Polkadot Summit - UX Workshop Notes

Ecosystem
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Hi all,
As you may be aware, we recently held an event for the key builders in the ecosystem just before Polkadot Decoded to meet and talk about different key topics.

These notes are based on the UX workshop that was held during the summit.

Lead by Nino & Jakub

@nino_apillon
@jakub

Key contributors:

@sam
@alexei
@jonathan
@stefan

High level discussion points:

Some key items that were discussed during the session.

1. Analytics

What are the different ecosystem teams using for Analytics?

Discusion regarding the usecase for analytics and the need to record some information to make good product descisions.

Would it be possible to encrypt user data across parachains - stored on IPFS

Some teams are using mixpanel or google analytics on their websites / products. Some teams are not using any analytics.

There was also discussion regarding the types of analytics and what types of information was useful to collect (or not…)

The 3 different types of analytics:

  • Marketing Analytics
  • User Analytics
  • Bug reporting

2. Creating well defined methods to sign tx, connect wallet,

Teams should include human readable documentation for extrinsics. It would be great to define a standard here for wallet teams to make human readable transactions easier for wallets to display information to users.

Wallet teams could build a custom UI for the 5 most common user actions.

3. Discussion on pushing for more usage of Wallet Connect in the ecosystem

All agreed this is something we should do and as mobile wallets are seeing higher and higher adoption, pushing for more dapps to support wallet connect would be beneficial for the ecosystem.

4. Discussion re: building a front end component library.

Agree on a spec for a component library on the forum.
Create easy functions for devs to call to perform crypto functions.

KEY TAKE AWAYS

  1. Component library - this would be useful to start specing out. @stefan to lead
  2. Wallet teams to work to standadise human readable methoddata for common transactions - requires follow up on the forum. @jonathan to lead
  3. There was discussion regarding creating a fellowship for UX/UI - would anyone like to work towards a manifesto for this? Open to all (including those that didn’t attend the session).
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Hello. I am a Rustacean, who want to contribute Polkadot ecosystem. I agree with you that the discussion points are key point to improve Polkadot ecosystem. I want to contribute my skills and experience for Polkadot ecosystem.

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Anyone is welcome to contribute, if you’re looking for specific Rust contribution, I’d recommend looking at some of the different parachain teams and see if there is a specific one you’d like to contribute to. Once you’re more familiar with substrate, then you could look at contributing to the Polkadot core runtime code.

If however, UX is your jam - I’d wait until you see further messages / posts from the people in the action items at the bottom of the message and join one of their working groups.

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@Birdo thank you very much for the summary. I am fully onboard to create some sort of general purpose Web3 UX framework - mostly on the UI, Application layer.

As mentioned on the workshop, I wrote a blog that outlines tiny part of the issues and modestly touches the possible approaches we could use to solve that. If anyone is interested in this kind of thing, I am attaching the link here: https://medium.com/apillon/why-web3-needs-a-ux-framework-e0db6806a579

I will gladly help and participate in:

  • UX/UI manifest
  • component library
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