THE UX OF FINAL MAJOR PROJECT | BLOG 03
Interviews & Literature Review
14/07/21 – 25/11/21 (about 3 months - excluding summer holidays)
Design Brief: To be explored and researched...
Project Member: Yiwei(David) Han, Sue Heeyeon An.
Design Phase
Review Feedback
According to previous feedback that collected from our proposal presentaion, those can be broadly summarised into two categories:
- Do we want to continue with idea 01 (designing a new blockchain that has nothing to do with money or tokens) or continue idea 02 (designing a piece that critiques the environmental impact of the current blockchain)?
- Who is our target audience?
Based on previous primary research, we understand that redesigning incentive and consensus mechanisms involves significant design and technical challenges and difficulties (unless it is a speculative or conceptual design work). After a group discussion, we agreed to continue with idea 02 of producing an interactive version of antonamy of blockchain. Regarding the target audience, we started with a broad scope, i.e., people who use the blockchain-based applications (including cryptocurrency buyers, NFT traders, or whatever blockchain-based application users), but we think that as we refine and narrow down our project idea, the target audience will become more specific.
How to refine our target audience (Made by David).
Interview with Previous Partners - Brixton Pound Team
After defining the broad target audience, we decided to conduct interviews with potential audience to investigate the need and acceptability of idea 02. As our previous project partner, This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, had recently been working on a project incorporating blockchain technology into Brixton Pound. We thought they would be good candidates for interview, so I went to their team party to interview two people (Binki Taylor-Brixton Pound Project Founding Partner & Guy Davis - Blockchain Project Lead) about their views on blockchain and its environmental impact. Here are the main questions from my interview:
- What is the value of blockchain?
- In what areas do you think blockchain is being used best?
- What do you think of the environmental impact and energy waste caused by blockchain?
Transcript of interview with Guy Davis - Brixton Pound Blockchain Project Lead (Courtesy of David).
Interviewing with Binki Taylor - Brixton Pound Project Founding Partner (Courtesy of David).
Design idea Challenged
The results of the interviews were surprising, with the interviewees' attitudes and opinions being the exact opposite of ours. They do not consider the environmental impact of blockchain to be a hidden danger or a valid argument for criticism, as there are already very new types of blockchain that use increasingly environmentally friendly consensus mechanisms. Furthermore, the environmental impact caused by the cryptocurrency market should not be borne by the blockchain application industry as a whole. Many other applications of blockchain pollution are small but play a huge value. This interview made me clearly aware of the problems and limitations of our ideas & research and prompted us to make adjustments.
“From this we conclude that although the criticism of Bitcoin's power consumption is legitimate, it should not be used to derive an energy problem of blockchain technology in general.” - Sedlmeir et al., 2020
Rethink Design ideas
Literature Review Takeaways (Courtesy of David).
Previous cryptocurrency buying experiences journey (Made by Group).
In the literature review, I found that the underlying mechanism and structure of blockchain technology is invisibly complex for the average user (De Filippi, Mannan and Reijers, 2020). So in discussion with Sue, we came up with two 'more valid' design ideas: 1. to solve a practical problem: improving the cumbersome experience of buying cryptocurrency (Based on our previous experience and feeling of the process of buying cryptocurrencies). 2. to combine the findings of the literature review: reveal the invisible underlying complex operations of the blockchain system (but we haven't figured out why we need to do this yet).
Reference
De Filippi, P., Mannan, M. and Reijers, W. (2020). Blockchain as a Confidence machine: the Problem of Trust & Challenges of Governance. Technology in Society, [online] 62, p.101284. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X20303067#sec4.
Sedlmeir, J., Buhl, H.U., Fridgen, G. and Keller, R. (2020). Recent Developments in Blockchain Technology and Their Impact on Energy Consumption. Informatik Spektrum.