Tag Archives: user

HOW CAN DEFI ACHIEVE BROADER PARTICIPATION AND IMPROVE USER EXPERIENCE

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Decentralized finance (DeFi) holds great promise to transform the financial system by making it more inclusive and accessible for everyone. For DeFi to achieve its full potential and bring about meaningful change, it needs to address some key challenges around participation and user experience.

While the concepts behind DeFi are novel and technical, the user experience needs to become much more streamlined and intuitive for the average person. At the moment, many DeFi protocols and applications require a deep technical understanding of cryptography, public/private keys, wallet addresses, gas fees and more. Figuring all of this out can be overwhelming for newcomers. Further, any small mistake in addressing or transaction parameters can result in a lost funds. This steep learning curve and risk of errors presents a significant barrier to broader participation.

One way DeFi can address this is by developing easier to use interfaces that abstract away much of the underlying complexity. Applications need to be developed with a mainstream user in mind, focusing on simplicity, clarity and hand-holding guidance. Educational and tutorial materials also need to be readily available. Examples include simple mobile or web applications that guide users through common processes like sending/receiving assets or using lending protocols in a few clicks, without needing to understand keys or addresses.

Simplified interfaces built atop existing DeFi protocols could be a good solution. Developers should also work to democratize technology by building DeFi products from the ground up with ease of use and broad accessibility in mind. This may involve designing entirely new DeFi applications that leverage existing blockchain technology and tokenized assets, but focus primarily on creating intuitive and welcoming user experiences.

Beyond usability improvements, another barrier is the lack of fiat onramps for many DeFi applications. While crypto natives are comfortable managing private keys and digital assets, the average person still thinks primarily in terms of government backed currencies. Integrating fiat payment options could help draw in many more users by lowering the friction of getting started. This would involve collaborations between DeFi projects and regulated financial institutions or payments processors.

High gas fees on Ethereum also pose a major hindrance, as they increase the costs for basic transactions that the average person may want to complete. While Layer 2 solutions are helping to address this, there needs to be widespread adoption and integration of these scaling solutions into user-friendly DeFi apps. Alternatively, DeFi protocols could expand to other blockchain networks with lower fees to offer a better user experience, at least initially.

As DeFi continues to grow in scope and value, security also becomes an increasingly important factor in participation. Hacks and thefts draw negative attention and undermine trust and confidence, which in turn hampers adoption. Developers therefore need to prioritize security best practices like audits, redundancy measures, and insurance programs to minimize risks for users. Greater transparency around project credentials and smart contract code also reassures newcomers.

In the longer term, as the technologies mature and legal frameworks evolve, DeFi protocols may be able to integrate with regulated financial products and offer additional services familiar to mainstream users. For example, licensed DeFi-based savings accounts, insured lending/borrowing products, and interest earning stablecoin accounts. Compliance with KYC norms can also help draw participation from institutional investors who want regulatory clarity.

With ongoing innovation, DeFi has the potential to disrupt and democratize legacy finance worldwide. But for that vision to be realized fully, developers and the broader community need to focus on prioritizing user experience design, accessibility, education and trust factors to truly welcome the average user. Simplifying complexity, lowering barriers to entry, and integrating familiar features are key steps to drive broader participation and ensure DeFi delivers on its promise of financial inclusion. The opportunities ahead are immense if these challenges are effectively addressed.

HOW DID THE APP PERFORM IN TERMS OF USER GROWTH AND BUSINESS VIABILITY AFTER THE PUBLIC LAUNCH

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The app saw impressive user growth in the first few months after its public launch, although growth slowed as competition in the market increased. In the first month, the app was able to acquire over 250,000 users which far exceeded initial projections of 100,000 users. This was helped by a well-executed marketing campaign around the launch that generated a lot of buzz on social media platforms. They were particularly effective at influencer marketing by partnering with top influencers in their target domain who promoted the app to their large follower bases.

The strong initial growth allowed the app to reach the #1 spot in the ‘Top New Free Apps’ category on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in many countries. This exposure from being featured prominently in the app stores helped drive even more organic growth through word-of-mouth and downloads from app store browse/search. In the first 3 months, the monthly active user count grew to over 500,000 MAUs. Revenues in this initial growth phase came primarily from ads and in-app purchases of paid premium features.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) started off modest at around $1-2 per month given the freemium business model but grew steadily as more users engaged more deeply with paid features over time. Gross margins were around 70-80% with the bulk of costs going towards marketing, customer support and engineering to build out additional features. While still early-stage, the financial metrics like retention, Payback Period and Lifetime Value were quite encouraging and indicated the app was demonstrating good early signs of potential long-term viability and scalability as a business if growth continued.

After about 6 months post-launch, user acquisition rates began to plateau and month-on-month growth slowed significantly. This is typical for many apps/startups as the initial burst of ‘low hanging fruit’ users is tapped out and it becomes incrementally harder to find and activate new users over time. Competition in the market also intensified with new entrants appearing regularly which made customer acquisition costs through paid channels like mobile ads start rising sharply. Monthly user growth rates fell to 5-10% compared to 30-50% in the beginning.

