1. Do not infantilize the enduser.
2. Focus on the function not aesthetics.

Do not infantilize the enduser.

Retail does not care about the decentralization.

Wrong. The retail you are familiar with might not want it. However, when you look into The 2023 Global Crypto Adoption Index Top 20 by Chainanalysis, you’ll only see 3 Western democracies alongside Japan. The remaning 16 are either second, or third world countries. Endusers, or “retail”, in these countries most of the time are well-versed in the trade-offs among security, censorship and centralization.

Each has different needs.

Some of these countries have robust and advanced banking systems. Some have rather advanced democracies. Each of these countries lack a fundamental when it comes to crypto-economics ranging from privacy to regulation to security.

People in these countries complement CEX usage with heavy DeFi utilization for different reasons. However, they all need decentralization for this or that reason.

Read your target audience well.

Focus on the function not aesthetics

I am an artist who has the most degenerately libertine tastes when it comes to aesthetics. I can navigate ‘90s HTML spaghetti net dot art pieces by intuition. However, I am also a researcher who provides insights when it comes to documentation.

Many people dunked on Curve Finance’s original frontend for example. However, it was a very well designed website that in actual guided you well: You click the “governance” button, and you were in the governance section. That the average user did not understand the Curve Wars was irrelevant. It served its purpose well for the knowledgable.

Then, around 2022 we saw an influx of over-aestheticized frontend design everywhere that buried the lede, that shipped with no visible “docs” page, that came with instant popups that wanted to fix an hour long calls with you in exchange of boredom. Some even has direct URLs that read “click to reach the support and sales.”

When an average user, regardless of their expertise, visit a website that offers financial services onchain, they just want to access the functions. They do not want to see a bloatware of 2000s metallic breakcore bling bazaars. Also, some of these users are devs and they want to access either the docs or the github and most preferably official contract addies.

Make sure that you invest in heavy text. That way your frontend will be more responsive to the intutitive needs of an average user.

I for one close any website that comes with immediately one of these mental bloats, or explain needed info only in videos. Also, i should be able to talk to your documents. Either design them nicely so I can search, or plug in a simple LLM.