 Thank you everyone for joining. Today, we're going to talk about how to onboard a staking user in under five minutes. But first a quick introduction. My name is Adam and I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I currently live in Brooklyn. I got involved in live peer pretty early on building products and tools for the community and these days I'm doing product engineering and design with a real focus on the token holder experience. Hi, I'm Shwan. I was born in China. I grew up in Texas and now I'm in San Francisco and how I heard about the blockchain world was at the end of last year and I really got involved in live peer earlier this year and just never looked back. So now I'm working on live peer research and design under the community grant. Actually, next one's mine. So we got a couple of really exciting things on the agenda for you today. First, we're going to delve into what are some of the onboarding problems across the entire ecosystem because this is really non-isolated incident and then secondly, we're going to be really excited to share with you how live peer really imagined its own staking app redesign. Cool. So there's a pretty decent amount of you here. Quick show of hands. Who here runs a mining operation? Okay. And who here has recently staked token on a proof-of-stake network? Okay, so a lot more hands. I think I think this perfectly illustrates basically how much proof-of-stake has really lowered the barrier to entry to participate in these these open decentralized networks. So in the case of live peer that's a video infrastructure network, but there's lots of really exciting proof-of-stake networks being being built out today that we think will be really integral to our everyday lives as really citizens of the internet. So here's just a short list. This is really just the tip of the iceberg, but there's a public proof-of-stake network for smart contract platforms, for value exchange, for data query processing, for blockchain interoperability. So yeah, we think staking is here to stay and we believe strongly it's yeah, it's here to stay. We think it's pretty cool. And we're looking forward to seeing the first million users onboarded and participating in these networks. But there's a problem. Staking user interfaces, so the gateway to participate in securing these networks kind of sucked for the for the most part. And that makes onboarding really hard. So studies have shown that if it takes more than five minutes to onboard a user, they'll most likely drop off or give up. So we're gonna have a real hard time onboarding the first million staking users if it takes more than five minutes to stake. So why do staking apps suck? We surveyed this sort of burgeoning landscape of staking apps and we surfaced really four main problems that have really been impeding the onboarding process for users and nearly all of them. So problem number one is a really verbose and inconsistent language system being used. So staking, bonding, unbond, on-stake, baking, cycle, round, era, epoch, delegator, there's a lot of jargon and I think like these words are great, but they're pretty verbose and often redundant, like stake and bond really mean the same thing. And they're not being employed consistently and this is leaving users pretty confused. Number two, it's really hard to evaluate delegates. So in most proof-of-stake systems, a delegate is represented by their address. So this is just a randomly generated string. And so the absence of a social identity layer, for example, a name, a bio, or an avatar, or a URL, makes it really difficult for users to evaluate who to stake towards. And this is like, you know, in web 2.0, this is like a given, but in a lot of these apps we saw there, it's not available. Problem number three, it's really difficult to evaluate the benefits of staking. So staking apps are not effectively showing users what they stand to gain by staking. Staking represents an opportunity to own equity and voting influence in public networks that we think, we believe strongly, our society will run on one day. And it also represents an opportunity to do work and potentially even earn a living on these networks, whether that's validating, blockchain transactions, or in the case of live peer, transcoding and distributing video. So these are awesome opportunities, but staking apps are not doing a good job communicating them before users actually stake. And finally, we notice a really disconnected onboarding funnel. So most staking apps suffer from non-integrated, complex onboarding or onboarding at all. So there's a lot of steps connecting your wallet acquiring tokens. Staking apps really need to lead users through these steps in app, like a good salsa dancing partner. So this is an actual conversation I had with a friend of mine. He asked me how to stake on live peer. And I didn't feel really confident in the onboarding tutorial on the staking app. So I just sent him step by step instructions. And I'm sure many of you have gone through this process, you know, step one, get a wallet, step two, fund the wallet, step three, acquire tokens, step four, approve tokens for staking, step five, evaluate your your delegate, step six, make sure to manage your awards, you know, sign up for notifications. So my friend, he did give up and like, I don't blame him. It's like, come on, that's a lot of steps. So yeah, I think the stakes are too high. No pun intended. The stakes are too high for to allow users to drop off like this. So you know, how can we how can we design for these problems? How can we help onboard new staking users in under five minutes? Well, I'm so glad you asked Adam, because that's exactly what we set out to do in reimagining the life you're sticking up. Yes. And we're super excited to share with you also our results. So maybe before we get into that, what is live peer anyway? And for those of you who don't