 You are here to listen to this talk by yours truly Diego Salazar. I wanted pyrotechnics for this introduction, but they said no. Both the hotel and DEF CON and the Monero Village. So I got three noes. But we're here to talk about the UI UX of Monero. For those of you who don't know what that stands for, that stands for user interface and user experience. My name is Diego Salazar. I'm known in the Monero community by my handle. R-R-R-E-H-R-A-R. So actually let's go and go to the next slide so you can go and see that. Oh no. Okay, here we go. Well, you know, I'm just going to hide this cursor over here so it's not so much seen. So this is me, Diego Salazar. This is all my business card. Human, go-getter, friend, you know. I'm here for you, whatever you need. I am a UI UX designer. I do own a small design firm, which I am not representing here officially. But I do a lot of things within the Monero community. I work on the Monero website. That design up there is mine. You know, doing some application work for Monero to try to make it a cryptocurrency that is easy to use, that is a pleasure to use. And even though the name of my talk is very aggressive, that's really just to get you guys in the seat so you can see how mad I am. Really, I'm a little nicer to Monero than it might seem on the surface. But Monero does have its pain points in terms of in some places it is ugly and in some places it is very difficult to use. So this talk is actually, we're going to walk you through a little bit of UI UX in general, kind of some general theories so we can kind of get some common ground, be all on the same page. So let's go ahead and get started on that. What are some of these definitions here? For a lot of people, this phrase UI UX because they kind of go together, the interface and the experience are kind of interchangeable and they're really not. The idea of interfaces is something that anything that the user interacts with, so when you click on a button, when you type something into a field, this is all a part of the interface. But the user experience does not just depend on the interface. And let me give a very easy example as to one of the, it's the easiest example as to one of the ways that this is true. If the interface is beautiful, glorious, everything makes sense, but you click on a button and you see a loading circle and you see a loading circle and you see a loading circle and it takes 30 seconds in order for your command to kind of get registered. That's not really a part of the interface. The button was okay, the loading circle is okay, but the fact is that it takes 30 seconds for that command to go, right? So that is going to lessen your experience when you are using that application or using that product. I'm also going to be using the word intuitive a lot. And so let's go ahead and define what that means kind of in UI UX circles. The word intuitive kind of has some various definitions, but one of the ones that I found that I really agree with is this idea that there is a trial and error period of one time. Meaning if I put something new, a new interface in front of you, you don't know it because you haven't seen it before. So if I ask you, can you do this thing? Can you accomplish this goal? You look at it and the interface, whether it's through text or through pictures or symbols, you automatically know what it is that you need to do. So it is still trial and error because you don't know for sure that the button that says go will actually make you go and not stop, but it's intuitive enough that when you click on it, it works. So a trial and error period of one, if it takes you two tries, meaning you click another button and it doesn't work, and then you click on the correct button and it does work, then it's not intuitive. And I found this to be a very easy metric. It's very objective and that's something else that we're going to really start to dig down into. A lot of people view UIUX as kind of this very subjective thing. It's very artsy, designary. Everyone has an opinion and no opinion is more valid than others, almost as much as what kind of wallpaper are we putting on the wall. It's very subjective, but that's not true. Actually UIUX is a very objective field. It's very scientific because if a simple change of color on a button will help a user accomplish something faster and with less confusion, if it helps them accomplish their goals in a better way, then it is objectively better design. So we go about this usually by like A-B testing, right? Okay, what if we switch this color? What if we move this button to the side of the screen? How fast do users accomplish their goals? So these are kind of terms I'm going to be using all throughout and this is kind of the framework in which I'm going to be talking about interfaces and the user experience and we're going to kind of move into Monero from there. So actually we just did through the crash course. You guys are now, you guys are experts at this. You guys can walk around saying I know exactly what interfaces are and the differences between user experience. You'd be surprised how many people don't know this. So it's really hard to have conversations with people about interfaces, about user experience because they just start mixing terms up and you start not talking about the same thing. So now that we've established this common ground, let's go ahead and jump right into it. So actually before we move into cryptocurrencies, I