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Dear MetaMask workforce,
I assume your product is great.
Blockchain is an very elaborate know-how, and you are executing your most effective to make it person-helpful.
Now you need to have to make it even consumer-friendlier.
We not too long ago introduced our BMJ Reward Token, a groundbreaking blockchain-primarily based reward application, and we supported just a person wallet at launch: MetaMask.
Our logic was very simple. In the earth of Net3 wallets, MetaMask was the most consumer-welcoming, the most properly-known, and the most very well-made use of. What we did not anticipate was how your item would depart our end users very well-confused.
These are not noobs: our common investor has in excess of $200,000 in crypto belongings. Continue to, we invested way also a lot time and vitality supporting our end users through MetaMask installation and setup – if the objective is a World wide web3 wallet for the environment, you’re not there still.
As a staff that is on the front traces of MetaMask help, here are a several straightforward things that would have a big influence – as very well as fixing the root trigger of quite a few of your issues.
1st, let’s start out with a very simple issue. What is MetaMask’s strategy?
The “Netscape Moment”
Again at the dawn of the Environment Huge Net, the to start with knock-down, drag-out battle was all around the Net browser.
As it turned obvious that the Internet was going to transform the planet, every person required to personal the computer software that ran it. The epic struggle among Netscape and World wide web Explorer is the stuff of legend, and famously landed Microsoft with an antitrust fit.
It is abundantly obvious that World-wide-web3 wallets – the gateway to blockchain – will be a related battle. In other phrases, this is your “Netscape minute.”
Like the early days of the Web, your main consumer base nowadays is geeks and wonks. (This is also noticeable from studying through your Group discussion boards.) But glance at the normies who assessment your item on, say, Trustpilot.
A person term: oof.
I get that this engineering is not only exceptionally advanced, but brand new. I also get that you are investing a ton of time and income on assistance, as nicely as battling off fraudsters who use the MetaMask title.
However, there is one major query about your system: Do you want to be the primary Internet3 wallet for crypto geeks, or for all of us?
From my viewpoint, this is your root trigger: you are heading for geeks, not for the rest of us.
By default, you are spending your time chasing every obscure function ask for from the crypto natives who actively interact with you – and you miss out on out on the massive untapped possible of the silent masses (right until they leave a scathing Trustpilot assessment).
I am flummoxed by some of the conclusions currently being manufactured at MetaMask. Why on earth are you funding grants? Why are you sponsoring art shows? Why are you not funneling 100% of your time and money into producing the most person-helpful Web3 wallet in the earth?
Potentially you are not aware of the unbelievable opposition that is coming your way. Since if you experienced any inkling, you would reduce all the extra fat, place your head down, and laser-concentrate your way to reaching mass adoption.
This likely goes all the way to Joe Lubin, the CEO of ConsenSys, which owns MetaMask. Do you not recognize this product or service is a shining gem of World-wide-web3? We would invest in it, if we could (and we are invested in it, since our products and solutions are intertwined).
Who is operating MetaMask’s small business tactic? If you really don’t have a environment-course government who has scaled up customer program at a international level, then you should transform up the workforce. Double up on UX and UI. Get rid of the artwork exhibits. Quit screwing all-around.
The huge tech businesses, the browser corporations and the fintechs will all have some version of a Web3 wallet. To defeat them, there are core structural changes that need to be manufactured to MetaMask to carry it to the masses. Be sure to get started them Monday.
Get Back again to Initially Rules
Yet again, the root cause, from our outdoors view, is that you are producing for crypto geeks, not for the rest of us. You are letting them generate your product or service roadmap.
Blockchain is dominated by technically wise men and women who will bludgeon you with obscure use cases. “Develop this attribute,” they say, “that I, and only I, will at any time use.”
Creating for the rest of us, on the other hand, appears like this: you put a ton of revenue into aim groups. You get common customers in a place, or on Zoom, and you check with them how they would do very uncomplicated items. Like putting in MetaMask. Shopping for their first ETH. Building a transaction.
You observe. You pay attention. You document the classes, so other folks can view and pay attention. You do this once more, and again, and all over again. With hundreds of folks who are not blockchain experts.
This is how you make MetaMask the Website3 wallet that we will be very pleased to provide to our customers. They really do not need to cross-chain bridge. They don’t want to create on testnets. They just need to have to:
- Put in MetaMask
- Display screen their BMJ tokens
- Redeem their BMJ tokens
Which is it. Most straightforward use conditions attainable. Listening to our customers (and our consumers are your buyers), listed here are a number of precise areas that need to have function to get back to these to start with concepts.