know, life here is peer to peer live video encoding. And what that means is we are a protocol and open source protocol that any video developer in the world can use to incorporate live video into their project or app. Okay. Now how does staking play a role in life here? So understand that let's just go through a scenario. Pretend you're watching a streaming version of the World Cup in 2020, we're traveling time, you know, traveling to the future. And between the camera and guitar, that's on the football field and streaming that live to you, your device, there's this multi billion dollar market in ensuring this quality video streaming experience for you. And now how that happens is there's a footage of the video football game playing out there, and it has to be reformatted in order for it to work on all these different devices. And that's called encoding. The current services that are centralized make this insanely expensive. Now what life here does is take unused infrastructure that's out there and make the computation so cheap that it's just a fraction of the cost what it is today. And we use a delegated proof of stake system. So when you stake live for your token, you ensure the quality of the service and you secure the network. Okay, so let's take a look at the current staking experience. This here is our previous Explorer. And what you do here is you stake token, you manage your rewards, et cetera, et cetera. And there are over 2,600 token holders currently participating in every day there are more people. But there are still a lot of problems with the staking Explorer. And as Adam mentioned, we don't really, we're not really exempt from all of the, you know, same the problems that are going on in the ecosystem. So currently more than 70% of the users don't make it past the first page. So we know this from our analytics. And more than 90% of the users who are staking had to rely on the community and some human input to even just get through the staking first experience. Probably something else is more shocking is that the first stake experience can take anywhere between 30 minutes to upwards of three days for some unfortunate users who are truly lost. So that's not acceptable. And that led us to formulate these two North stars for where we want to be. So the two key targets for us in our staking redesign would be we want all of the users or sorry, eight out of 10 users to be able to complete staking autonomously supported by the interface alone. And that means no human intervention. They just figured out. The second thing is that we want more than 50% of the users to be able to stick in under five minutes. And as we said, this is a really key thing for us. So how do we go about accomplishing this, right? These two goals. Well, as a good human centered designer, we asked the first question first, which is, for whom are we designing anyway? And we went to our community for that. We did generative research with 30 community members who are currently stakers and figured out that our audience really has this investor mindset. And we further sub segmented them and figured out who our early adopters are in the community. And another way to resegment this audience is to look at their experience with staking in general, because we want to design for multiple levels of experience. So we have new users and experience users, which we'll share with you how we factor that into the onboarding. Okay, a second category of information that we looked at is what are all of the other apps doing, right? Because we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We want to take what's good. Some of the apps that we looked at are Cosmos, Tezos, some of the bigger staking apps that we know, but we also looked at investment apps, which are relevant to what our users are already familiar with. We looked at the UI. We looked at the onboarding flow. We looked at the information architecture and also the staking interactions. And thirdly and most importantly, we really wanted to figure out what are the user pain points? And that's key to all of the designs, decisions that we made. So we went about constructing a user journey from beginning to end. And that means when they first got involved and engaged with live peer as a brand, all the way to the end when they state token. And some of the problems we surfaced are pretty similar to what's going on out there on all the other staking apps. People don't understand the ROI. Like what am I even getting out of the stake? And they don't understand how to evaluate who to stick towards anyway. They don't really, they can't finish the first staking experience, which is a huge problem. And lastly, the confusing terminology detracted greatly from the experience. Awesome. So based on these user pain points that Siwan just described, we identified really five areas that we felt we could really improve the onboarding experience for this new staking app. So I'll go through them. So number one, we introduced a more intuitive information architecture that really shepherds users to where they need to go. So there are over like 14 views, but if you really boil it down, there's like three high level views. So there's the orchestrator's list view, which orchestrators in the live peer protocol are the delegates. There's the orchestrator profile and the token holder profile. A key takeaway here is that you'll notice there's a call to action to stake or on stake on each one of these views. So whether you're evaluating transcoders or managing your existing stake, that core value proposition is always available and highly visible. So this was just an important design consideration in getting users staked in under five minutes. We established a language system. So this was, I mean, it's small, but important. So this was really just an exercise in reaching consensus with the team on vernacular. So removing certain words and renaming