GoodDollar Is Building A Crypto Wallet Using Blockchain Technology – Here’s How ...

As GoodDollar’s Product Lead, I am responsible for the access point side of the project, and essentially we are building a crypto wallet to deliver universal basic income. I would like to bring you up to speed with our progress and outline the challenges we face — and how we plan to overcome them.

GoodDollar is a 100 per cent, not-for-profit and open-source social impact initiative. In the past year, since we’ve announced our first donation — from the eToro Group — we’ve worked on the first phase of the project: the infrastructure and wallet layer. I’m pleased to announce that the Alpha 2.0 version of both our protocol and digital wallet is now live.

A Crypto Wallet That Gives Users Money — Inconceivable?

The GoodDollar ecosystem is founded upon three basic elements. First, a network that has an in-built universal basic income (UBI) mechanism; the more we use GoodDollars (G$) as a means of exchange, the more UBI. The second part is the means to use G$. GoodDollar is designed as both a decentralised protocol, but also a decentralised, simple-to-use, access point to the protocol itself. The last part is the usage of the GoodDollar ecosystem. As we finish releasing the two first technically complex, infrastructure projects, we’ll share more of our thoughts then.

What’s unique about the GoodDollar crypto wallet, compared to any other digital tokens wallets, is the fact that this one provides users with tokens — every day of the week, every week of the year.

Yes, you can claim G$1, every single day. It may not sound much to most of us, but this daily small amount of money — known as UBI — could very well be the starting point in the fight against global wealth inequality, according to many leading thinkers. Elon Musk, for example, believes “universal income will be necessary over time if artificial intelligence takes over most human jobs”, while Mark Zuckerberg has said: “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.” Or, in short, it aims to help a lot of people to improve their lives.

Three months ago, in mid-June, we launched the first versions of both GoodDollar’s protocol and digital wallet (access point), a version named Alpha 1.0. That iteration was an end-to-end proof-of-concept, with basic wireframe-style design. The main purpose was to test our functionality flows, so we can learn from the feedback from community members on how to improve our app. We used analytics and usability tools such as FullStory and Amplitude to gather insights that helped to guide us through the design and development process. Four weeks ago we released Alpha 1.1 that offered an improvement on our face validation process, which many people reported was one of the main friction points to using the GoodDollar wallet.

GoodDollar Alpha 2.0: A Crypto Wallet For The Masses

This week we are proud to present GoodDollar Alpha 2.0: a fully designed and all-round-improved digital / crypto wallet experience. This version enables members of the GoodDollar community to send, receive and claim G$ in a straightforward and user-friendly way while we’re working hard behind the scenes to deliver a frictionless blockchain experience.

DUX: DApp User Experience

Our goal was to create an app that will bring blockchain technology to the masses without even knowing that they are using blockchain.

People are usually intimidated by new technologies and for an app that has the potential to improve the lives of every person in the world, we knew we needed to simplify things. This ranges from avoiding jargon that most of the users might not understand — such as ‘decentralised’, ‘crypto’, ‘blockchain’, ‘smart contracts’, ‘DApp’ — to ‘hiding’ the full blockchain wallet address from the users.

We used the same approach that everyday payment and financial apps use, in terms of UX and UI, adding our own unique features and then mounting it and integrate it on Blockchain environment. For instance, using easy and fast payments by scanning QR codes versus using a 40-character hexadecimal strings wallet address and calculating extra gas fees. Here follows a list of our core UI design principles.

GoodDollar’s Basic UI Design Principles

1. Low cognitive load in critical actions (clean and minimal design)
2. The right information at the right time (showing and hiding information only when the user needs it)
3. Simple, clear and friendly (frictionless, KISS — keep it simple, stupid)
4. User-centered design (this app is designed for real users, and for real everyday usage)

According to ‘Hick’s law’, the more choices the users are presented with, the longer it takes to make a decision. With that in mind, we designed each screen of our main features (‘send’ and ‘receive’) to have only one clear action, therefore reducing the cognitive load to a minimum.

Even our microcopy is straightforward, at eye level, and uses humor, unlike most financial apps.

From MVP to MLP: Showing The Love

As an app that aims to reach the masses, we needed to rethink our product strategy. We couldn’t go out to the public with an app that is just a minimum viable product (MVP); we need it to be a killer app. We want our users to fall in love with our product and our messages. So we shifted to a minimal loveable product (MLP), which is a fun app and extra easy-to-use. In order to do so, we deconstructed each action flow into a simple task. We also added illustrations and built a unique icon set. The next step, which we have already started to work on, is to add animation and micro-animations, not only to deepen the fun dimension but also to help explain functionality to the users.

Social Financial Feed

Most digital wallets have a section that shows the user transaction history, but we wanted to take it to the next level. We built a feed with a visual logical system; each card in the feed is distinguished by color and icon. Some have the same color but a different icon. For example, ‘receive’ payment and ‘claim’ G$ has the same outcome: GoodDollars are added to the user account, so their color is the same, but the icon is not.

Moreover, we wanted the users to keep in mind our main goal — to reduce wealth inequality– and to convey to them the message that the more users and usage GoodDollar has, the greater impact we have. So, occasionally, we’ll add to the feed cards with social impact stories.

Feed cards legend:
Receive / claim = green
Send / donation = red
System = light blue
Social impact = purple
Pending (until recipient will withdraw his payment link) = orange

Hopefully, this visual system will be easy to understand and help the users to scan their feed faster.

User Verification: Me, Myself and I

GoodDollar’s app gives G$ for free to everyone in the world. To do so, we need to make sure that each user opens only one account, and we decided to use face verification (FV) technology. (For more on identity and privacy, please read this article by GoodDollar Tech Lead, Hadar Rottenberg.)

The FV flow raised a lot of interesting challenges, such as, what’s the best way to explain to the user the need to go through this process, privacy issues (where is the data being saved, what are we going to do with this data, etc.). We needed to be extra transparent to the user, and describe each step of the way to ease his mind and reduce friction.

Bad Friction? Good Friction!

As a product designer, you learn that friction is the enemy, and you should avoid them or at least try to reduce them to a minimum.

But that’s not always the case. Sometimes you need to create friction in order to convey a message. In our case, we give away free GoodDollars to everyone. But most of the time, when you give people something for free without them needing to ‘work’ for it, they feel that what you gave them is worth less than what it actually worth. So, by combining FV with the claim action, we’re giving GoodDollar claim action an extra psychological value.