Getting into it: Designing for Bitcoin, Day 15

Design is design, right. That's what we learn pretty early on in design school. If you can design a chair, you could design a print ad one day, or some weird extrapolation of that. So, if you can do product design, you can do product design for Bitcoin, right?

Well, not really. Kind of? But, not really. It's an interesting space. It's one created by die-hards and loyalists and people who have elevated Bitcoin to its status as the world's leading "cryptocurrency". Interestingly, as Bitcoin's use evolved over time, the core user experience of the apps we use to store, send exchange, and purchase it have remained the same.

About us

We're a design team from Trinidad and Tobago and some of the work that we've been making for governments has taken us along a route that requires a better understanding of Bitcoin. We've chosen Bitcoin and Lightning as the currency and transfer protocol that makes the most sense for the developing states that we make work for, so now are trying to get more up to speed as a team with Bitcoin and its community.

Me and Chris from the team decided to start working on this idea, and were fortunate to know the author of the post; it seemed like an easy way in. For Stack or Spend, the challenge is to create a design that's intended to remove the binary good-bad relativity of assessing Bitcoin's price now, vs the always-good ability to either stack or spend your sats based on your average buying price over there's been this new idea of mid-time preference that's emerged as a result, but it's not a concept we're unfamiliar with in practice.

First Sprint

We decided to enter the Bitcoin Design Designathon 18 hours before the submission deadline. Fortunately we didn't need to spend much time building an application and were able to spend all our time prototyping.

The design brief is simple: designing a model for showing users whether or not it's a good time to use the sats stored in the wallet, relative to the user's average buying price of bitcoin.

Our submission's logic worked like this:

1. User signs up by connecting an existing wallet

2. An average price for buying bitcoin is calculated based on the wallet's history

3. The user has access to the Stack or Spend wallet either on desktop or web, with intuitive UI elements that show users whether they should be spending their sats at the moment of purchase or saving/ stacking sats for a more favourable time

Designing for Bitcoin is tricky, because you have such a well-established, canonical approach to the user experience that from the outside it can seem like making a substantial change could be bad for users:" it could feel too different. Now, the Bitcoin community is one that you can make assumptions about being open to change, but more widely, people hate when Twitter changes their interface, or when Tumblr changes their privacy because it disrupts the way things work. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's not. We'll see, I guess.

Takeaways:

1. Software wallets seem to be designed for people saving or buying sats, not consumers using bitcoin. So questions like, is this a good spend considering my long-term with bitcoin? haven't come up yet, or at least haven't presented a massive pain point at scale.

2. Bitcoin is open source first. There's a culture in traditional product design that's very much about closed doors and secret plans, but so far the community seems to take building in public pretty seriously. We have to respect that

3. Design for this idea can happen, but if it's too disruptive to the traditional experience we'll have to also explain it, and try to establish a new mental model for onboarding users. That seems like a lot of unnecessary work, so we're gonna avoid that.

4. Using the Bitcoin Beach Wallet will allow us to be able to present an alternative to spending sats during a lightning transaction: the option to instead use stablesats (ie. USD) instead of BTC to make payments.

You can check out the design's first round on Figma here.

Our next steps are:

1. Decide on the right combination of graphic elements to represent the stack/spend decision easily to users

2. Build a new mobile-only prototype for the wallet, so that we can begin testing the core question, "do you get why this could be good for you?" and iterating on the design accordingly