Week 3: UIUX & Data Modeling

This week we took a look at the breadth of potential features and started to dive into each one to hash out the UIUX details and identify the engineering challenges involved. This way we can have a sense of what is feasible to ship first and what will take more time to design & implement properly.

We discussed how to design Wallet Setup UIUX to be able to accommodate both users who have never heard of bitcoin and fully self-sovereign node-runners. We also wanted to try and fill the gap in between with some blended trust models and came up with a few wallet configuration options:

1. Simple: Provide a BTC Address - Selecting this option has the least friction, but comes at the cost of lower transaction speed (no Lighting payments) and poor privacy (payments are sent to a single address)

2. Advanced: Connect your Node - Provide credentials to your Lightning node to allow for dynamic address + invoice creation as needed

3. Federated: Create a Cloud Node - This option is only selectable if your Project Admin has configured a set of Voltage API keys to spawn a node on your behalf and results in a set of credentials that can be imported into wallet controllers like ZeusLN

Thinking through these options allowed us to land on a flexible data model so users can select whatever option is most convenient and not be locked in to any one configuration.

We also decided to focus on a feature that would be simple enough and useful for our own team: Bitcoin Bonuses

When our team successfully ships a release after 2 months of design, implementation, code review, & QA, I as the Project Admin/Manager usually like to "tip" everyone for their efforts with $50 worth of BTC. At the moment, this involves a blast in a Slack channel while I collect BTC addresses and Lightning invoices from everyone before sending payment. Being able to use Trinary to coordinate this more conveniently will be our primary usability goal while tying neatly into our Project-Contributor models and APIs alongside some other core features.

Even if it didn't score all the points in the Value Proposition & Innovation categories, this approach provides a bit of grounding so we create something usable on from day 1, rather than over-engineering something with tons of features before even validating them with user feedback.

Our feature set will look something like the following (rank-ordered) list

1. Github-integrated Project Administration

2. Github-integrated Contributor Profiles

3. Wallet Configuration

4. BTC Bonuses

5. Budgeting & Rate Negotiation among project contributors

6. Advanced Project Planning

7. Project Reports & Insights

8. Funding Public Projects

9. Tip Contributors Directly

Overall we drafted a lot of new UI views in Figma that will require further iteration, but for now it's enough to pave the way for engineering work with fewer obstacles. We will be working on coding some the more developed views this week while stringing together a UIUX prototype.

Lots more to do!