want to say that UI UX is not just a digital thing. It's not just a thing for applications. This is something that is all around us. Every single thing, every object that we use has a user experience associated with it. We might not think about it, but it does. Let's take these doors for example. These doors, if you look either on the left here or there's the ones in the back, you can imagine that if it's a push door, we like that push bar to be there, right? Because it tells us what it is. How many times have you gone to a door that has one of those handles that instinctively tells you pull and you try to pull it, right? But then you see the sign that says push or maybe there is no sign. And you're like, okay, and then you push it and it works. That's really annoying. And in the same way, if you were to put this push bar on a pull door, that would actually be even worse because it'd be really difficult to kind of get a grip on it, right? So this is part of the interface of the door, right? It's something that the human interacts with. And your experience using that door is going to depend on how quickly, how intuitive that is. So once again, moving back to that definition of intuitive, the trial and error period of one time, if you go to that door and it's got that handle and you pull, okay, you have just trial and error once and failed. Now you have to try the other time. So that's how you know it's not intuitive. So everything around us has kind of an interface and has an experience associated with it. Actually here at DefCon, I had a really funny experience. So over in the restrooms, they have the ones that are right over here, they have the handles that are just circular, right? So not the bars, they're just circular. But it's almost like binary. As soon as you turn it even just a little bit, it's like water in full force. And then if you continue turning it all the way, like the water pressure doesn't get any bigger. And they actually rotate in very unintuitive ways. So I turn on the heat which goes in one direction and the cold which kind of goes in another direction and as I was washing my hands, I forgot which direction it goes. And there's no feedback in terms of, okay, well let's try to lessen this to see if that goes more towards the off direction because it's just binary, it's just full force. So I'm here just twisting for like a minute, trying to find the right configuration to turn off the water. So really poor interface, really poor experience. Now let's jump into the cryptocurrency aspect of it. Now that we've kind of established all of these things. Cryptocurrencies in some ways have better UX than the traditional finance system and in some ways have worse UX. So how many people are really annoyed that banks are really open from nine until four or five, right? If you want your money and it's six o'clock, you can't get your money or you got to go to an ATM and maybe there's ATM fees and you got to find the right banks that don't have the nonsense fees, right? This is all part of the experience of using the traditional finance system. With cryptocurrencies, one of the pros of cryptocurrencies is that you don't need anyone's permission to send any money. You can do it at midnight at 3 a.m. You can send it across the globe. So the traditional finance system fails in some areas. But cryptocurrencies also have some cons. Anyone that's trying to kind of sell up cryptocurrencies as a be all end all, they have no idea what they're talking about. In terms of user experience, there are some cons with using cryptocurrencies. When we say you are your own bank, Monero allows you to be your own bank. We mean it. And everything associated with being your own bank, your own security, that's on you. If you lose your money, that's on you and nobody can help you, right? And so a lot of people, the reality is they're just not ready to be their own banks. They don't have the resources or knowledge necessary to be their own banks. And this is not helped by the fact by the fact that many of the apps and wallets are very confusing. They may not tell you, hey, you need to write down your seed. It just shows you a word list. You're like, oh, okay, this exists for a reason. And so you don't end up writing it down. If your computer goes away, you know, it breaks or anything like, now all of a sudden you've lost your money. This is real people's funds that we're dealing with here and they're just gone, right? So these things are actually very important on the application level to have write the first time. Before we start getting a flood of tickets in, hey, what happened? How did this go wrong? And then only after that we go, oh, we should have done this, of course. No, no, no. This is people's money that we're dealing with. Like we need to make sure this is right the first time and it's really, really difficult. And typically there is a spectrum on which whenever you move towards security, you're moving away from good interfaces and easier user experience. If you just think of passwords, the longer passwords are more secure, but they're also much harder to remember, much harder to type correctly. The better passwords are the ones that are more random. They're not really words, they're not really any of this song lyrics or whatever. They're just long alpha numeric, sometimes symbol strings, but they're much harder to remember and much harder to input properly. So poor user experience is on