Good morning everybody. Thanks for coming out this morning. First of all, a special thank you to DEVCON and all the organizers for having me here. The hospitality so far has been great. I'd also like to make a public statement here that, it's great to see some minority groups are strongly represented here. I've noticed the increase in women and non-white guys here at DEVCON which is very positive. I think diversity is an important thing for us to progress. So, keep it up and let's go together strong in this one. So CryptoKitties. This launched the Alpha just over a year ago. It was really wild. We had tons of fun doing it. For many people, it was actually the first time that they ever interacted with the blockchain in general. For us, we felt that we're onto something new. A lot has happened since then. We've had many lessons that we learned, I'm here today to talk to you about some of them. Our community and our ecosystem has also grown significantly. We've had third-party outside KittyHats come and expose this idea of extensibility of Non Fungible Tokens. We've had CryptoGoods who came along and did this whole physical representation of NFTs which is pretty cool. We've had tons of fine arts. We even had people who have gone out and gotten kitty tattoos, which was crazy. Our team has also grown since then. So I want to give a special shout-out to our team over there. We hail from 18 plus different countries, 20 plus different languages, and over 60 employees. So, big shout-out to the team, all ranging from a variety of different backgrounds, different experiences and whatnot. So like I said, I'm here today to talk to you about user experience and blockchain. Instead of rattling off a bunch of bullet points, I'm going to have a little bit of a philosophical discussion. I'm going to break this down into three overarching lessons. These lessons are going to be kind of human-to-human relatable, because I believe that if we can think and build our products for humans, then they're going to be much stronger. So lesson one is titled, Talk. I'll begin this lesson by telling you a little bit about myself. So my name is Nick. I'm one of the founding members of Cryptokitties, and I'm the lead Front-End Engineer over the Kitty Den. I was born and raised in the Caribbean on a small island called Trinidad. I spent 19 warm years in the tropics. I had a very strong interest in Arts and Sciences. At the age of 19, I left Trinidad and I went to Montreal to study Mechanical Engineering. When I came back to Trinidad, I decided to go to the other side of my brain and start a fashion brand. So I was designing apparel, producing it, selling it. Through apparel design, I decided to learn how to do web development because I wanted to sell my clothes online. Eventually, I got a job as a web developer at an advertising agency. A year and a half later, I quit that job and I went traveling around the world. During that time, I built up a technical blog that had, I think about half a million readers per month in its peak. That was a time for me to really discover, what did I want in this industry? I came back to Trinidad at some point and then went to the Bay Area for a few months. In November of 2019, I joined Axiom Zen as a Front-End Engineer. Initially, I'd worked out at the Chilean office, Then I worked in Trinidad for six more months as well. In January of 2017, I moved to Vancouver and I sacrificed all the sun and warmth, for a little bit of snow and cold. But it was a really good choice for me because several months later, we were scheming Cryptokitties. In December of last year, we released the cats into the wild. So why am I telling you this? What relevance does my life story have to user experience? Well, the way that I think is that, now that you know a little bit about me, we've established a little bit of a human connection. The more that you get to know me and the more that I get to know you, the easier it's going to be for us to build our relationship. So I'll tell you a little bit about Cryptokitties. Yes, it was an app. Yes, it was a product that we developed. Yes, we just put cats on the blockchain. But for us, we did a lot more. We gave these cats names. We gave them a story and people felt really strong connections to the kitties they owned because they had a story. The interesting thing in this space, is that we use a lot of technical words like interoperability and extensibility and whatnot. But outside of this room, outside of DEVCON, nobody understands that. But by crafting narratives and crafting stories for the cats and for the ecosystem, we bring meaning and we bring life. We establish this really good human connection. So lesson one concludes with, give whatever you're building a personality. Give it a voice, let it tell stories because storytelling is important for establishing a human connection and a human connection is really important for building a long-term relationship. So lesson two will be about listening. We just went over talking. How do you talk to establish a connection? We have to return the favor. You have to listen to the people that you talk to. So in December of 2017, Cryptokitties was released to the masses. I'm just going to get a little water, excuse me. Sorry. Can I get a sip? Thank you. Apologies. So in December of 2017, CryptoKitties was launched to the masses and by December 8th, three days later, we we're literally on fire. I had been working for about six weeks straight with my team pulling 16-hour day, we were pretty exhausted by then and I remember it was a Saturday, I was just trying to have a normal day. I was out buying a little grocery, getting a little bottle of wine, I wanted to relax and then I got a few text messages from some of my coworkers saying that, Genesis, which was cat number one of CryptoKitties had just soled for a $120,000. I knew at that point that any sign of relaxation was officially out the window and it showed. I mean, in that first month, we had 1.6 million in web traffic, we had over 200,000 wallets created and we had 52,000 new kitty owners, I mean things really skyrocketed. It was high time for us and for CryptoKitties and we had to deal with that. I mean at that point, it was immediately exposed that the network couldn't handle the traffic, different GET nodes were just completely failing because of nimples getting clogged. Our API which was listening to events on set GET nodes was just not picking up the events anymore. Our front end was just not