Discussions about accelerating adoption of crypto often focus on improving user experience. (UX). The popular thinking goes: Web3 products lag behind from a user experience perspective, onboarding poses multiple points of friction, and technological concepts come with learning curves. Web3 is missing a seamless experience for apps that will unlock greater adoption.
While improving crypto UX is certainly important, I believe that the more significant and urgent barrier to adoption is building things that people want. Web3 has a product-market fit problem, not a UX problem.
Li Jin is a co-founder of Variant, which co-published this article.
Product-market fit is when a product satisfies a strong market need. For consumer builders, the elegance and challenge in building for consumers is that humans have remarkably consistent needs across time. That’s why Maslow’s hierarchy of needs continues to resonate nearly a century after its introduction, with universal needs ranging from the physiological (food, shelter, clothing) to psychological (belonging, love, entertainment, esteem).
See also: Cami Russo: Crypto’s Theater Is Becoming More Surreal | Opinion
The history of consumer startups is one of continual innovation in solving for human needs in novel ways. Though people often dismiss new consumer apps as incremental innovations in flippant categories (“teens making dance videos”), the truth is that successful startups offer a step-function improvement in enabling people to achieve a core need. Amazon sold us books (and everything else) in just a few clicks, dramatically easing the process of procuring goods. Facebook enabled us to connect with those we care about instantly. Tinder exposed us to an order of magnitude more potential romantic partners than anyone could stumble on in real life.
There is a lot of evidence that when the user benefit is great enough, users are willing to jump through UX hurdles and learn new behaviors, in crypto and beyond. Examples include the first iPhone (which lacked a touch keyboard), the internet itself, and all crypto assets and applications that have had significant adoption to date (non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, during the last bull market being a primary example). For products that solve a core need, unfamiliar and complicated UX hasn’t been a…
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