What Blockchain Products Get Wrong About UX
Blockchain technology offers genuine capabilities that traditional systems can't match. Most blockchain products do a terrible job of surfacing
I've worked on three products with significant blockchain components: 11Onze (blockchain-based savings products), Binarii Labs (enterprise blockchain infrastructure), and Cyqur (blockchain-backed cybersecurity). Across all three, the most consistent challenge was the same: how do you design a product that leverages blockchain's genuine capabilities without requiring users to understand what blockchain is?
The Jargon Problem
Blockchain product discourse is uniquely prone to jargon that excludes the mainstream users these products need to reach. 'Private keys', 'gas fees', 'smart contracts', 'consensus mechanisms' — these terms are meaningful to practitioners and alienating to everyone else.
The solution is not to educate users about blockchain. It's to translate the benefits of blockchain — transparency, immutability, verifiability, decentralisation — into outcomes that matter to real people. 'Your transaction is permanent and verifiable' communicates more to a mainstream user than 'this transaction is recorded on an immutable distributed ledger.'
The 11Onze Approach
On 11Onze, the blockchain-based savings products offered genuinely better rates and greater transparency than equivalent products at traditional banks. The design task was to communicate those benefits — better rates, verifiable terms, community ownership — without getting into the blockchain mechanics that delivered them.
The product language focused on outcomes ('your savings are working harder for you', 'you can verify exactly how your interest is calculated') rather than processes ('your savings are locked in a smart contract on the Ethereum network').
Enterprise Blockchain: A Different Problem
The Binarii Labs and Cyqur projects represented a different use case: enterprise blockchain infrastructure where the user is a technical buyer or administrator rather than a consumer.
In this context, the jargon problem inverts — enterprise buyers want to understand the technology because they're accountable for the decision to adopt it. The design challenge shifts from simplification to clarity: explaining complex technical capabilities in precise, accurate terms that help technical decision-makers make confident choices.
Principles for Blockchain UX
- Lead with outcomes, not mechanisms. Users care what a feature does for them, not how it works.
- Distinguish between user-visible and infrastructure-level blockchain use. If the blockchain is doing its work invisibly in the background, don't make users aware of it unless they want to be.
- Never use blockchain as a trust signal in consumer products. It doesn't work. Trust is built through the quality of the experience, not through technology claims.
