#70 Summer sizzles
Time for a breather.
Feels like it’s been an intense year and I am ready for summer vaca. I’ll do my best to take the next two weeks off and really get my mind away from bitcoin and design. Not easy for me, TBH, because I like doing this stuff.
For the past two weeks, it’s been mostly heads down on a few projects.
Porting the UI Kit to Penpot is making good progress. The group is moving fast and super motivated, and of course running into all kinds of things to resolve. Penpot feels pretty rough compared to Figma, but these things can change quickly. I’m mostly on the project management side of this project (our milestone), which now seems to become more relevant after a few weeks of everyone just going at it. We’re also in contact with the Penpot team to provide feedback and learn about their plans and ideas for the future. And I looked into the Penpot API and set up a basic demo site (repo, preview). We might be able to have some pretty powerful automated design docs and custom workflows in the future. A long way to go still, lots of potential, requiring top-notch execution to pan out.
Speaking of project management, I am continuing to flesh out the design milestones for the Bitcoin Core App. Might be hard to tell the progress from the design docs website from a glance, but things are taking shape quickly. We’ll just have a ton of screens to detail out. The rough flow below, for example, is for creating a new wallet. With single-key, multi-key, view-only, and custom configurations, it’s just going to add up. But the end results will be simple step-by-step user flows that guide users through each activity, reducing the likelihood of mistakes and improving their privacy and security. I hope we can set a really high bar for bitcoin UX here.
Also shout-out to Jakub for detailing out the global navigation, and to Mo for scheming several user research efforts.
While we’re on the topic of research, Andrew is doing a great job at user interviews recently for Saving Satoshi. He interviews one user per week on a 1:1 session, and then shares key findings and snippets from the recording. It’s super helpful for the team to learn about how users experience the site. I also really enjoyed Satyam’s interview he did with a blind bitcoiner about his needs and thoughts. Regular, direct user feedback keeps the important things in focus.
Just going to continue the shout-outs because it’s so much fun. I had a chance to test Collin’s Etta Wallet, which implements the Daily spending wallet and UI Kit. A very impressive effort, and really cool to see those resources come to live in an app. And one more to sha-256 for implementing accessibility fixes in Zeus, which I’ll test after writing this newsletter. Awesome to see progress being made on that front.
Lots of really interesting smaller efforts and individual conversations happening, which I find tricky to summarize here, and I’m sure I’d forget some anyways.
Going to end this with an example of a non-ideal customer experience. Wasn’t going to share this, but a notification just popped in about PayPal launching a stable coin. Here’s my most recent experience with their customer support, when testing purchasing a small amount of bitcoin and trying to send it to my own wallet (you can probably tell, I love testing UIs). I tried their send user flow, but it always ended up in an unhelpful error screen stating that “there was a technical error”. Then I reached out to their support team.
Not sure how they think it’s OK to flat-out refuse this very basic action without any path of identifying and resolving whatever the issue may be. Good luck with that stable coin, I will certainly stay far away from it. Just one example of why bitcoin is so important.
Anyhow, time for me to take a break and enjoy the summer sun. Hope you also have chance to kick back.
🍭🏖️