If Steve Jobs taught us anything, it is that great UX is the only thing that matters. An interview with Mel Gelderman – CEO of token.com
Why do you believe UX is so important?
The most successful user-facing tech companies have achieved massive levels of adoption by making processes extremely simple for users.
Take the IPod for example, people were walking around with heavy packs of CDs that had very limited storage capacity and would constantly get damaged. Then, from one day to the next you could carry around all the music out there in your pocket.
In the past people would stream content making themselves vulnerable to cyber-attacks or legal problems, Netflix enabled a one-stop-shop for all desirable long-form content (and others followed). Airbnb introduced a next-level of ease when traveling catering for a completely new generation of travelers.
What Apple, Netflix and Airbnb have in common is that they placed the users at the center-stage and developed products with the sole purpose of improving their experience and became massively successful because of it.
Why is UX particularly important for the crypto industry?
Just like with any other user facing technology the only thing that will bring mass market adoption is good UX. I see a lot of companies that are optimizing for Web3 narratives that mean nothing to anyone outside the space. These companies may find success in the Web3 space but they won’t find it in the mass-market.
Why hasn’t this been considered a priority in the past?
Well, on one hand you have large exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase that are optimized for large trading volumes coming from whale movements; millions and billions of dollars. Of course, this business model is very lucrative but it so happens that it leaves the rest of humanity behind.
Keep in mind that 99% of the population still needs to be onboarded into crypto so there is also a lot of money to be made from the mass market.
On the other hand, I believe that culture within the Web3 space has gotten increasingly solidified with concepts that don’t hold true in reality or may not hold true for very long in the future. These concepts keep Web3 complicated for newcomers who don’t care about the technology, or simply don’t have the time to study and figure everything out – they just want the benefits.
Humanity has seen this time and time again; technologies rise and evolve. I am sure when Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook many people disliked it because individuals had developed skill-sets that allowed them to host and run their own blogs and suddenly, Facebook made it really easy and these hard-acquired skills became irrelevant.
And finally, to be honest I don’t think there are many product visionaries in the Web3 industry. I know there are many very clever and brilliant individuals who are technically and mathematically minded; on that front we’ve over-indexed but we’ve fallen short with people that have visionary UX ideas.
How is token.com expecting to solve this issue?
Our industry suffers massively from poor story-telling. There are tens of thousands of tokens and each has a unique story and reason for being. But when regular individuals think of crypto their perspective is very different from what is really going on in the industry.
Individuals should be able to invest in a token if its story resonates with them enough, and token projects should be able to reach the mass-market in a seamless way. The best way to do this is through storytelling.
Social media feeds are the ultimate evolution of human storytelling using the technology available today. These are the best at mass market storytelling and are optimized for a short interaction time.
At token.com we believe that the user experience is the most important thing to solve, and we’ve built a team and a culture around this vision. So for the first time in a decade the mass market crypto UX is about to change; it’s moving from a NASDAQ type experience to a social feed where it’s about storytelling and diversifying your money across hundreds of tokens.
token.com is the social investment platform where money flows effortlessly into the tokens you truly care about.
