Written by: Will Robinson

Compiled by: Xiaobai Navigation Coderworld

This first part of a series looking at the best Web3 UX is focused on games, but should provide useful ideas for more general products. I’ve spoken to dozens (hundreds?) of Web3 game developers over the past few years, and the general consensus is that there’s too much friction to get started. But how do we get beyond Metamask’s rut and create a better UX?

Progressive Entry

Although “gradual onboarding” is popular in UX CommunityIt is a popular concept in crypto, but I first saw the term “progressive onboarding” used in Crypto in Privy.io BlogHere’s a simple idea:

New users should only experience friction with your product when necessary and as late as possible.

Too often, encryption products require “walletBut before we dive into applying best practices to Web3, let’s start with an onboarding experience from a AAA mobile game: Marvel Snap. This is a game with excellent user retention that effectively introduces complex game mechanics and a unique progression system through progressive onboarding.

Lesson 1: Let People Try Your Product First

design: Players starting at Snap are faced with a choice: “Play as a Guest” or “Linked your account?” Surprisingly, the screen is laid out to nudge users to play as a Guest. This means players can play through the entire tutorial without having to sign up for an account!

lesson: Snap offers valuable ideas before users press the button: let people try your product first. By eliminating the churn point in the account creation process, you can retain more of your early users.

Lesson 2: Simplify the game

Design: Once you get past the initial screen, the game guides you through a simplified version of the round, consisting only ofXiaobai Navigation50% of its full mechanics. This tutorial round is designed to be hard to fail. Take a look at what it highlights (vs. what's hidden).

• Play one card each turn;

• Each card has a numerical strength;

• There is only one valid place to place a card;

• Win the game by having more intensity than your opponent.

lesson: You don’t need to teach everything at once. The Snap team effectively designed a new game so that users don’t feel overwhelmed in the first few minutes. As a game designer, your goal is to move players from apathy to focus by simultaneously increasing their skill level and the game’s challenge level. Too much challenge relative to skill, and your users will get anxious, bored, or worried and leave the game. The takeaway here is to make the same recommendations for products more generally.

Lesson 3: Progressive Introduction

design: After completing the Snap tutorial, you get your first reward: a visual upgrade for your card. Cosmetic upgrades are great rewards for early games because they don’t affect gameplay but give players something to enjoy. But this game does something unexpected: upgrading a card’s visuals unlocks new cards for use in future game rounds. This creates a cycle: winning a round unlocks resources for players to change their appearance, and unlocking appearances gives players resources (new cards) to win future rounds. To solidify this cycle, Snap leads players through a second, more complex tutorial and another round of upgrades.

lessonProviding motivation to players is powerful. Think of it as a second game played alongside the first. Rewards from the first game can become resources for the second game, and vice versa. By doing this, these systems mutually prove each other’s value.

Lesson 4: Ensure Success

design: After completing a few tutorial rounds, the game will drop you back into the lobby. Only then will a window pop up asking you to pick a name! A few more rounds later, it will prompt you for a social login. At this point, you're in a fully unlocked lobby, full of quests, resources, and news. If you play long enough, you'll find a surprisingly cost-effective "first charge" package for just a few dollars.

lesson: Only bother players with administrative tasks after they’ve tested your product. Also, break these tasks down as much as possible so they don’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Now that they’ve committed, players will sign up without churn.

And be laissez faire when it comes to monetization! Just because they give you their number doesn’t mean they want to take you home. As their gameplay and identity become associated with the game, players will start buying in-game assets.

How does this translate into crypto gaming?

Snap revealed that the onboarding experience for encryption should only happen the first time it is needed. This means that in almost all cases, it may not be needed yet. I will start with Primodium For example, this is an early stage project where a small team is trying to build an on-chain strategy game.

App Lesson 1: Let People Try Your Product First

The good news is that, unlike many of its peers, Primodium does not require you to connect towalletInstead, your private keys are stored in the browser cache. If a player accidentally clears their cache, progress will be lost. This is the same risk Snap took before players added social logins.walletPlaying the game under management was a wise choice by the Primodium team.

However, when you first connect to Primodium, it takes two minutes to load the world state. Game over. This has become an absolute barrier to getting started quickly. Primodium mistakenly hopes that players can just jump into a multiplayer environment, but as we saw with Snap, that's not necessary right now. By making the first hour of the game a player-versus-player game, Primodium is able to make the game more fun. AI, reducing the complexity of getting started and allowing players to try the product before waiting for it to go live on-chain.

Apply Lesson 2: Simplify the Game

At the beginning of Primodium, we are plunged into a minefield of complexity. If you have ever been at risk of anxiety, prepare for a nervous breakdown. The developers do not hide anything from the player, showing the ranking, score, six buildings, star map, three mineable resources, main base, star map, 8 icons in the upper right corner, and 15 empty resource trackers. By hiding the unnecessary things, things are made more understandable.

Primodium's approach is to create a tutorial box that lists a set of tasks that follow Snap's example of a non-failable first tutorial. However, the player can only complete the task inBlockchainThe reward cannot be claimed until the transaction is executed. Ideally, the client will "optimistically" progress as if the transaction has been confirmed, eventually resynchronizing with the chain state. This front-end "cheating" is not unique to Web3, and for years games have had to rely on clients progressing state faster than the back-end.

Apply Lesson 3: Take it Slow

Since the core loop of Primodium is building alien factories, there is a natural visual progression for the player. Every time the player upgrades their base, they gain access to new buildings. Not only does this help introduce complexity more slowly, but it rewards past successes. Additionally, since you have control over the layout of your base, it's rewarding to see your base become more aesthetically pleasing.

In addition to in-game progression, Primodium also displays meta-level progression through global rankings. Since current rounds are small, new users can quickly climb the leaderboards. The dopamine hit of seeing that number go up is a big part of user retention. Closing the loop and leveraging leaderboard scores to output cosmetics and other in-game rewards over time will be critical to Primodium.

Their cycle should be: score points using assets, score points to get more cool assets, score more points using new cool assets (or in a balanced game, different scores).

Lesson 4: Ensure Success

Primodium excels in this area, the developers know they haven’t found product-market fit yet, nor have they built a sufficient base of repeat users (at least not yet). Rather than looking for ways to monetize, they spend their time making the game better.

Since they decided to ignore monetization, they gain some benefits: No wallet connection is required. Players are only prompted to sign anything if they want to connect their game state to a personal address for some bragging rights. Here we see a new crypto-native paradigm emerge, which is to separate hot and cold wallets in games and applications. Use disposable devices to play, but store your reputation (and maybe NFTs in the future) on moreSafetyThe place.

Summarize

Web3 user flows and onboarding should not be different from those in Web2. Web3 should focus on letting users try the product quickly, in a simple format, while immediately linking successful interactions to progress. Once buy-in is achieved, administrative tasks like account association and wallet connection can be introduced.make moneyOpportunities are offered to players who like your product and look for it among value creation.

The article comes from the Internet:Eliminating the Web3 barrier: A guide to designing crypto games for progressive onboarding

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