Sometimes change is good, but other times, it's frustrating. Many have had experiences where a favorite app or website changed a couple of features, maybe even the positioning of navigational buttons and that led to a bad user experience.
This is something very common, but also something that a lot of companies do not know how to track and adjust effectively.
Of course, when we are dealing with established players, user experience is often on the good side. I've personally, on different occasions, used apps that moved navigational buttons and I unconsciously kept hitting the previous location every time I needed to use that feature.
One thing I noticed was that the established players often had a plan to aid the users adapt to the change.
Sometimes there were pop up messages reminding the user that the button had moved each time the finger or cursor went there or it was simply moving the feature back to its original position.
In both cases, evidence exists that thoughts were given to user experience when designing these products.
When it comes to crypto projects, we cannot exactly say the same. Certainly, focus on user experience has improved over the years, but frankly there is still a lot of friction.
The shift to blockchain payments
Life is a series of negotiations for trade. You're either buying something or selling something at every point of your life.
This reality makes payments central to everything else and it makes payment apps or solutions a driving force for crypto adoption.
But what does that really look like for a consumer?
Why should an every day Joe or Mary care about some supposedly decentralized currency?
The truth is, unless there's a desperate search for a safe haven maybe due to inflation or a run from government oppression, there's really not much reason for this market segment to care.
Anyone who's been in the game long enough knows this. And that counts for both players in traditional finance and players in decentralized finance.
This means that the best answer to that question: “how will consumers respond to the shift to blockchain payments?” Is that they won't be responding to the shift in payments settlement layer, they will simply be responding to whatever the payments solutions players sell them.
TradeFi has never bothered about crypto over the years because they aimed to choke out the industry given that they still controlled the central layer for commerce, but with recent regulatory adjustments, they can no longer choke the industry because the industry is going directly after the market that gives them that power.
There's going to be a lot of stablecoins and payments solutions atop crypto and blockchain but the truth is that consumers will never really have to worry much about the underlying settlement layer as they've never really needed to understand the systems that powers their favorite banks.
We are going to see numerous infrastructure solutions getting built alongside the growing numbers of stablecoins and payments solutions, but at the end of the day, interoperability will ensure a fairly smooth experience for consumers.
Depending on the incentives on the table, many TradeFi companies may forcefully transition capital of consumers on-chain.
This would make a lot of sense as many already expected that stablecoin tickers would not mean anything in the long run and frontends will just default to calling them all USD and processing necessary swaps in the backend.
The shift to blockchain-based payments is happening and the broader consumer market will really not have much to say about it.