3 levels of wallet users

Most dApps and wallets have complex user interfaces. The nature of blockchain necessitates exposing complexity to the user, but for beginners, it's much too overwhelming to get started.

Typically, the first step when setting up a wallet is to confirm your 12 word seed phrase. We're used to that, but it's a new challenge for people outside of crypto. Unfortunately, that's not the last hurdle before actually getting to use the wallet. Users must KYC, link a bank account, and spend money to buy tokens. For most wallets, that's the end of the user journey. The whole point is buying tokens.

Wallets can be so much more. Right now, wallets built for Koinos are just trying to match the experiences of existing wallets for other blockchains. That's a good start because all of those features are needed, but we shouldn't stop there. Let's look at 3 user personas and how to enhance the user experience for each.

1. Expert crypto user

This isn't their first wallet. You know the drill--this is who we're building for right now. Give them control and convenience.

2. Intermediate crypto learner

Maybe they bought some ETH a while back, but they're still learning. These users are ready for the full experience, but some educational guides would be helpful.

For this group, don't hide the complexity. Just offer tooltips and skippable UI tours to explain the complexity. Use more visuals than words. When you have to use words, use as few as possible, broken up into contextual steps.

3. Crypto beginner

They don't even know what a wallet is. They just want to play some game that told them to download an app to log in.

Downloading the wallet is already an inconvenience. Don't complicate it with 12 word phrases, KYC, or buying tokens. Don't even show the user what the USD value of their wallet's assets is (it's $0).

On Koinos, we can offer a unique wallet experience for beginners. Hide all the complexity. Give them free mana, let them pick a username (with KAP of course), and show them a history of things they've done--not just transactions, but explain what they did (i.e. played 3 games of X, sent an encrypted message to their friend, etc.).

Don't show an empty list of tokens and NFTs. When something is minted/sent to their wallet, give them a notification. Let them discover their new asset and how it looks in a new section of the wallet UI.

Now that they have an asset, it's time to suggest security best practices and expose a little more complexity each day – 12 word phrases, smart contract wallets, managing multiple wallets, etc. Take the user on a journey.

-Luke

P.S. this concept is called progressive disclosure and it's well studied outside of crypto.