How Design Works in Crypto

Mark Lurie:

Welcome to WTF, Crypto, where we peel back the layers of the onion of the crypto universe. To understand what's really going on, and how it affects you and your portfolio. I'm your host, Mark Lurie. And as a caveat, nothing in this podcast is legal or investing advice. And if you liked this podcast, or even if you hated it, I would love to hear from you. Our team works hard every week to find the topics you care about most. So please leave a review on Apple Podcast, to let me know what you think of the show. We read every single one. Thanks for listening.

Mark Lurie:

Today, we're trying a different episode format, where we talk with key people on the Shipyard team about their hot takes on crypto and the crypto ecosystem. And so, we're talking with Drew Tozer about design in crypto.

Drew Tozer:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Mark Lurie:

One of the most remarkable and odd things about crypto, is how the design is, in some ways so flippant. If I go to sushi.com or uniswap.com, one has unicorns. And the other has neon sushi outlines and club colors all over its site. And yet, Uniswap holds $5 or $6 billion in liquidity, and SushiSwap holds about $2 billion in liquidity. And these products process tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of trading volume every year. And it's almost amazing because if some people from outside crypto came to these sites, they'd think it was almost a joke. But it's very much not a joke. It's very serious and processes a real amount of money.

Mark Lurie:

And this is really important because as people increasingly come into crypto, it might be confusing what seems legitimate and what doesn't seem legitimate, because the design is so different from what they are used to. And so it seems like a really good important topic to unpack. What should you take away from design? And what is legitimate? What is not? What is important? What is not? As you are judging a company and a product. So, thank you for joining and helping us unpack this today.

Drew Tozer:

Yeah. It's pretty funny, isn't it? I think that brands like Uniswap and SushiSwap are good benchmarks of this paradigm shifted design. Before Web3, there's always playbooks for how professional organizations are supposed to represent themselves. And especially ones handling large volumes of assets. If you look at traditional design, if you looked purely at the function of an exchange, you'd handle someone like Uniswap or SushiSwap the same way that you'd handle Wall Street hedge funds. It'd be black and white, or a nice deep blue. They'd be stifled up. Very clean and tidy.

Drew Tozer:

And then from that perspective, Uniswap and Sushi look pretty scammy. They don't really follow the rules that design created about who is trustworthy. They even break the cardinal rule, that's don't use pink. And they use pink in a largely male-dominated exchange. There's always these strong rules that decide what is good design. What is bad design. And I think Web3 is breaking a lot of those rules.

Mark Lurie:

So where does some of these rules of thumb come from? I guess you're right. I don't see pink in a lot of financial websites. So why do you think it evolved that way? And what's wrong with pink?

Drew Tozer:

I don't think there's anything wrong with pink. But in every formal design education that I've ever attended, you always go down this hole of color psychology. And pink is always under the categorization of feminine and gentle. And so, when you are doing any sort of branding, you are supposed to refer to this knowledge base that has been created through years and years of psychoanalyzing design for specific user groups. And the umbrella of professional or mature. You are always into the blues. You are guided in a certain direction based on institutional knowledge basis.

Mark Lurie:

It is interesting because, if you look at New York Stock Exchange, into the Continental Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, Deutsche Börse, and London Stock Exchange, I think they all have a slightly different shade of blue as their general motif. And it's actually... Now that you mentioned it, it's a 100% true. But it also seems a little circular, right? It's, why do we associate blue with trust or financial sites? Maybe it's deep psychoanalytic research. But maybe it's because... Maybe it's circular. Maybe it's because all these financial sites all use the same color scheme. And then we associate trust and financial sites with that color scheme.

Drew Tozer:

You are totally right. It's the logic that they try to tell you is that blue is very calming and also very stimulating. So it keeps you awake, and it keeps you engaged. But I think it's just very self-referential. You are totally right.

Mark Lurie:

Interesting. So now we move on to Web3. And Web3 and crypto has a culture that's all about breaking norms, changing the system. And so I guess it's an opportunity to reset our design expectations. Why do you think Web3 is different?