showing the correct data as a result of that and it was a nightmare. Users were so new to this thing that they were just burning money on gas, they had no idea what they were doing. At that point, I think in the first two or three months or so, users had spent over $2 million in gas. Some people were standing up to 10 times more in gas without even realizing it like 10 times more than they should've and tons of it was wasted on failed transactions. This is such a new environment for users, they just didn't know. We were freaking out, we're dealing with people's money, we're dealing with completely new technology her, what do we do? So we have three options. Number one is just let them burn gas, let it be. But that was a big no for our part because we were dealing with people's money and we have to protect people a lot better when things are new and especially when we're dealing with money. Option number two was the go for a more preventative measure entirely. We tried to control the UI a little bit and prevent users from conducting transactions that we knew or that we assumed might be guaranteed to fail. But this also backfired because of these multiple layers of information travels from the blockchain all the way up to your obligations, info just gets lost along the way and especially when GET instances fail over and then API goes down due to heavy traffic and the front NHS assuming the wrong information. So we ended up in a situation where we're literally blocking people from buying and breeding their cats. That was also a bad thing. So option three sits somewhere in the middle, not really in the middle, but it's more like let's take the lessons of option one and two and apply it and let's give some use education and guidance here, let's teach users what is it that the ensue in this new space. During the alpha of CryptoKitties, we made a couple of wrong assumptions. We thought that our users were just get it. We were testing whether they would like the pictures of cats and whether they would get down with the sole cat breeding thing and they did. But we did make a couple assumptions that they would get the whole blockchain thing and we were wrong. They were actually confused, there was a lot of newness and a lot of unfamiliarity around that technology. Soon as we give people a little bit of guidance, they felt a lot more comfortable, they started to fall in love. The messages that we are getting through our various social channels at that point were hilarious. People were just fascinated by the sole ownership of NFTs on the blockchain. "Oh, I own this cat is piece of digital arts," and that user guidance really paid off big time for us. We took that as a lesson to introduce more and more guidance throughout the art, throughout the web app during its lifecycle, development lifecycle. We started to talk about gas and we had these birthing fees for cats as well. We continuously educated people about that. We got them educated through the on-boarding and that's everything. People started to have this growing familiarity with ecosystem. One of the most important things for us that was missing early on was, what was happening after I interact?. What was happening after I transact? In a normal, it's typically like client-server application, you do something and you immediately have feedback. If you buying some e-book online, you immediately get this email with your PDF of your book. If you are buying something on Amazon, you get this shipping receipts and you have this comfort that it's going to be in the mail in a couple of days or so. But with blockchain and with buying NFTs on the web, you go there, you do this transaction, you send it off to the mysterious blockchain and then that's it. The everyday usage is like "Oh, what the hell just happened?" So we started to introduce this thing about what happens after I transact. We started to get down this activity feed where they say, "Listen, you have attempted to do something. You can go track it on either scan and you can see the progress of it." That gave a little bit of tangibility to the whole purchasing for users and they felt a lot more comfortable. We followed that up with giving that e-mails about when the transactions were successful and that gave them a second degree of comfort. So I'll conclude Lesson 2 by saying, users need guidance when they're in unknown territory, they need lots of guidance education when they uncomfortable. This is concepts that I like to refer to as the failure path. In engineering and design, the failure path is the path that a user takes where they make continuously wrong steps. It could be things like entering an invalid email followed by entering weak password, followed by clicking the wrong button. If your users continuously take wrong steps, your UI, the user experience could become pretty daunting and terrifying very quickly. If we can guide users through that failure path, if we could make each step of the way pleasant for them and educate them as though why they ended up in this situation as opposed to presenting them with random error messages that bear no meaning, then they would feel a lot more comfortable, they will start to gain familiarity with their surroundings. So lesson three is about Connecting. I talk to you and then I listen to you our relationship is becoming established. How do we build a deeper connection and how do we grow that connection and strengthen it? So in an ideal world we tell our story through our products. We gain the user's interests and we guide them through the early stages. We get them through some simple on-boarding flows and then off they go. Through on-boarding and guidance they're able to start interacting with the most important parts of your apps immediately they're able to start engaging and having fun and getting integrated into whatever it is you're building. But in Blockchain it's not straightforward at all. It is really a hazy mess before they can actually start engaging with anything. After we get visitors and after we get them to do whatever sign-up flow it exists at all we have to introduce them to Wallets because at Blockchain you can't do anything without a wallet. You have to have a wallet to store your NFT's or to store whatever token it is your app is running and in order to engage with any token at all you need cryptocurrency. So this new user who was first of all just interested in cards now they are learning about wallets and cryptocurrency so we get them to sign