Improved User Experience will Drive Adoption: IOTA as a case study

If you have held IOTA you are probably familiar with "ZERO balance error", or maybe "Private Key Reuse Error", today I'd like to talk about what this says about crypto today, and make one suggestion to developers and users to increase crypto's adoption:

• Users need to voice our concerns, developers need to listen and respond with improvements to user interfaces, and develop with user experience in mind.

IOTA's wallet is a symptom, not the problem:

Today I am going to cite my experience with IOTA, and its user experience issues, however my criticism is not levied at IOTA directly, they are just an example of the wider issue.

Some Background: IOTA wallet errors
For those who do not know IOTA has a wallet that is problematic, it was not designed by the IOTA team, and it is a free download, both of which mean it is far from perfect.

The dreaded "zero balance error" is one where you log in and find you have lost your funds, in fact they are there but you need to "attach your wallet to the node" which can be complicated and time consuming, and it is always scary and annoying.

And the "private key reuse error", is no less scary and annoying. With this error you find that your funds are frozen in your wallet, because they were mistakenly placed within that wallet via two seperate transactions using the same wallet address. Expert users will understand that the wallet requires a new address for each transaction but noobs will not... I am a n3wb and so got pwn'd by this error.

But here is my point today:

More Attention needs to be paid to user experience

• These errors, and the annoyances they cause, are not the problem, they are symptoms of the core issue.
• The core issue is that User interfaces within crypto (not just IOTA) are a secondary concern, not given any serious time or attention in development.

Of course development takes time, and the teams are working to improve these issues I am sure, but my hope would be that user experience would be underlying every other endeavour, not left to the last minute and tacked on.

Why does this matter?

For crypto to reach a place where it is ubiquitous we require more users, and since many users are like me, going to make mistakes such as using an address twice to receive funds we cannot have wallets that will freeze funds for such an event! This user experience is not acceptable for most people, they will refrain from investing because of perceived or actual technical inability.

User vs. Code: Facebook & Cryptocurrency
For crypto to reach global adoption we are going to need to online people who are completely non-technical, grandmothers who have no idea how to use email, or young adults who struggle with a learning disability. Facebook does this. They have over 2 billion users, nearly 1/3 of all humans on Earth user Facebook, and they only started operating, in 2004, 14 years ago.

How are they able to do this? Because they lower the technical barriers for usage, opening the door to as many users as possible, and they do this by making user experience a top priority. Crypto needs to learn this lesson.

To explore this conversation I want to give an example from my real life today, this will hopefully illustrate how Facebook puts ease of use, and user service first, and by contrast we can see how far cryptocurrency (specifically IOTA) has to go.

A User's Experience: Facebook vs. IOTA

Facebook:
Today I was setting up my phone, linking my social media and emails, and when attempting to link my Facebook I realised I do not know my own password so I couldn't link that account. I attempted to guess my password once but for fear of locking my account I didn't try a second time.

To my surprise within 10 minutes I had received an auto email from Facebook which said this: Having trouble? Just one click... we'll log you in."

IOTA:
Compare that to my recent experience with the IOTA desktop wallet, where I have 802.4 MIOTA stored, frozen due to something called "private key reuse error".

These funds were originally sent to this wallet from Binance and are now frozen because I made an avoidable mistake. You see, I sent 10 MIOTA to test the connection and be sure I had the address correct, I do this as to reassure myself that everything is ok. After the first transaction goes through I then send the remaining balance, but because of how the IOTA wallet works, sending two transactions to the same address causes this very serious problem. The IOTA wallet requires that you use a new address every time or you will freeze funds in that account due to the "private key reuse error" mentioned above. So now, unfortunately that means I have over $1,000 USD frozen in that wallet...

Here is how I learned about my problem, I logged into my desktop wallet, light node, and attempted to send my tokens somewhere and received the following message:

"Winternitz one-time signature (W-OTS) scheme", what the #### is that?! I want my money! :)

At first I assumed I needed to reboot or try again, but nope. Following a short Google search it became clear others have this problem as well, and yes there is a solution but its complicated and the solution may be beyond my capabilities.

For those interested the solution I found is linked here:

https://forum.helloiota.com/7398/HOWTO-Reusing-a-misused-adress-Error-Private-Key

Today I am not explaining that solution but in case you need it, there it is.

Crypto is not ready for mass adoption:

Today I just want to raise the criticism against cryptocurrency in general, that user experience is often lacking, and I believe this is the single greatest point of improvement required for mass adoption. When funds are frozen in a crypto wallet users need to have a "one click" answer, currently crypto does not have this.

A cryptocurrency that has a use case, great development team and vision will languish unless they can create a user experience that is convenient, intuitive and easy, IOTA included.

What can we do to help?

We early adopters need to use our voice to urge developers to improve the user experiences of our favourite crypto projects. We need to implore devs to make user experience a primary consideration not a secondary or tertiary after thought.

That is what my post is aimed at doing today. I like IOTA, my hope and expectation is that it will thrive but the best path to that success is going to be through improved user experience. I want people to hear the problems I am experiencing so that people with power to improve the situation can know the concerns our community is facing.

Conclusion:

So long as ease of use is an after thought, crypto will remain a novelty. The path to mass adoption is through customer convenience, ease of use, and beautiful, intuitive simplicity. Anything short of that will relegate crypto to a pass time for nerds, widely ignored by the world.

None of this is to say I am bearish on cryptocurrency, I am not. I am more confident today than ever before that cryptocurrency is set to change the future of mankind, however in my view the biggest hurdle today is not visionary development, or exciting ideas, it is simplicity of use. We need intuitive user experiences and as that comes, only then will we move into wide scale implementation of cryptocurrency, where projects like IOTA can truly begin to reach their amazing world changing potential.

I hope this was helpful and enjoyable. If you enjoyed this post then please consider upvoting, commenting, resteeming and following.

Have an awesome day.