Get rid of the 3-2nd delay.
Each time you click the MetaMask browser extension (we have utilised equally Firefox and Chrome), there is a a few-next delay to open your wallet.
3. Next. Hold off.
Over time, this delay grows from a slight inconvenience to a rock-in-your-shoe irritation. It tends to make you not want to open up MetaMask, due to the fact of that 3. Next. Hold off.
If you materialize to go to yet another window, the wallet closes up, and then a different 3. Second. Hold off.
My issue is that the 3. Second. Hold off. is one particular of people unconscious factors persons will improve to despise MetaMask. We all have illustrations of these “small frustrations” that expand into quite large types (see Joel Spolsky’s well known web site about the bread manufacturing unit).
Google returns queries in milliseconds. That is the common. I’m confident there is a interesting complex explanation for the Three. 2nd. Delay. But I genuinely really don’t treatment. Please make MetaMask open, promptly.
Commit in human-centric UI.
A person of the most effective things about MetaMask is that you basically present the gas cost, in USD:
Your critiques exhibit that some users loathe this, mainly because they consider it’s your cost, but it’s unquestionably the proper factor to do: you are clear with customers about the expense to make a transaction.
That is human-centric style and design: it is our dollars, after all.
Make sure you deliver that identical user interface philosophy to the relaxation of the MetaMask experience. For instance, just after installing, MetaMask offers you this puzzling dropdown. How a lot of ordinary people are likely to be switching networks?
As soon as they’ve logged in, you’ve bought 6 items likely on up top: the MetaMask symbol (which does absolutely nothing), the perplexing community dropdown, the Account list, a cryptic message “Not related,” a terrifying-hunting wallet deal with, then a hamburger menu for “Account Options.”
This is the principal screen of your merchandise!
It’s a mess.
I’ve been employing MetaMask for numerous many years and I still cannot bear in mind where by to obtain Settings. (Click the round pie chart that appears to be like like an icon, of study course.)
Great UI is about ruthlessly streamlining and reducing. It is about what you conceal, not what you exhibit. I know you have previously hidden a ton. Disguise even much more. The geeks will not like this, but the rest of us will.
Strip it down! Simplify! Make crypto invisible!
I could go display-by-monitor on this place, but you get the gist. Remember to layout for people.
Align MetaMask encounter throughout all browsers and cellular.
As we have fielded thoughts from people, we have prepared stage-by-step directions on using MetaMask – even designed a tutorial video clip. The dilemma, we learned, is that MetaMask is not supported on each and every browser. (No Safari? Appear on.)
Then there’s Courageous, which has its possess wallet that you have to disable very first. If you want crypto reliability, you’ve gotta work it out with Brave.
And the cell model of MetaMask is totally diverse continue to. This is a big whiff. We have just started pushing users to desktop, even although a lot of end users favor cellular.
Be sure to align the main experiences throughout platforms, i.e., putting in MetaMask, displaying tokens, and redeeming tokens.
Increase tailor made tokens in a single click on.
Keep in mind your purchaser is just not the conclude person, it is also the developers and builders (like us) who are integrating MetaMask into their products.
We required a “surprise and delight” expertise where our Quality customers would just come across tokens in their MetaMask wallet each individual thirty day period, but guess what?
For our customers to basically see their BMJ tokens, which they own, it’s a convoluted method involving typing in the finish intelligent agreement deal with. It would be much less difficult if we could just mail them a website link: “Click listed here to check out your BMJ tokens.”
You should empower just one-simply click including of new tokens, so it’s not like configuring a router.
In Summary
Criticizing is easy building is hard.
But we wished to make our circumstance in the strongest way feasible, because – whilst we have no formal partnership – we are companions, of a form. We are relying on MetaMask as the gateway to our product, the BMJ Reward Token.
To our customers, then, MetaMask and the BMJ token are the exact “experience.”
If MetaMask is hard to use, our full product or service is tricky to use. The much more you increase MetaMask for day to day users, the easier it is to surprise and delight our Quality users.
(Conversely, if a competing wallet arrives out tomorrow that’s 10x a lot easier to use, we’ll drop MetaMask in a heartbeat.)
We are aligned in our mission: to make blockchain and crypto accessible to everybody. You have the beginnings of a terrific solution. Do not be distracted by the electricity consumers who are driving your product tactic and maintaining your developers chasing rabbits down holes. Create for the relaxation of us.
That, MetaMask group, is how you can in the long run outfox your level of competition.
