Learning bootcamp
A four-week self-guided route through this guide, from knowing nothing to designing a BSV wallet flow.
Four weeks, self-paced, from no knowledge to a designed flow you can show somebody. Each week is about three hours of reading and four or five hours of work.
It is a route through this guide, not new material, so you can do it alone or with a group.
It is written for designers. Researchers can swap week 3's challenge for a usability test plan, and founders should add Product and business in week 4.
Recommendation
Do the challenge each week, even badly. Reading the guide teaches you what the rules are. The challenge is what teaches you why they exist.
Week 1: Fundamentals
The question: what is actually different about designing for this, and what is just ordinary product design?
Read
- Getting started, all of it.
- Design principles
- Glossary, skimmed. Come back to it constantly.
Challenge: wallet teardown
Install two BSV wallets and use both to receive a small amount and send it somewhere. Any two wallets that support handles and connecting to apps will do.
Then write up, in two pages: where each one asked you something you could not answer, what each called the same thing, and which screen you were least sure about after using it. Annotate screenshots.
What you are learning: that most of the difficulty is vocabulary and sequencing, not technology.
Week 2: How it works
The question: what does the technology actually require, and what did somebody choose?
Read
- How it works: transactions, payments, backups and identity. This is the heaviest week.
- Pay particular attention to Payments and Connecting a wallet.
Challenge: separate the two
Take any wallet screen, your own or one from week 1, and label every element with either required (the protocol makes this necessary) or chosen (somebody decided this).
Then remove everything chosen and look at what is left.
What you are learning: how much of what looks inevitable in a wallet is a choice somebody made, and could make differently.
Week 3: Keys, backup and recovery
The question: how do you design the screens where a mistake is permanent?
Read
Challenge: recovery, tested on a person
Design the recovery flow: somebody has a new phone and whatever they kept.
Then find one real person who has never used a wallet, give them your flow on paper or as a prototype, and watch them fail. Note where, without helping.
Read Privacy in research first, and use the recovery drill test plan.
What you are learning: that recovery flows are written by people who already know the answer, which is why they do not work.
Week 4: Patterns and a whole flow
The question: can you design something coherent rather than correct?
Read
- Patterns, all of it, including Amounts and units.
- One app reference design, such as Pay-per-use reader.
- Daily spending wallet, all of it.
- Common user flows
- Accessibility
Challenge: one flow, properly
Pick one of the design challenges and do it end to end: the happy path, one failure path, and the screen where the user changes their mind.
Check it against the checklists for the pages it touches, and with a screen reader.
What you are learning: whether you can hold the whole thing in your head. If you can, you are ready to work on a real product.
After the four weeks
Do
Write up what you made, including what did not work. See Case studies.
Do
Take one page of this guide that you now know is wrong or thin, and fix it. See Propose a change.
Running this for a group
It works as a study group with one session a week: an hour on the reading, an hour showing each other the challenges. The teardown in week 1 and the user test in week 3 are much better in a group, because the differences between people's findings are the lesson.
The four-week shape draws on the Summer of Bitcoin curriculum, published under CC BY 4.0. This route is pointed at this guide and at BSV.
Related
Written from: Summer of Bitcoin curriculum.
Checklist
The rules on this page, in a form you can work through.
3 rules