Over the past years, the cryptocurrency domain has grown substantially. The corresponding user base has also changed significantly and is no longer only made up of cypherpunks and computer experts as was the case in the early days of Bitcoin. Managing these cryptocurrencies, however, has been found to be challenging for the users and it remains largely unknown what features of current wallets contribute to the poor UX, why, and to what extent. Artemij Voskobojnikov, PhD candidate in my research group, has led a collaboration with Freie Universität Berlin researchers that investigated this exact question.
In a corpus of 45,821 app reviews of the top five mobile cryptocurrency wallets, we identified and qualitatively
analyzed 6,859 reviews pertaining to the user experience (UX) with those wallets. Our analysis suggests that both new and experienced users struggle with general and domain-specific UX issues that, aside from frustration and disengagement, might lead to dangerous errors and irreversible monetary losses. We reveal shortcomings of current wallet UX as well as users’ misconceptions, some of which can be traced back to a reliance on their understanding of conventional payment systems. For example, some users believed that transactions were free, reversible, and could be canceled anytime, which is not the case in reality. Correspondingly, these beliefs often resulted in unmet expectations. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations on how to design cryptocurrency wallets that both alleviate the identified issues and counteract some of the misconceptions in order to better support newcomers.
The paper received Distinguished Paper award at ACM SIG CHI, the top HCI conference.
To learn more, watch a short presentation of the study or read the paper.
Artemij Voskobojnikov, Oliver Wiese, Masoud Mehrabi Koushki, Volker Roth, Konstantin Beznosov, “The U in Crypto Stands for Usable: An Empirical Study of User Experience with Mobile Cryptocurrency Wallets,” Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI’21), 2021