the, good user experience, sorry, is on the opposite spectrum of good security. So what we typically try to do is maximize security and then optimize the interface as best we can without compromising on that security because the only way to move back across that spectrum, oops, the only way to move back across that spectrum is if we compromise. And we're not really willing to do that. So kind of we've been talking about bitcoin, you know, cryptocurrencies in general, some of the pros and cons of using that. Where does Monero lie in this? And this is kind of where we're going to dig into the meat. Of this, because in comparison to other traditional cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Monero has very specific pros and cons even to that, not just to the traditional finance system, but we make other trade-offs as well. And so if you saw the title of my talk, Monero is ugly and it is difficult to use. There are many places where that is actually the case. When compared to bitcoin, Monero has some really big pain points. One of them, which is pretty easy to see right off the bat, is bitcoin addresses are pretty small in comparison to Monero addresses, which are absolutely massive. And we do that because we wanted an increased entropy set, which means that we need longer addresses. And so it's, if it was already impossible to type in a bitcoin address by hand, it is absolutely nightmarish to even begin to think about typing in a Monero address. If you haven't already, you can download a Monero wallet, you can generate a dress, and you just see how long this thing is. And you can imagine taking out your phone. All right, grandma. So tell me your address so I can send you some money. She's like, okay, it's x, y, seven. Okay, is that a capital X? Is that a lowercase x? This stuff matters. And she's telling you for 20 minutes, you got to verify it, right? So Monero addresses are much longer than bitcoin addresses. It was potentially feasible, like 2% chance of being feasible in bitcoin. It's just not even an option in Monero, which means that we had to come up with really interesting technology to kind of circumvent that fact. So we actually, Monero worked on something called open alias, which is this idea that we take advantage of the already existing DNS infrastructure, which allows for text records, right? And so we can say that Diego dot Monero dot com, if I own Monero dot com, and I can set the text record for that, equals this address, similar to the way that DNS will put an IP address to a domain name. So now if you go to Diego, if you sit in your wallet, you type in Diego dot Monero dot com, you can go ahead and just kind of, it reconciles that, it looks up the record and it reconciles the address there. So some of these things do have really clever ways to get around them to increase the user experience without lessening the security, which in this case is the entropy and the long addresses that Monero has. But some of the other stuff that Monero does wrong, that is not quite so, I mean, like nobody was going to try to type in a bitcoin address anyway, let's be real. But Monero does have other pain points, and some of them are actually really, really large. As an example, Monero has four keys, a public key, a public view key, a private view key, a public spend key, a private spend key. And it's just, as we start to layer this privacy technology on top of Monero, it gets increasingly difficult for users to use. So we have, because, so with bitcoin, if I'm a merchant and I'm accepting, because the whole blockchain is transparent, I can see when somebody sends me money. Right, and I know where it came from. And I could, but with Monero, because everything is so hidden, if I receive money, I don't know where it's coming from. Right, so we had to make these things called payment IDs, which is an alphanumeric string that says, hey, this came from me. So as a merchant, I said, okay, if you want to purchase this, send me this, send it to me with this payment ID. And already trying to describe it to you, it might get pretty confusing in your head. And if it's confusing to describe, it's confusing to use. And it's another field to fill out. And then we kind of saw this problem, we kind of didn't solve this problem. We implemented something called sub addresses, which if this is all going over your head because I don't have slides, that's exactly the point. I'm not trying to show you the slides and tell you how this stuff works. I'm trying to explain this verbally and everyone's kind of getting okay, I'm not really following. And that's exactly the user experience of this stuff. People don't track with it. You try to, no, no, no, Monero works because you could do this and this. Listen, grandma, this is all you have to do. Right, and she's not gonna, she's like, okay, what is a mouse again? Right, and the reality is that a lot of the people out there are gonna be like that. Not everyone is like at DEFCON, where we have a baseline level of computer literacy, which typically is much greater than the general population. So when we're trying to tell grandma, because we wanna send her some Monero, that okay, generate a sub address and send it to me so we can do this securely, like it's not gonna work. Let's go ahead and move on. So those are some of the things that we get very, very wrong. And I wouldn't say wrong in the sense that there's nothing that can be done. So one of the