in understanding what role they can play in the development of blockchain solutions.

Little research seems to exist so far regarding designing for blockchains. In general, considerable research and articulation of best practice is needed concerning design, development and deployment of blockchain solutions. We need to determine what are the best techniques. Learnings need to be captured and elegant designs noted. More stable and mature tools and infrastructure are also needed. These are all evolving in synchrony.

There are tremendous opportunities open for understanding and improving how we design, develop and deliver production-quality blockchain solutions. Prototyping new ideas is an important part of discovering a viable blockchain solution.

The penetration of blockchain into all walks of life means we need different education approaches whether it’s universities or private training or blockchain/cryptocurrency parties (as was done with Tupperware parties). We are bringing the education to the home as well as the office, as well as in formal learning institutions. All avenues are needed today.

A video stream of the panel discussion can be found at https://m.facebook.com/academyxi/

A few days following the panel session a couple of interesting and relevant papers were published.

Sarah Baker Mill’s article about blockchain designer issues https://media.consensys.net/designing-for-blockchain-whats-different-and-what-s-at-stake-b867eeade1c9 adds tremendous value to the discussion above.

A significant slide pack revealing insights into the state-of-practice and state-of-art for design is at Design in Tech Report 2018.

Susan Dart