Drew Tozer:

I think Web3 is different because of people are navigating it differently. So when people are looking for visual cues of legitimacy, like we were saying before this paradigm shift, they are not the same as Web2. And I think that that comes from an overwhelming disdain from stuffy financial institutions, because they work for the wealthy. And I mean, the wealthy compose much of Web3. But the marketing that we are seeing is not targeted towards them.

Drew Tozer:

And I find that the Web3 community tends to be just that. Like a community. So they don't rely on marketing and design firms to tell them what's legit. They talk to each other. So when a Web3 organization looks like a Web2 organization, that's going to be the black sheep. And that's going to stand out as inappropriate.

Mark Lurie:

So it's almost like there's new norms. And if you depart from the new norms, it's just as odd as if you departed from the old norms in the old system.

Drew Tozer:

And I mean, Web3 does as all things do when they move through trends as they look back in time for inspiration. So I think Web3 very much pulls a lot of its aesthetics from Web1, which is the low brow web. And I think they are doing that in much clever and nicer ways. It's very playful, and there's a lot of expression. It really encourages experimentation, and allows non-designers to enter this space and create the world that they want to see.

Drew Tozer:

I think a lot of the Web3 aesthetics are borrowing from this early Web1 idea of non-designers being able to experiment with creativity. With digital tools for probably the first time ever. And I think we are seeing a little bit of a renaissance with that. And I honestly welcome it, because designers always treat their work as a portfolio for other designers. And I think design in Web3 is now coming out to be more people-oriented, and actually people-generated.

Drew Tozer:

So people who use these exchanges or have a say in how it looks and how it feels and it represents their interests, definitely is one of my favorite things. I mean, Web1 was like the Wild West of the internet, which is my absolute favorite aesthetic. It's just totally unhinged. And then Web2 came in and we started to apply design principles to the web. And we were like, "No. We shouldn't have flashing GIFs, and Elton John blasting when you open the tab, and a blue text over a blue patterned background. That just doesn't work." And then Web3 comes around. They're like, "Yeah. We're going to go back to being internet cowboys."

Mark Lurie:

I love it. Why not have Elton John playing?

Drew Tozer:

I don't know. I'd be into it.

Mark Lurie:

There's a process difference. There's a freeing of creativity whenever you have a new paradigm. But a lot of that's presumably because users expectations change. And so users are open to considering new things.

Drew Tozer:

Yeah, for sure.

Mark Lurie:

How do you think about user feedback and what users actually want in crypto? And is the process of discovering that any different in Web2? And do you think that designs itself might be a function of how we get feedback from users?

Drew Tozer:

Yeah. I think that user research is very different in Web3 compared to Web2. And just as a introduction to user research, it's mostly the efforts of trying to understand people, motivations and behaviors when interacting with digital products so that that product can meet their needs and desires. And that's done by various methodologies that generate feedback like surveys, interviews, and workshops.

Drew Tozer:

I think in the Web3 space, we are seeing much more of a participatory design environment, which is really exciting. Participatory design is when you actually co-work with the people you are designing for. So it's more of a collaborative effort. And you make sure that they're involved at every milestone of the project. And I think that Web3 enables that, because people are more tech-savvy. They tend to care more about how the products that they use are built and they're interested in it.

Drew Tozer:

The community in Web3 is just eager and willing to participate. They come looking to help. They want to get involved. It's a really inspiring level of enthusiasm that makes participatory design far more accessible for designers in the space.

Drew Tozer:

And if we contrast that with a different way of gathering user research, you are met with data-driven design and data-driven user research. So I think data is fine. I'm not going to dis data. My mother is a data analyst. So, sorry mom. But I think that having a small amount of quantitative data is really helpful for understanding what's working and what's not working and identifying patterns on a larger scale.

