CS
UX
Web 3.0 has become a buzzword in tech and venture capital since 2020, with major investments fueling its growth in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the metaverse. Major companies like Meta, Opensea, Coinbase, and Solana have introduced use cases to expand this technology’s reach, though user adoption and satisfaction remain limited. As a transformative phase of the internet, Web 3.0 holds the potential to redefine entire financial systems, though it needs time to mature. This project addresses current user challenges and offers streamlined solutions designed to improve user experience and promote broader adoption. Through in-depth research, user surveys, and solution testing, the report seeks to enhance usability for current users and attract a new user base.
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 envisions a more decentralized internet where control is spread out, not dominated by major corporations as in Web 2.0. Using technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it aims to recreate the internet’s early days of direct user-to-user interactions (Cook et al., 2020).
The internet’s journey can be seen as three major chapters: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web 3.0, each with distinct characteristics.
Web 1.0: The Read-Only Era
In Web 1.0, websites were static, primarily for viewing information. Interaction was minimal, similar to looking at posters on a wall. Mobile usability was limited.
Web 2.0: The Social Web
Web 2.0 transformed websites into interactive platforms, introducing social media and user-generated content. This era enabled easy communication, sharing, and mobile-friendly experiences.
Web 3.0: A Decentralized Future
Web 3.0 is focused on making the internet more secure, private, and user-controlled through technologies like blockchain, the metaverse, and NFTs. It aims to give individuals greater ownership and control over their online presence and data.
Web 3.0 isn’t replacing Web 2.0 but rather enhancing it, offering users a more balanced, secure digital ecosystem. With these advancements, we must consider their impact on society and individuals' livelihoods. Society 5.0 emphasizes the integration of advanced technologies in a human-centered way, aiming to redefine two key relationships: the connection between technology and society, and technology-facilitated interactions among individuals within society. To align with Society 5.0, new technologies should address three essential aspects for responsible and inclusive development.
Society 5.0
Society 5.0 is a vision for a human-centered society where advanced technology works to improve everyone's lives. It focuses on balancing economic growth, solving social issues, and enhancing the overall quality of life.
Helping the Economy Grow: Make our economy stronger and fairer. It means creating new jobs, making businesses better, and helping everyone have a chance to succeed.
Addressing Social Problems: Use technology to solve big issues we face, like making sure everyone gets good healthcare and education, protecting our environment, and making sure everyone feels included and treated fairly.
Enhancing Quality of Life: It wants to use technology to make life happier and easier for people. It means better healthcare, schools, and transportation. It also means having fun things to do and feeling like we belong in our communities.
What we know about Web 3.0?
Web 2.0 has been dominated by platforms like Amazon, Meta, YouTube, and Google, has integrated seamlessly into daily life, making content sharing and connectivity easy. In contrast, Web 3.0 is often seen as just a "decentralized ecosystem." According to a LinkedIn poll by HRB, 70% of 50,000 respondents were unfamiliar with Web3. Complexity around blockchain and limited use cases keep people from engaging with it—until the arrival of NFTs. NFTs, or "non-fungible tokens," are unique digital assets representing creative works or intellectual property, often valued in cryptocurrencies, which have sparked interest and adoption in Web 3.0.
Emergence of NFTs
NFTs gained public attention with CryptoPunks in 2017 and skyrocketed in popularity after digital artist Mike Winkelmann sold a piece for nearly $70 million (Rehman et al., 2021). This growth attracted artists and established NFTs as a major part of the Web 3.0 ecosystem, reaching a market value of $1.2 billion in 2021. However, user experience remains a challenge:
Multiple Marketplaces: With numerous NFT marketplaces available, users are often confused about where to buy or sell (Cantrell, 2022).
Lack of Interoperability: NFTs on one platform may not display on others, and compatibility issues can arise between different blockchains (Priyanka, 2022).
Non-crypto users Barriers: Many platforms aren’t beginner-friendly and use heavy crypto jargon (Priyanka, 2022).
Complex account Set-ups: Minting and transferring NFTs require lengthy processes, making it daunting for new users (UXPritesh, 2023).
In our project, we will integrate NFT-based features to enhance user experience by allowing users to create and own unique digital assets, such as art and music, represented as NFTs. Our platform will include an easy-to-use marketplace for buying, selling, and trading these NFTs, simplifying the process for users. We aim to ensure that NFTs can be used across different platforms, making them more accessible. To cater to non-crypto users, we'll create an intuitive interface that avoids complex jargon and streamline the minting and transferring processes, making it easy for everyone to engage with the NFT ecosystem.
Problem Framing (Structure the issue)
Framing the problem became the first step of the design process. It required a little background research to justify problem whether it’s relevant for the research or not. The problem framing went into layers of research where it got separated into different factors which can occur to the problem. The factors include Risk, Long term goals, Primary goals and Metrics, combining them all together with appropriate references helped framing the problem which can be taken into account.
HMWs and Literature Review (Elaborate the problem)
Using the problem identified, a list of problems related to it has been created. This helped exploring all the aspects of the problem and discovering which goes best with primary and long-term goal and has lesser amount of risk.
With the help of literature study of few research papers and articles, a HMW (How might we) table was created. This table was used to reframe the problem and to go a little further with what, where, when, why questions. Reframing the problem was definitely a lengthy task, but it helped to dive deeper into the problem and to define the users, their issues and empathize with them.
Users, Discovery and Core Mapping (A retreat)
Reframing the Problem in HMW gave an idea of who users are and what could be their core experiences. This helped in defining who users can be, in what possible way they will discover the features and what can be their experience using it. Although this framework of identifying the users and their core experiences was a useful part for understanding the user’s thought process and experiences, it created a little confusion around what problem is related to which user. In this stage the focus shifted from the core problem to the user.
Although working on this framework didn’t serve any purpose, but it helped understanding the user from all the the problem areas, which helped in further process of personas, and user stories.
How, Now and Wow matrix (Narrowing the problem down)
Reframing the Problem in HMW gave an idea of who users are and what could be their core experiences. This helped in defining who users can be, in what possible way they will discover the features and what can be their experience using it. Although this framework of identifying the users and their core experiences was a useful part for understanding the user’s thought process and experiences, it created a little confusion around what problem is related to which user. In this stage the focus shifted from the core problem to the user.
Although working on this framework didn’t serve any purpose, but it helped understanding the user from all the the problem areas, which helped in further process of personas, and user stories.
Conducting a Survey (Clarity from users)
After defining the areas which needed to work on, I conducted a survey among the existing Web 3.0 users. The participants were recruited various sources including the connections and communities. The aim of the survey is to identify the experience and challenges user face in real life while using Web 3.0 services like NFT minting and managing wallets. The survey was conducted considering all the ethical implications providing Participation sheet and Consent form to the participants.
Understanding the user (know everything about user)
Understanding user after getting the survey results gets easier, survey helped to understand user needs, preferences and to work on challenges they currently face. Two users were focused for the further thinking process one with the background of artist and other with the background of trading. Their both interests have been kept on NFTs as the areas I decide to focus on were totally based on it along side with wallet management.
Mind Mapping (Volcano of ideas)
After a proper understanding of users and areas to work on Mind mapping helped creating more and more ideas related to a specific feature. On the overall process, mind mapping was the most fun part as it helped exploding all the feature ideas with keeping the user in centre. Mind mapping also helped creating a rough flow of how and where user can go and achieve their desired goal.
The ideas I finalised to work on were:
Minting NFTs