other points that I'm gonna really delve into a little bit later in the talk is that foundations cannot really be changed so easily, but UIUX can be tweaked. So this is one of our, I would say this is one of our weaknesses currently. This is something that is going to be improved upon, but Monero also does get, what do you think's coming next? Right, with green, right? Monero also does some things very, very right. So in comparison to Bitcoin, this is a really big point to make, okay? In comparison to Bitcoin, Monero's privacy works out of the box, which means if I send a transaction to you, the privacy just works, and you didn't have to do anything. Whereas with Bitcoin, if you listen to a lot of the people, typically Bitcoin maximalists or others that are like, okay, Bitcoin is the way to be, they're like, okay, so here's how you get privacy with Bitcoin. You gotta obtain your funds from a non KYC AML exchange because otherwise they know which address is yours. You have to mix your funds, send it to a good mixer, but mixers are a trusted third party, so choose the correct one, otherwise they can leave with your coins, right? And you have to choose one in a region, state or nation that is not adherent to, like let's say the five I's, right? Because otherwise they're just going to hand over all the metadata that they have. So you have to choose the correct one, and it has to have a good number of other people using it, otherwise you're mixing with an X, too small of an anonymity set, and even then there's some attacks that can be done if you send small amounts of Monero, I mean not Monero, small amounts of Bitcoin to those mixers, you can still potentially follow funds through it. So there's this just laundry list of things that you have to do to be private with Bitcoin. And honestly, like it gets actually absurd when these people are like, no, no, no, privacy in Bitcoin is easy. This is all you have to do. And if you mess up on any of these things, your privacy is shot. Whereas with Monero, right? I send you a transaction, you're like, hey Diego, send me five bucks of Monero, okay, boop, boop, boop, it's your privacy. We didn't have to do anything. We didn't have to toggle anything. We didn't have to use a third party. It's just the way that it works, which really defaults and mandatory things are extraordinarily powerful in UIUX. The reality is that when something is the default, if it's a default setting in an application, then it's just gonna be used probably 95% of the time. Most people, they'll just install the thing and use it. They won't mess around with the settings. They won't do, they won't kind of see what's available, what options are available. They're just gonna do what's the easiest. That may not be how we think here, because this is DEF CON kind of hacker mentality. So it's kind of may be hard to kind of get in the heads of those people. But the reality is that's actually the majority of the people that exist, right? They're just gonna use the default settings. Defaults are very, very powerful. And if something is not the default, then it's just not going to be used. So when people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, see Bitcoin, it's not really private right now, but all you gotta do is, even if it was just one step, all you have to do is this, one step, that would drop the amount of people using it by a massive amount. But the fact that it's a laundry list of steps just means that honestly, nobody but the nerds are gonna be using the privacy on Bitcoin. And even then, their privacy is not very robust when you start digging really deep down into it. So Monero's privacy is not just a default, it's mandatory. You cannot turn it off, meaning if you are a hacker type and you kind of go in, look through the settings, okay, I don't want this privacy, you cannot do that. This is for everybody's safety. You cannot turn off the privacy. And this is actually the next step beyond defaults being powerful. Mandatory things are absolutely, incredibly, incredibly powerful. Because some people are not financially motivated. Some people, in the words of the Joker from the Dark Knight, they just wanna see the world burn, right? So if you have somebody that can figure out an attack, how to hurt Monero, and these attacks still do exist despite having good defaults and mandatory stuff. These attacks still do exist, and if you go type in Breaking Monero on YouTube, you can see just like the Monero Research Lab has outlined several attacks that you can do on Monero, even with all of the steps we have taken on a protocol level and a user interface and experience level, these things do still exist. But if there are other attack vectors, some people will use them simply because they want to attack Monero or because they want to, you know, chill their coin or whatever, and this stuff happens. So I said we were gonna get to this portion and now we have arrived. The reality is that user interface, interfaces, can be tweaked. Fundamentals cannot be tweaked. I mean they can, but it takes a lot longer. And so the example that I like to give is picture a toilet. They picture a toilet. There's two components to the toilet. The front end, the interface, the actual toilet that you're using, and the back end. The back end, no, the back end, meaning the pipes that take all your stuff away, right? If the back end is not working, you can have the most beautiful golden, soft toilet in