For the longest time Bitcoin and Crypto in general has been ruled solely by developers. What's one thing developers lack? The understanding that a vast majority of the rest of the world doesn't think like they do.
What makes sense to a developer often makes no sense to the every day user and what you're stuck with is the potential of a very awesome product or service that no one knows how to use or a very select few people do.
This is where UX comes in...
UX stands for user experience and it's different from just a designer. While many and most are designers themselves the UX side of this is a critical understanding how where to place things, create simple one click pathways that make the most sense and present the right data and the right time.
A well structured UX overhaul can take a struggling product into a massive success.
Here at Hive we get a little bit of a inside scoop on this from their head of UX @nateaguila (Pardon the tag just wanted to give you recognition for the hard and awesome work you do)
Mass adoption means the ability to structure UX and the UI in a way that makes sense to all users. No complicated processes just a few simple clicks gets the job done. This is ever more powerful when you're application is more of a mobile platform over doing it on desktop.
What we might be seeing right now is another core fundamental shift in our lives. It's hard to see them when they are happening and often just as hard to notice them when looking back. Take for example the dawn on the internet. Not much was going on it was just static websites. However the first forum started to allow people to interact with each other on the net.
Move on to Myspace/Facebook days and it gave us even more ways to connect with each other. Tiktok was one of the most recent changes which many would write off as a simple teen fad it really reshaped content and mobile friendly videos. Short bite sized videos that could easily be digested and moved on to the next one. It's changed the entire marketing landscape and businesses as a whole in just the matter of a year or two.
The only really time UX doesn't matter as much is when profits are there or the demand is high enough that people are willing to take the time and learn it even though it has a poor UX interface. The benefits outweigh the investment in this case it would be time and frustration are worth it because the end goal value wise is worth it.
This is often the case with new tech which Crypto is always at the forefront of. For example NFTs where around for a long time. But they really lacked marketplaces and demand. It wasn't until beeple sold a huge NFT asset that really sparked interest and got the whole thing going. This sparked innovation in the NFT space, new jobs, new businesses like opensea and so much more. While that fad has for the most part faded away it still is a very legitimate and demanding section of the crypto space that continues to grow and evolve.
The next evolution in this space seems to be content creation with a mix of NFT creation in it. However a more central platform in which users can see what each other has bought and create a social interaction based on such things. This media and content creation network seems to be the next big push however many of these still lack proper UX designs and let's be honest it's no easy task trying to mix blockchain, crypto, users keys all into a decentralized and stable solution.
We will have to see if this new form of digital ownership means anything but I have a strong feeling if the social aspect of it mixed with platforms like Sound.xyz that allows artists to mint and sell their music instead of streaming could end up taking off. Above all else though these platforms need to integrate with each other in a way where users never really know they are interacting on the chain but still able to perform the functions. This is where UX will become the critical role of the future adoption of crypto.