Woah, am I forgetting to post here? No, just not doing it because I am super busy. There’s an endless list of things to go through at the moment, with all the different events we’re planning the community. Every morning, there’s 50 messages from 20 people waiting to respond to. All good stuff, really can’t complain.
Most importantly, the Designathon is starting Sunday. We have two kick-off calls, would be amazing if you could join us.
So great to see all the preparations coming together the past days and weeks. Big thanks to everyone, especially Mo, Erik, Paperpsych, and Jason. Goal is to have a friendly community event where everyone can meet fellow tinkerers and explore some creative ideas around bitcoin that they are interested in. Sunday will be kick-off, then everyone is off to do as they please. We have a bunch of workshops and office hours lined up and will provide support as needed. And then we’ll see what happens. Looking forward to it.
Same for the user interviews and testing with activists we’re planning for the Oslo Freedom Forum. We’ll test Dana Wallet (silent payments) and White Noise (private messaging). Both apps have the potential to very useful tool for people in sensitive situation that need secure communication an access to a credibly neutral financial system. And both teams are still working hard to get their apps in good shape for testing. Fingers crossed it will all come together smoothly.
For the Bitcoin Core App, we’re still working on finalizing all the send-related details, towards presentations at BTC Prague. I am also trying to help finalize the assumeUTXO/snapshot feature implementation. There was a bit of discussion around some UI elements that we resolved. The video below shows the latest user flows.
Overall, core app design files and docs are a bit messy. It’s going to require putting aside some dedicated focus time to get everything detailed out and consistent. Which will then be a great foundation for the design and implementation work that follows. Always a back and forth between iterating and making a mess and tidying up again.
There are some interesting conversations related to the Bitcoin Design Guide happening. One is around the use of AI. Why do a manual usability review when you can just ask AI to do so, especially when it has the whole guide already internalized. That can be based on screenshots, or like the video below shows, just have the AI navigate the app and give you a report when it’s done.
These automated reports are super helpful, but also need to be carefully evaluated. There’s always some missing context that can lead to inaccurate feedback. But this stuff will only get better from here, and it is about 1 gillion times better to have an AI report in 15 minutes, than nothing at all.
Also good to note that a report is not a solution. Making just the right improvements based on feedback requires a lot of sensitivity as well. And AI tools for UX design are still completely worthless at the moment.
Also made some t-shirt mockups for Oslo Freedom Forum and BTC Prague. You may recognize the snazzy headlines from sticker designs I previously shared.
And a personal thing. My family and I participated in the Runway 48-hour hackathon for generating short stories via AI video/image/sound tools. Was a lot of fun, it was a mess, we had good time, and we submitted something. Super cool what you can do now with a couple of laptops over the weekend.
Take a look at the some of the finalists, some really great creative work there.
That’s it for now, gotta get back to things. Need to announce another Designathon sponsor on the socials and few other things before wrapping up the day.
Peace ✌️🇺🇦