Note

If you are new to the blockchain technology, taking our Introduction to Blockchain Technology self-paced course is highly recommended. Also, for a comprehensive coverage of blockchain development in Ethereum or mastering Solidity programming, taking our below self paced courses is highly recommended:

• Learn Solidity Programming by Examples
• Introduction to Ethereum Blockchain Development

Recap

In our previous article ( Review of Challenges for Ethereum Blockchain Development), we discussed the challenges of Ethereum blockchain development.

In this article, we learn how to use UI/UX and design thinking best practices while building Ethereum blockchain applications.

• Learn Solidity Programming by Examples
• Introduction to Ethereum Blockchain Development

UI/UX, usability, and design thinking

This is a mouthful. The truth is, in order to gain widespread adoption of Ethereum and cryptocurrency, there's much to be done by the Ethereum and blockchain community to improve the usability of the technology, tools, and user experience of DApps.

Cryptocurrency may be a hot topic in the blockchain community and crypto-investor circle, but to the average Joe, the concept of Bitcoin or crypto-token is too foreign to understand. What they heard or saw is a bunch of magic alphanumeric characters. Those characters seem to make no true connection to their own daily life. It is something like 1BQhEut2E4XmYm53Qt614NbrhBvuCoyxVc in their crypto-wallets, with a final balance of 10.0005 BTC. It is hard to fathom how much I have actually owned, how much profit I gained from this trade, and how much I paid for a cup of coffee.

User Interface (UI), User Experience (UX), and usability is the collective name for the user experience design. It is an experience design process of taking a user-centric approach to products and services, with a focus on usability, accessibility, and desirability throughout the entire journey and interaction with end users. It intends to design a product with the goal of creating an attachment, satisfaction, and stickiness with end users.

The usability and UI/UX of DApps will greatly influence the adoption rates of Ethereum, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. The UI's design goal is to come up an intuitive and clean design to hide all the complexity of DApps. It needs to navigate the user through complex business processes and create trust and confidence between the machine and network.
Typically, it also involves streamlining and redesigning the traditional business process and coming up with new digital experience processes.

One common technique that's used in user experience design is the design thinking process. It is a five-stage process that was developed by Stanford University, and is shown in the following diagram:

 

The preceding five-stage process is as follows:

• Starting with empathy, it gets to know the users and understand their needs while gathering information about the targeted users.
• It then comes up with a problem definition and tries to make sense of the user.
• Once you have defined the problem statement, during stage 3, you can start to anticipate the user's expectation and come up with solutions and ideas.
• The last two stages in the design thinking process are to come up with a prototype as a scaled-down version of the final design and test the new product and design with the users, and then refine and improve the design and user experience.

 

It has been an effective approach for defining innovative products and services. Those of you who are skeptical should try it out for yourself.

 

Next Article

In our next article ( Review of Ethereum Governance for Ethereum Blockchain Development), we discuss the Ethereum governance for blockchain application development.

This article is written in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a leading author of “Learn Ethereum: Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts” book. He has written 7 books on blockchain development.

Resources

Free Webinars on Blockchain

Here is the list of our free webinars that are highly recommended:

• Hyperledger Fabric for system admin versus developers
• How to harness blockchain for environmental and corporate sustainability
• Review of Initial Coin Offering, Security Token Offering and asset tokenization use cases and best practices
• Blockchain for entrepreneurship- 27 blockchain business use cases
• Hyperledger Fabric for entrepreneurship- 21 blockchain business use cases

Free Courses

Here is the list of our 10 free self-paced courses that are highly recommended:

• IT Career Roadmap Explained
• Web Design with Bootstrap
• User Experience Best Practices
• Intro to Search Engine Optimization
• Web Design with WordPress
• Introduction to Drupal CMS
• Intro to Joomla CMS
• Intro to Cybersecurity
• Introduction to Cloud Technology
• Recorded Live Webinars and Classes

Self-Paced Blockchain Courses

If you like to learn more about Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Ethereum or Corda, taking the following self-paced classes is highly recommended:

1. Intro to Blockchain Technology
2. Blockchain Management in Hyperledger for System Admins
3. Hyperledger Fabric for Developers
4. Intro to Blockchain Cybersecurity
5. Learn Solidity Programming by Examples
6. Introduction to Ethereum Blockchain Development
7. Learn Blockchain Dev with Corda R3
8. Intro to Hyperledger Sawtooth for System Admins

Live Blockchain Courses

If you want to master Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum or Corda, taking the following live classes is highly recommended:

• Live and self-paced blockchain development with Ethereum
• Live and self-paced blockchain development with Hyperledger Fabric
• Live and self-paced blockchain development with Corda
• Immersive Blockchain Bootcamp with live and self-paced courses
• Live crash course for learning Ethereum with Solidity
• Live crash course for building DApps with Hyperledger Fabric 
• Live crash course for building DApps with Corda
• Live full-stack blockchain development in Hyperledger and Ethereum