up for our app, our wallet and coinbase to buy some crypto. They finally got through to that, they manage to get the Ether, maybe it takes them a couple of days because they have to validate their credit card and then they have to pile the Ether itself and then after they buy it they are like what is this, I have to wait. I have just given money and I have to wait to get something in return and that's very unusual for people and at this point they are wrapping their head around this thing and they're already lost the plots. They are wondering well, which one is the wallets and which one is the app? I don't really remember. Then finally after that maybe three or four days later they can interact, they can get involved, they can play the game and that is so unusual for user. It feels like we've literally gone backwards. At CryptoKitties for us we've spent days on-boarding people through conversations and messages and say, "Hey well, this is what this thing does and this is what this thing does." It's shocking that people stick it through. It's good news that people stick it through, it's a positive sign. It's a reassurance for us that it could catch on but look at the steps here and at every one of these steps there are huge drop-offs and at some steps you can't even control the drop-off. Because they're third-party applications. It's totally out of your control at this point. It's starting to become like cognitive overload. Unless until we spoke about guidance. But now there's too much guidance, there's too much education. People came to this app because really they just wanted to buy some huge cuts and now they have a PhD and cryptocurrency and wallets and blockchain and they didn't want that. The majority of users just don't want that. On the number show the current state of the Ecosystem reflects that a year ago we had 52,000 new kitty owners within the first month but today the DAUs of the top 100 apps combined are less than 10,000 and the number of CryptoKitties' players are a small portion of that. But we're in this together, we're a tight community here and I believe that together we can address these problems. But the big question is obviously how. So has anybody heard User GameBoy? Wow. Very nice. So my experience with GameBoy in the 90s growing up was, I got it, I put a game inside, I switch it on and I started to play and it was a very natural feeling. I didn't have to go and read the Game Boy manual, I probably threw it out. I didn't have to go and read the game manual either I threw that out as well. The technology which was again if we want to map the GameBoy itself to the Blockchain and the game itself to say like CryptoKities for example, both of these were very self-guided pieces of our technology and the relationship felt very natural, and I actually went down the rabbit hole before this presentation of looking at GameBoy commercials from the 90s and there are some really weird ones that I encourage everybody to check out. But one thing that was a prominent theme was in messaging. GameBoy didn't try to sell me on what their CPU specs were or what their LCD screen specs were. Their messaging across the majority, the ads was simple was it you can have all the power of Nintendo right in the palm of your hands and that was enough, that was all I needed as a user. I didn't care about the hardware, I just wanted to play. With the game it was the same as well with Zelda the messaging and one of these super weird commercials was you travel through many worlds with endless characters and their eternally ventures and it's lovely, it's simple, you put that game in and you start playing and you are guided through by the game itself. You're not banking on this insane intense on-boarding experiences. The blockchain is different. Blockchain is new. There's no familiarity in the space at all. But it is our job to build that familiarity and to take these underlying concepts and to abstract them entirely. Because the day-to-day user they don't care about the things that we care about as developers. They don't care about securing their private keys, they don't care about gas, they don't care about different clients for different wallets. They want this feeling of familiarity, they want this feeling of comfort and we need to start thinking like them and talking to them like humans, we need to speak their language through our products and we're not doing that right now it's tough to do that right now because there is just so much cognitive overhead. So less than three is really about 'Make Making Friends Easy'. What I mean by that is make growing the connection that a user has with your product easy, make strengthen that relationship easier. What we've seen at CryptoKitties is that blockchain and non fungible tokens and crypto assets and digital art are a great way for users to self express, to create and to collaborate and to grow this technology together, and we need to provide that. If we want to appeal to the masses, if we want to grow the markets together we need to start giving these delightful experiences for users. We need start making all of those abstractions for people and we need to start getting them together and letting them engage with each other and experience joy through the apps that we built and that needs to be our mission like the UX is everybody's problem it is not just for the designer, it is not just for the product manager or the UX experts. It is all of our problems. We need to start thinking like that. So at CryptoKitties we have this bold statements like 'let's bring the next billion users to the Blockchain' and it's wildly ambitious. So my call for you today is that let's do something a bit more realistic for now. Let's take those metrics and 10X them. Let's get our users from 10,000 to 100,000 by next year. Let's take these steps together. Let's build the tools. That's really Ecosystem that we need. Let's think about our users, think about the people outside of this conference. That's what's going to drive the technology forward and Dapper labs which is the parent company of CryptoKitties that is what we are doing. We are building the ecosystem for the next wave of users. So I encourage you to check out dapper, what is dapper dot xyz for some more information about what we're doing and the tools that we're building and the ecosystem that we're creating to create these abstractions of people and so on, make on-boarding to the blockchain much better. Thank you very much everybody.