Drew Tozer:

But I think the problem with increasingly data heavy research is that it's like an addiction. And especially for larger companies who are able to pull or purchase data, it's often far easier and cheaper to just capture these huge swaths of data from many people than to conduct and compensate people to help improve your offering. So, that's what Facebook does.

Drew Tozer:

And I don't know, it's my belief that people should have autonomy and should be aware that they are participating in a study. That they should be compensated for their time. Data-driven research also is just furthering this pigeonholing of people based on demographics. It overly simplifies society down into small groups of individuals. And that categorization treats people like loan consumers, rather than social people that exist in layers of societal context. So they are just continuing to promote and sell individuality through data-driven research. And I'm very excited that we are moving away from that in this space.

Mark Lurie:

It's so interesting because I think there was a previous generation or era where people really were not data-driven at all. And partially this was because computers weren't really a thing. And so data was a lot harder to get, much less analyze without spreadsheets. And we've had several decades now of people emphasizing, "Be data-driven. Look at the data. Look at the data." Now we have so much data. But if I look back on some of the companies I've run, some of the biggest mistakes I've made was when I relied too much on the data instead of my intuition. And I have tried to pull myself back from that and be a little less data-driven to your point.

Mark Lurie:

And I think that may sound odd. But it's a pendulum effect where you shouldn't have no data. You shouldn't be all data. You need to be somewhere in between. And we've maybe gone a little far. And it's interesting that Web3 is more participatory and lets you talk more with users. And what do you come back to a little bit of Web1, where people were less constrained by data because they didn't have it quite so much, and they were going on intuition and their personal preferences. Really interesting how that works.

Drew Tozer:

Yeah.

Mark Lurie:

Do you think... One thing I've noticed is that communities and systems and institutions tend to ossify over time. Do you think that crypto will end up becoming more formal just like Web1 gradually turned into more formal Web2? Or do you think there's something fundamentally different about crypto, which will make its design aesthetics stay different?

Drew Tozer:

I don't think that there's anything fundamentally unique about Web3 that ensures that it will not evolve into something more refined later on. I think it's going to be very challenging for people in the Web3 space to avoid design principles forever. I think they always catch up to you. Be it through an increase in adoption. I think as adoption increases in Web3, you are going to see more traditional design firms want to get involved and they are going to bring their baggage with them. But I definitely feel there's always going to be new trends coming around the corner. And Web3 will evolve to them as they come.

Mark Lurie:

Before we tie off, do you have any advice for users who are going to Web3 sites and deciding for the first time, whether they should trust those sites with their money, and take them seriously? Any guidelines or rules of thumb to judge from the design?

Drew Tozer:

I think in this context, let's treat design as the holistic thing it is, which is the whole experience. So I think that benchmarks of trust would be transparency. And if people clearly articulate who they are and their motivations. They are honest about where they are in the project. They are not over promising with huge loads of money.

Drew Tozer:

And I think another benchmark is simplification. I think there's an urge to make things complex in Web3, because people who can wave through the complexity are often seen as holier-than-thou. So I think having things simple and clear that are welcoming to newbies in the space, that's a good benchmark of somebody who's investing time and effort to design, and is likely not a rug pull.

Drew Tozer:

Other than that, it's hard to tell because the scammiest looking websites now are totally legit in the Web3 space. So all of the benchmarks that you would've seen in the Web2 time just don't exist now. So you really do have to be quite discerning and talk to people.

Mark Lurie:

It's surprisingly complex to be transparent and simple.

Drew Tozer:

It is, yeah.

Mark Lurie:

And communicating that is hard. And I guess at the end of the day, good design helps people be transparent and simple and communicate.

Drew Tozer:

Yeah, absolutely. It needs to be welcoming and accessible. Otherwise, who is it for?

Mark Lurie:

Wise words. And with that, we will tie off. So Drew, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for all the work you do to make Shipyard DEXs, Clipper in particular, so simple and intuitive, and authentic to the users who come to it. Really appreciate it.

Drew Tozer:

Thanks. This was fun.

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