existence, and it can be an absolute pleasure to use. But when you go to flush the toilet, if the back end, if these pipes are not working, if the plumbing's not working, you're left with crap, right? Whereas, whereas, if you have plumbing that is working correctly, you may not be using the best toilet in the meantime, but at least it works, and you're not left with a toilet full of crap, right? So the reality is that a toilet is easy to change. I mean maybe you haven't changed a toilet, I've changed a toilet, but a toilet is fairly easy to change. You take off the bolts, you can put on the new one, right? Whereas the plumbing underneath it, if it's really screwed up or it doesn't work, you may have to dig down into the concrete, you're gonna have to do something. If the plumbing underneath it does not work, that is much more difficult to change. And this is the reality, like when we're talking about Bitcoin and Monero and other cryptocurrencies that are not transparent, Monero gets these fundamentals really, really solid. The plumbing works. Right now, the toilets are kind of so-so, depending on which application you're using and stuff, but that can be improved upon. Whereas with Bitcoin, which is very radically transparent from the get-go, trying to add on little privacy layers on top isn't really gonna be helpful for the underlying plumbing, which is not very private. It's like trying to, inside of the toilet, this is where my analogy begins to break down, by the way, inside the toilet, like install some pipes that circumvent the pipes that are supposed to go down into, and then we're not gonna go further down that road. Monero gets these fundamentals correct, and it's one of the reasons why this project is very exciting, because interfaces and experiences evolve with time, and they evolve much faster. Whereas with Bitcoin, you would really have to gut a lot of the things that make it what it is, which by the way, it's not gonna be that easy because there will be a lot of people that stand in the way and say, nope, you cannot do this. This is what makes Bitcoin what it is. We don't want this. And they do have some legitimate reasons why Bitcoin should be transparent, but here in Monero, we definitely think that the cons really heavily outweigh the pros. And so as a UI UX designer, actually, it is much more exciting for me to work on something like Monero where the fundamentals are really solid, because I can take the designs in very exciting directions. Whereas with something like Bitcoin, which has, in my opinion, a very inefficient and not working foundation, these fundamentals, this plumbing, I have to kind of work super hard to go all around these things that don't work. And the design ends up being skewed and weird and twisted and like non-functional and confusing to use and non-intuitive. So my creativity as a designer is actually unleashed by having plumbing that works as opposed to having to do all this nonsense and put all this brain power into something that doesn't. So despite all this negativity, not just that I put on Monero but on Bitcoin and even on the water faucets in the bathrooms, the future is very bright. And this is what keeps me coming back again and again and again. It gets tiring sometimes. I'll be honest, the hacker community, the open source community, is not always the easiest community to work with. Sometimes the hackers take a great pride in an interface being very annoying to use. They take great pride in having these gigantic wikis because the reason they need these gigantic wikis to use their application is because their application is not intuitive. So if you want to use it, you have to read through this massive wiki just to understand what you're doing and to accomplish your goals. And they can take pride in that because it's like a little badge of honor. It shows that you went through the work in order to get to that, right? And as a designer coming in here and like, guys, let's not do this. An example is the Monero website. I came in and I'm like, okay, I want to redo this. It was absolutely awful. I want to redo this. And some people are like, I kind of like it the way it is. It's kind of the better. I like it the way it is. It shows we're an open source software project. I'm like, you know, the funny thing is if I change the website, we will still be an open source software project. I promise you, changing the website is not going to make the license go changed, right? So it's not the easiest to work with, but little by little, especially as people are talking about mass adoption, mass adoption, right? People are understanding. People are really looking towards these interfaces and starting to say, okay, okay, let's see how we can improve on this because as people realize that Monero is actually a very exciting technology, as people look at Monero and realize it can really change the world. We realize we want to give this to as many people as possible. We want this power, this power to take back your privacy, this power to take back your freedom in the hands of as many people as possible. It's not just for nerds. It shouldn't just be for hackers. It shouldn't just be for the people that attend this conference and people like us. It should be for everyone. But for it to be for everyone, it needs to be much better than it currently is. That's why I do what I do. And I am so thrilled. There is an increasing number of people, of designers that are