others. We introduced opt-in identity using a project called Threebox. So this accomplishes really two things. So number one, it helps users evaluate who to stake to, and then it gives orchestrators campaigns greater visibility into the app. So they don't have to go digging off app. We introduced what we're calling a staking widget. So this really accomplishes three things. Number one, it allows you to connect your wallet. Number two, it helps you understand what you're getting from staking before you actually stake. So in the case of live peer, that's projected rewards, projected earned fees, voting power. And then thirdly, it leads directly into the staking interaction. So this is kind of like a mini app in and of itself. And we really like it because it I think lends itself to embedding in other applications. So if you're an orchestrator running a note in live peer network, we can see you embedding this on your own site to campaign for token holders. Now that we've seen how the information architecture have been reorganized and how the UI elements have been really designed to support onboarding and understanding, let's see how all those elements kind of pull together into a cohesive onboarding experience. And what we did here was create an onboarding tutorial. And as Adam mentioned, we always have just one call to action. There's no distraction. But for the onboarding, we give people a place to start. And that is over there. So once you watch this tutorial, we kind of learned this key lesson, which is you can't have the same onboarding experience for everyone. So as we remember, we had two key audiences at experience levels that we wanted to sign for. And that is new users and experience users. New users really can't do without a lot of hand holding. But experience users are boggled down by all the explanations that they don't need. So here's how we solve for that problem. Once you launch the tutorial, which is for everyone, then you get a choose your own adventure. So for the experience users, they get a quick guide, a really, really quick out of glance, you know, for what the four steps are to onboarding. And then for the new users who really need a lot more support, they get a step by step walkthrough to help them complete sticking interaction for the first time. So let's take a look at how that works. So this is the first step, which is enter the amount that you want to stick in the sticking widget and also figure out what the ROI is for the experience user. It's a very simple suggestion and showing you where to, you know, input that information for the new user. We give a lot more in depth explanation. So this way they understand what they're doing. Okay, step two, we want to choose an orchestrator from the list. So we explain how to choose the orchestrator and that you can also click here to go into the detail view and further evaluate. Yes, further evaluate the orchestrator and all of their activities. You can see their campaigns there. You can see the identity. And this just like really helps you contextualize who you're evaluating. So the third step is a really important step, which is we tell them explicitly to go ahead and stick to the orchestrator that they chose. And after this step is where all the fun happens. We get this huge yay, you have completed staking lots of confetti user delight. So people love this. And voila, we have now completed staking for a new user. And then lastly, but not least, we finished strong by helping people understand that the staking fun continues on. You still have a management app basically where you can see you're seeking activities, how do that change over time this anything change, what your rewards are over time, etc. So that concludes our onboarding tutorial. Thank you. So yeah, results really quickly. We did find in our early usability testing that eight out of 10 users were able to complete staking autonomously. So that means just really without asking any questions. And key result number two, 60% over 60% of users were able to complete staking in under five minutes. And this particular stake are actually completed in under one minute. So yeah, future challenges. You know, obviously onboarding is just one piece of the puzzle. How do you help retain users after they've staked and really encourage active participation? Staking is not a passive activity. You have to be really vigilant and, you know, make sure your delegate is performing up to par and playing by the rules. Otherwise, you like them risk losing some of your stake. Designing for governance interaction. So in life here and in most proof of stake protocols, your stake also represents your voting power. So, you know, for future governance proposals, how can we design to encourage this type of participation in the network? And finally, you know, in a world where there's hundreds of staking protocols, it's going to be increasingly important to make it as easy as possible for users to really jump from one staking app to another and still feel at home and feel, have a feel familiar. So this is going to require reaching consensus with other staking protocols and other projects and really coalesce around proven design patterns and a shared language. And we're really looking forward to, to working with you guys and other teams in the space and to make this a reality and help onboard, you know, the first million staking users. Without a huge thanks to the live peer team and community without whom this talk would not have been possible. And also a huge, huge thanks to you, the audience members. And as Adam mentioned, we really want to collaborate with you to make staking better for everyone. So if you want to take our challenge, we have this challenge out for everyone at DevCon to stake live peer token in under one minute. So if you're curious about that, come find us afterwards. Thank you so much. Come find us on Twitter and yes.