Bridging the “Joe” Gap
The brifs.co team and I have thought quite a lot about how crypto can achieve mass adoption. We currently see 2 points of friction, in a broad sense, which need to be addressed: Behavior Change and UI/UX.
This discussion, as it relates to brifs.co, came about when @nervozaur made a great point as a reply to our NEM Community Fund Proposal. nervozaur made a case that average consumers may have a difficult time using brifs.co by saying “Things will probably change in the future when mass adoption sets in and if you already have your project out by then, that will give you the advantage. I don’t see that happening anytime soon though.”
What nervozaur was describing is the deep behavior change, which would need to happen, before crypto, and by extension brifs.co, can be broadly adopted.
Behavior Change
To me, the biggest hurdle preventing this behavior change is the notion that an individual being is the only person, who holds the key to their own representations of value (money, crypto, etc.) This makes many people very nervous. What do you mean if I lose my password the “money” is gone forever?
Heck, this makes me nervous at times. This personal responsibility, however is at the heart of decentralization, one of the founding principles of the blockchain.
Crypto’s need for people to be solely responsible for themselves is a tough pill for many to swallow, but it certainly can be of benefit; which leads me to the next point of friction.
UI/UX
I would say that crypto can only achieve broad adoption, when people like “Joe” can use the blockchain without realizing it. I’m describing utterly frictionless user flows requiring little to no behavior change. These can only be achieved with extremely well designed user interfaces and user experiences (aka UI/UX).
To date, crypto has been largely FgBg — For geeks By geeks. “Joe” isn’t at all interested in the inner workings of crypto, and he never will be. Some of the basic questions associated with crypto, like “what is value” are so far into the abstract that it makes most people’s head spin. Geeks are geeks because they like geeking-out on the ideas that make their head spin. “Joe”; well “Joe” doesn’t like that feeling and avoids it at all costs. This is the Geek/Joe Gap.
As an operator of a company that is built on blockchain technology, it seems a futile exercise trying educate everyone about crypto and blockchain. Our job is to responsibly make it easy for “Joe” to enjoy the advantages of crypto, without him having to think about it. This is achieved through intuitive UI/UX.
Compelling Val Prop + UI/UX done right = Mass Adoption
Whether you are a fan of the organization or not, one of the things that has made CoinBase so successful is their ability to provide “Joe” with a UI/UX that is dead simple for buying and selling crypto. CoinBase works very similar to our current online shopping experiences. If you want more powerful “geek” tools, then you use CoinBase Pro (formerly GDAX).
Although, we take it for granted now, “Joe” wasn’t always an online shopper. It took “Joe” 20 or 30 years to change his behavior, overcome his fear of the internet and computers Now he’s bidding in online auctions, selling items online, and so on.
In my estimation, good UI/UX is the primary mode for getting mass adoption of crypto. Will it take time, Yes. But the organizations that win, will do so with undeniably solid value propositions (which motivate the willingness to pursue behavior change in the first place) and dead simple UI/UX to reduce the cognitive load that the behavior change requires.
When crypto’s hysteria started to reach manic proportions, CoinBase’s de facto & unintentional val prop became “Hey Joe, want to do nothing & get Lambo”. Their UI/UX made that possible for Ol’ Joe.
How brifs.co’s UI/UX Bridges the “Joe” gap
As we mentioned in the Executive Summary of our NCF Proposal:
We’re building brifs.co to be natural and intuitive for average shoppers by providing a user experience just like the ones that they are used to already in their online shopping.
Our value proposition to sellers of unneeded gift cards is that our platform frees those values up, without charging any commission (normally platforms take 10% to 15%). Our value proposition for buyers is that they can buy these gift cards at a discount (it’s free money; who doesn’t like it?). This is all facilitated by a “natural and intuitive” UI/UX. Here are 2 examples:
Selling a Gift Card | Mobile
Here you have an example user flow where a fellow, — Aubrey D Graham; heh — lists a Walmart card that he’s not planning on using. It’s just a straightforward account signup and product listing user flow, just like he would do anywhere else. There’s no clunky interaction with the crypto here. In fact, Mr Graham has the option not to engage with crypto at all.
Buying a Gift Card | Mobile
In this same example, a woman — Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson 
— buys that Walmart gift card from Mr. Graham. She does so without ever leaving the app. Even if she has never used the app before, she could buy the discounted card in the time it takes to checkout at an online register. Handling the BRIF mosaic feels like any other online transaction.
These examples are just mockups, but the functionality they illustrate closely mimics the potential functionality of using NEM’s integration with Changelly.
This is how NEM wins
Bridging the Joe gap is what makes the NEM blockchain so powerful. NEM allows builders like TravelbyBit, Choice, and Mobi to make it easy for Joe to experience the value propositions enabled by a blockchain use case that matters to them. These NEM projects do this by way of an effortless user experience. Forget the hype. It’s blockchain’s Joe friendly adoption that matters now. Everything else is just noise.
Note to Joe’s
The term “Joe” was in no way meant to be pejorative, rather just a metaphor as it relates to crypto. We’re all “Joe’s” when it comes to one thing or another, and being that crypto is in such early stages, all of us are crypto Joe’s to some extent, as well. NOTE: No Joe’s were harmed in the production of this post.