Catching up
It's been 3 weeks since my last update, so quite a few things to mention. I skipped the last 2 because I was traveling.
First, I attended the Push UX conference and spoke at the Bitcoin Munich Meetup (slides are here). Both were super interesting, naturally in very different ways. Surprisingly, not a single mention of bitcoin (or crypto) at the UX conference. Feels like UX has become pretty corporate these days.
Then we had our awesome Bitcoin Design retreat in Barcelona, where the regular contributors met up for the first time ever to hang out and discuss everything community-related. 3 people were sick, but we managed to make the most of it. Lots of great discussions around where the design community is now, how things went so far, what to focus on next, and how each of us wants to be involved. Really felt like everyone got along super well and is on the same page. We also discussed establishing a Foundation, people are into it, so that's going to move forward now as well. There's a rough roadmap for 2023 with some of the ideas we discussed. I still need to digest and plan various things out better.
Seriously, such a good group of people. I'm excited to keep doing things with them.
Pav had organized for us to present at the Barcelona Bitcoin Meetup. Everyone where was super nice, we had some good discussions and burgers afterwards. Gregg, one of them also gave us a tour of the city the next day (thanks!).
Bitcoin Design Community on Twitter: "Gràcies @BcnBitcoinOnly per acollir-nos ahir a la nit! Ens ho vam passar genial xerrant sobre el disseny de #bitcoin, el lightning UX, @StratumV2 i @BtcpayServer. https://t.co/mbI0zo2KBb" / Twitter — twitter.com “Gràcies @BcnBitcoinOnly per acollir-nos ahir a la nit! Ens ho vam passar genial xerrant sobre el disseny de #bitcoin, el lightning UX, @StratumV2 i @BtcpayServer.”
And then this week it was time to catch up with an endless list of things that has been building up.
Here's a brief concept for a UI for automating lightning node channel management (come from listening in on this conversation). I wish someone would build this, I want to use it.
V1 of the new Bitcoin Core App will likely launch in the next few weeks, so we discussed what's needed to wrap it up and present it well. Here's a sketch for a landing page.
And some more layout logic to better account for the various screen sizes the application needs to accommodate across desktop and mobile.
It will be really nice to see V1 out in the world a bit more publicly. Go team!
Saving Satoshi is also in full swing. Ideally, we can submit something by next Thursday to the Legends of Lightning tournament - that's when submissions are due for the final selection. The four tracks we have - story, lessons, design, development - are in various states and need to come smoothly together for this. Probably won't be super tight by next week, but maybe we can still submit a prototype and do a presentation.
Let's start with mobile layouts.
Now for some nav details.
And for the load and save features.
We have some really smart people on the project. I'm excited to see how it will all come together.
Another small project has popped up in the community to help the Wallet Scrutiny project. Limited on time, I had not been involved with it yet at all. But after listening in on a call and clicking around a bit, I found a few things to improve and made a mock-up for one of them (clarifying visualization of the evaluation).
The last community call around standards was also a good one. I hope we can help with identifying and supporting adoption of best practices and roll-out of standards more in 2023.
Lots going on, as usual. But, I'm going to take Fridays off the next few weeks. The past months were pretty stressy and I spent lots of evenings and weekends working and feel a bit worn out. Time to nudge the balance in the other direction.
Did you actually read all the way down? Congratulations, and thank you.
Happy Thursday 👋