 

Articles and Tutorials on Blockchain Technology

If you like to learn more about blockchain technology and how it works, reading the following articles is highly recommended:

•  History and Evolution of Blockchain Technology from Bitcoin
•  Overview of Blockchain evolution and phases from Ethereum to Hyperledger
• Comprehensive overview and analysis of blockchain use cases in many industries
• Blockchain Crowdfunding Security Token or Initial Coin Offerings
• A beginner Guide to Blockchain Technology
• How Decentralized Peer-To-Peer Network Works
• How blocks are added to the blockchain
• How Public and Private Keys of Cryptography Work
• What Is A Cryptographic Hash Function
• How Digital Signature Works In Blockchain
• The role and types of consensus mechanism in blockchain
• How Proof-of-Work Consensus Works in Blockchain
• How Proof of Stake Consensus works in Blockchain

Articles and Tutorials on Ethereum and Solidity

If you like to learn more about blockchain development in Ethereum with Solidity, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:

• Review of Architecture and Components of Ethereum
• Comprehensive Blockchain Ethereum Developer Guide from Beginner to Advance Level
•  How to Write Ethereum Smart Contracts with Solidity in 1 hour
• Review of Architecture and Components of Ethereum
• How Ethereum Manages Accounts
• How Ethereum Manages Transactions
• How Smart Contracts Work in Ethereum
• How Ether and Gas Work in Ethereum
• How Ethereum Virtual Machine works
• How address and wallet work in Ethereum
• How mining works in Ethereum
• List of Tools and Technologies in Ethereum Ecosystem
• Review of challenges in distributed systems
• Review of Cap Theorem in Distributed Systems
• Horizontal Scaling versus Vertical Scaling in Distributed Systems
• How to Scale up Ethereum Blockchain Applications
• Review of scaling solutions for Ethereum
• How to Manage Ethereum State Channel with Raiden
• How Plasma Chains Work in Ethereum
• How Sharding and Gasper work in Ethereum
• How Proof-of-Stack Consensus Works in Ethereum
• A roadmap for Implementing Ethereum 2.0
• How to work with Decentralized Data and Content Storage in Ethereum
• How Decentralized Messaging with Whisper Works in Ethereum
• Review of Infura for Ethereum Development
• Review of Infura Ethereum API
• How to Use Remix with Infura for Ethereum Development
• How Ethereum Client API Works
• How Ethereum IPFS Storage Works
• How to Install and Start Ethereum IPFS Storage
• How to Run Ethereum IPFS Storage
• How to Work with Ethereum Swarm Storage
• How to Install Ethereum Swarm Storage
• How to Handle Ethereum Messages with Whisper
• Review of Popular Ethereum Smart Contract Libraries
• Review of Private and Permissioned blockchain
• How to Set up a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
• How to Run Geth on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
• How to Build a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain with Mining
• How to Run Geth on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain with Mining
• How to Create an Account on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
• How to Use Ethereum Optional Flags with New Chains
• Review of Ethereum Options for Development and Testing
• Review of Ethereum Developer Chain Options
• Review of Ethereum API and Console Options
• Review of Ethereum Networking Options
• Review of Ethereum Transaction Pool Options

Articles and Tutorials on Hyperledger Family

If you like to learn more about blockchain development with Hyperledger, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:

• Introduction to Hyperledger Architecture, Projects, Tools and Libraries
• Complete Review of Hyperledger Fabric Architecture and Components
• Hyperledger Fabric for System Administers versus Developers
• How to use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor Hyperledger Fabric
• Essential Hyperledger Sawtooth Features for Enterprise Blockchain Developers
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Fabric on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install and work with Hyperledger Sawtooth
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Burrow on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Iroha on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Indy and Indy CLI on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Seth and Docker on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Configure Hyperledger Sawtooth Validator and REST API on AWS
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Build Transaction Processor as a Service and Python Egg for Hyperledger Sawtooth
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Deploy Ethereum Smart Contracts with Hyperledger Burrow
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Create Cryptocurrency Using Hyperledger Iroha CLI
• Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Explore Hyperledger Indy Command Line Interface
• Blockchain Developer Guide- Comprehensive Blockchain Hyperledger Developer Guide from Beginner to Advance Level
• Introduction to Hyperledger Sawtooth Blockchain Development

Articles and Tutorials on R3 Corda

If you like to learn more about blockchain development on Corda , reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:

• Introduction to R3 Corda Blockchain Development

Articles and Tutorials on Other Blockchain Platforms

If you like to learn more about blockchain development in other platforms, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:

• Introduction to Quorum Blockchain Development