As someone who has come of age in parallel to the social media age, and who has used untold dozens of services and platforms for a wide variety of professional and personal purposes over the last dozen or so years, I've gained a certain degree of knowledge on what works and what doesn't. As someone who has been using blockchain tech in my day-to-day life for the past seven years, and who has lived entirely off of cryptocurrency for nearly five, I know how well crypto services work (or don't), probably better than anyone, and can see the gap between them and apps that the rest of the world uses.
Let's be honest, most crypto apps and services suck. They serve more as a basic proof-of-concept of the amazing technology that powers them, or serve a subset of highly-technical users who have nowhere else to go. If more people relied on these apps for everyday life, the user experience would be far better. In the meantime, I'm offering a few useful tips on how to get ready for when that fateful day of mass adoption comes so as to frustrate the lowest number of users possible.
No, this isn't a detailed how-to guide, but rather a set of guiding principles to provide the best possible user experience.
1: Complexity vs. Simplicity
In app design principle, there's a sliding scale between complexity and simplicity of the user experience. Staying at one of those extremes is sure to create a bad experience, and the best one will manage to strike just the right balance.
The more simplicity you can get away with, the better
The old adage of "less is more" definitely applies here. When you're trying to optimize for the best possible experience, you're trying to do make things as simple as possible. This is because every single extra action or thought a user must take before reaching their desired outcome not only degrades their enjoyment, but also reduces the chance that they'll take action at all. Not only does every additional step degrade the user experience, but so does every additional choice they make or moment they take deciding what to do. To maximize the value to the user, you want things as simple and bare-bones as possible.
A lot of the social media innovation that has happened in recent years has been in the realm of feature limitation, not in developing new features. Twitter essentially took Facebook and stripped it down to just a few features and characters. Instagram turned that into only pictures, while Snapchat turn that into only temporary pictures. YouTube got narrowed down into exclusively much shorter videos with Vine and TikTok. In payments, NFC and tap-and-pay models, as well as in-messenger payments, are the new wave to replace clunky swipe/chip cards and more relics of bygone eras.
Feature set is a minimum threshold
So am I saying that fewer features is always better? No, not at all. I'm saying that you should have the simplest experience you can get away with having. You still need to let the user do what they want to do. When designing a feature set, you should be looking for a minimum threshold, or the lest complexity you can get away with before your product just isn't deemed useful to users.
We've seen a lot of the same platforms I mentioned above slowly add in more features: Twitter doubled the character limit and added threaded comments, as well as comment limitation settings. Instagram added videos, longer videos, shorter videos, and temporary videos. Snapchat added text and others. Even Reddit added some chat features. While all of these got things right by choosing a limited feature set, they got it too right went below the minimum feature threshold, and had to correct.
2: Customization
The other sliding scale to keep aware of is the level of customization. This may seem like the same thing as simplicity vs. complexity, but remember, you can have a high degree of customization back-end while still keeping a simple front-end experience.
The simpler the product, the more customization you need to enable
One of the most frustrating situations for users is where an app is so simple that it can't do a very simple thing that the user wants it to do. This can be a wallet not allowing a user to choose their own transaction fee, or a social network that has no function to search posts by user. One great way to chase that elusive simplicity while not alienating too many power users is to allow for a degree of customization. Giving an advanced mode, or the ability to specifically enable or disable specific features, can give that simple and smooth experience that nonetheless serves each and every user perfectly.
Too much customization can overwhelm even the power user, and make features less robust
As always, there's a tipping point where too much becomes too much. If you have a brutally simple app with a wide array of possible customizations for every user imaginable, you defeat the whole purpose of the simplicity by making it too complex to figure out the perfect simple configuration, which may lead to users just keeping the default configuration, which defeats the point of being configurable to begin with. Have just enough customization options to satisfy most users and leave it at that.
The Facebook anomaly
In all this, Facebook stands out as a wildly successful counter-example. It has all the features of several networks combined: long text posts, short text posts, images, short videos, long videos, messaging, groups, events, and more. This certainly seems like feature overload, and to a certain extent it is, and has caused migration to other platforms. Yet Facebook is still far and away the most successful social network, despite breaking these simplicity rules. Why? Well certainly inertia and network effects can explain some of it, but I have another theory: Facebook introduces its own type of simplicity that's unrivaled by other platforms. Other platforms are so bare-bones that you have to use multiple apps in conjunction in order to cover the broad spectrum of your needs: Twitter for short posts, Medium for long posts, YouTube for videos, TikTok for short videos, etc. The inherent simplicity in each platform introduces a certain complexity in the platforms together. Facebook, on the other hand, achieves greater simplicity by having all this functionality under one platform, app, and login.
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