Agoric’s Orchestration API simplifies blockchain’s most intricate interactions, providing developers the opportunity to deliver user-friendly, frictionless experiences. But let’s not take the value of developer experience and user experience for granted. Sure, blockchain has come a long way over the past decade and a half. Today, there are more than 82 million blockchain wallet holders, and even more users who interact with a blockchain in some other way. And yet, UX remains important for the technology to succeed. Why? Short answer: It’s all about adoption.
Lagging Behind the Smartphone & Web 2.0
This number is a far cry, however, from the explosive growth of something like the iPhone (which has nearly 1.5 billion users worldwide, despite being announced only a year before the Bitcoin whitepaper) or the large Web 2.0 platforms (e.g., 3 billion Facebook users, 1.7 billion for TikTok, 426 million PayPal accounts).
A key reason for this difference is user experience, or UX. Time and time again, good UX design has been a necessary condition for the mass adoption of new technologies and products. While the UX of crypto applications has improved dramatically, there is still a long way to go for blockchain to achieve the ubiquity of Web 2.0 applications, smartphones, and computers themselves.
Lessons from the Past: Mass Adoption of New Technologies
Good UX design is a crucial part of solving a user problem. It reflects the set of decisions that makes a solution realizable by the user themselves, giving them the confidence to employ technology for their benefit on a regular basis, as such needs arise. By abstracting away frictions and providing intuitive signals of what actions are possible, UX design both attracts and retains users.
The history of the mass adoption of new technologies confirms this fact. Take the personal computer itself: before UX innovations like Xerox PARC's graphical user interface (GUI), computers were characterized by complex, technical interfaces that catered primarily to expert users (think green text and command lines). With the GUI and hardware innovations like the mouse, personal computers began to bridge the gap between niche, technical applications, and mass adoption by abstracting away many of their complex underlying operations, making the tools accessible and (a key concept) intuitive for non-technical users.
Similarly, the iPhone and its touchscreen-focused UX took smartphones from clunky, button-laden gadgets with limited functionality to intuitive tools leveraging natural gestures that made mobile usability instinctive for anyone who picked one up.
Other examples abound, and they all teach the same lesson: good UX is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, when it comes to the mass adoption of a new technology. The Orchestration API leverages this same principle by abstracting intricate multi-chain processes, like querying balances across chains, into straightforward API calls, making it easier for developers to create simple, user-friendly applications.
Blockchain’s Road to Mass Adoption: Current Issues in UX Design
Blockchain arguably left its “green text” era a long time ago. With the advent of more user-friendly wallets, exchanges, and decentralized applications in recent years, the standard UX of blockchain applications has become significantly more accessible and intuitive over time.
But there remains much-needed progress to be made in order to realize the type of adoption enjoyed by PCs, smartphones, and Web 2.0 platforms. Current problems like no single point of entry, complex onboarding, lack of cross-chain interoperability, and fragmented liquidity all require developers to orchestrate operations between different blockchains on behalf of the user.
Improving UX in cross-chain environments is an industry-wide focus, as evidenced by the growing popularity of modular, interoperable, and Chain Abstraction–focused technologies; not to mention the founding of the CAKE Working group and development of Particle’s Multi Layered Framework (both of which Agoric helped establish). And, as always, enhancing transaction speeds and reducing costs remain vital for improving the UX of blockchain applications, ensuring that they can operate at a scale and with the efficiency comparable to traditional systems.
As a broader range of end users begin interacting with blockchain, they will expect frictionless and intuitive services akin to their experiences in Web 2.0 applications. New users are not likely to educate themselves and learn complex interactions in multi-chain environments, making it increasingly important to abstract away many of the complex cross-chain interactions.
Achieving Chain Abstraction: Agoric’s Orchestration Tools
Agoric’s tools offer a solution to many of these UX challenges by providing a Web 2.0 developer-friendly environment well-suited for chain abstraction via an Orchestration API. Developers can use this set of tools to build user experiences that afford single points of entry, simple onboarding flows, and seamless access to assets across multiple chains, all by facilitating cross-chain operations underneath the hood that the user would otherwise have to worry about.
Read more: Seamless Multi-Chain Experiences with Multi-Block Execution
Reducing the need for users to understand the underlying complexity of multi-chain interactions is key to solving some of blockchain’s stickiest UX problems, and Agoric is one of several leaders in working to ensure developers can make it happen.
Looking Ahead
In order to attract and retain the next generation of blockchain users and achieve widespread adoption, the future of UX design for blockchain applications will be marked by a continued shift towards more user-centric design principles and an obsession with intuitive user experiences.
Agoric's Orchestration API is one of several keys ways this approach is playing out, and it exemplifies that developers will need more tools and frameworks in order to build apps that rival the usability of Web 2.0 applications, and retain the next many million blockchain users.
Getting Started with the Orchestration API
Getting started with the Orchestration API is straightforward and involves three main steps:
Master the key concepts that give Orchestration its super powers!
Play with the Orchestration Basics dApp to see how orchestration can improve cross-chain functionality and enhance the user experience.
Fork the dApp to customize the code, giving you the freedom to experiment and tailor the orchestration features to your specific needs.
Trying out the API? Join the conversation on Discord to share your experience!