coming, not just into Monero, but to open source in general. I've never been more excited for open source. I love open source. The idea of it is so gracious and giving just empowering people. As an example, there was a scammer on Telegram who was trying to scam Monero out of me. But I basically talked him down and I figured out where he was from. He was from this place in Africa and we started talking video chats and stuff. And he was in a really hard way. And I said, look, man, I'm a designer. I will teach you how to design. And I will start paying you for designs if you're willing to do that work. And he said, yes. I mean, long story short, it didn't end up working out. He got a nice little windfall and so he wanted to go to college, so I'm more power to him. But he doesn't have to download or pirate Photoshop because GIMP is available. And even though it's not in the best place, in my opinion, UI UX-wise, it's still available. And it empowers him to be able to start on this work and potentially look at leaving scamming behind so that he can start a legit good life and get paid for work. So in open source in general, just this idea that if we make these interfaces good, the open source software core is so solid, we can just give it to everyone. And if it's a beautiful thing to use and it's a pleasure to use, then we can really empower more and more and more and more people as we continue along this spectrum. That's why I'm here. That's where my heart is in this. I want to see people in power. That kind of stuff excites me. This is a very exciting place to be. So the future is very bright. For Monero, for open source in general, I've kind of gone off on tangents, but you guys understand. That's the end of my presentation. So I still have some time left. If there's any questions about kind of design in general or kind of what we're looking towards in the future, some optimizations that we want to make, or just say, hey, Diego, your wallet sucks. That's totally fine. Is there any questions? No, I explained everything really well. Yes. Sure. So actually, the question was, for those on the stream who didn't get to hear that, what is my opinion on familiarity versus good design? And I do have another example, actually. It is widely known or thought in designer circles that the hamburger menu, you know those little three lines that you tap and then the menu pops out, that that's bad design. Because it hides relevant information. Not everyone's going to click on it. But the reality is it's become so ubiquitous. It's used absolutely everywhere that it has almost brute-forced its way into being good design. Because now enough people know that it exists, they know what it does. Before that, nobody knew what it did. Right? Same thing with those little three dots or whatever way of hiding information so that way somebody can click on it. It's generally thought in design circles to be bad design. I am, this may, I'm not trying to be political here, but I am largely neutral on this. I think something like Monero is already confusing enough to try to also reinvent new ways of doing design. I do see great benefit to trying to do design better. So staying away from hamburger menus and trying to do something better to try to brute-force a new better way of doing things. Right? Because that's what Monero's trying to do anyway. We're trying to reinvent a financial system, which is much harder. So I'm all about kind of reinventing something if it means having a better product at the end. But some, like I said, something like Monero is already so difficult and abstract and it's hard to wrap your head around that trying to do that at the same time, we're trying to reinvent design and reinvent but the financial system all in one application, it can be a bit much. We're trying to onboard as many people as possible, which is already difficult enough. So I would say adhere to familiarity. And, you know, so in my design work, as I'm designing a new application for Monero from scratch, I'm looking at traditional banking applications, mobile, desktop, just what are people used to and trying to make Monero familiar in that sense. So people are like, oh okay, so Monero's basically just money, right? And the answer is yes, it is. So if it flows, it's very similar to a banking application, then a lot of these things will just come naturally to these people. But some of the things in Monero, like the private keys of bank, doesn't make you do a private key, right? They don't make you write down a C. Some of those things will need to be unfamiliar and so you do have to really optimize to try to make those as nice as possible. Any other questions? No. Well, thank you so much for your time, guys. I'm very grateful to have gotten on the stage and talking to you guys about this. Hopefully you walk away from this, not just with better knowledge about Monero and kind of the way that we do things, but interfaces in general, which is something that is sorely lacking in communities like these. We have a lot more content coming up. We have in about an hour, no, in about like half an hour, we have Artic Mein, who is a Monero Core Team member, who's going to be coming up here and talking with you guys about scaling on Monero. I know we've gotten a lot of talks, like, hey, questions, what are you guys going to do about scaling? Come here, listen to that. It's definitely worth a listen. Thank you guys so much. It's been a pleasure.