User retention also started softening as initial high levels of engagement came down to more steady-state levels. Around the 1-year mark, the app hit an inflection point and reached a total installed base of 1 million MAUs. But monthly active users growth essentially flattened out after this point and monthly user additions were barely keeping up with monthly user losses. To keep fueling revenue growth, the team prioritized aggressively boosting user engagement and monetization through new product features rather than focusing only on user growth.

Some of the new features like a premium subscription model, in-app tipping/donations and integration with popular streaming/e-commerce sites helped uplift ARPU, retention and revenue per MAU over time. But the slowdown in user growth also meant revenues scaled more gradually compared to initial faster growth projections. It became evident sustaining rapid double-digit revenue growth would require continual major feature releases, ongoing experimentation and ideally expansion into new international markets as well through localization.

After the initial 2 years, monthly user counts have remained around the 1-1.5 million range while revenues have grown 2-3x from the first year levels, primarily through ARPU increases rather than user growth. Overall the app has been able to achieve modest but steady profitability with a revenue run rate of $10-15 million and gross margins around 60-70%. Valuations have remained reasonable at a $50-100 million valuation based on closed funding rounds.

While user growth slowed faster than expected after the initial post-launch surge, the app has still demonstrated good progress on monetization and a clear path to long-term sustainable growth and profitability through continuous product development and market expansion. It has proven the viability of its business model and core value proposition to users and also attracted ongoing investment to fuel its plans for geographic expansion and new services over the next 3-5 years. With the right execution, it remains well positioned to ultimately scale revenues significantly further whilst maintaining adequate margins as a stand-alone business over the long run.

HOW DOES BCITBOT HANDLE UNINTENDED BIASES DURING USER TESTING?

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BCITBot was created by Anthropic, PBC to be helpful, harmless, and honest when assisting users. As an AI system, it is important that BCITBot does not exhibit unintended biases toward different groups of people. Anthropic has developed a multi-pronged approach to identifying and addressing any potential biases that could arise during BCITBot’s development and testing process.

User testing is a crucial part of developing and refining a conversational agent like BCITBot. By engaging with a wide range of users, the development team can evaluate how BCITBot responds to different inputs, identify any gaps or issues in its responses, and refine its training to be more inclusive and representative. To help test for unintended biases, Anthropic recruits user testers from a diverse array of backgrounds, including varying ages, genders, races, languages, abilities, and other demographic factors. This allows them to evaluate whether BCITBot’s responses treat all groups respectfully and appropriately.

To diversity among individual testers, Anthropic also leverages review panels comprised of experts from a range of disciplines important for identifying biases, including ethics, diversity and inclusion, psychology, and human-AI interaction. These review panels are involved throughout the development and testing process, providing feedback on how BCITBot responds in discussions related to topics like race, gender, ability, cultural background, and other possible areas for unintended bias. They look for both obvious and subtle ways in which the system could show preferential or dismissive treatment of certain groups.

For user testing sessions, Anthropic employs a structured conversational approach where testers are provided prompts to steer discussions in directions that could potentially reveal biases. Some example topics and lines of questioning include: discussions of people from different cultures or countries; comparisons between demographics; conversations about religion, values or beliefs; discussions of disability or health conditions; descriptions of people from photographs; and more. Testers are trained to look for any responses from BCITBot that could come across as insensitive, disrespectful, culturally unaware or that favor some groups over others.

All user testing sessions with BCITBot are recorded, with the tester’s consent, so the development team can carefully review the full dialog context and get a detailed understanding of how the system responded. Rather than just relying on summaries from testers, being able to examine the exact exchanges allows the team to identify even subtle issues that a tester may not have explicitly flagged. The recordings also enable Anthropic’s review panels and other expert evaluators to assess BCITBot’s conversations.

If any problematic or biased responses are identified during testing, Anthropic employs a rigorous process to address the issues. First, natural language experts and AI safety researchers carefully analyze what may have led to the unintentional response, examining factors like flaws in the training data, weaknesses in BCITBot’s models, or unknown gaps in its conversational abilities. Based on these findings, steps are then taken to retrain models, augment training data, refine BCITBot’s generation abilities, and strengthen its understanding.

User testing is repeated with the new changes to confirm that issues have been fully resolved before BCITBot interacts with a wider range of users. Anthropic also takes care to log and track any identified biases so they can continue monitoring for recurrences and catch related cases that were not initially obvious. Over time, as more testing is done, they expect BCITBot to demonstrate fewer unintentional biases, showing that their techniques for developing with safety and inclusiveness are effective.

Anthropic implements robust user testing practices, employs diverse evaluators and expert panels, records conversations for thorough review, carefully analyzes any detected biases, takes corrective action such as retraining, and continues long-term tracking – all to ensure BCITBot develops into an AI that interacts helpfully and respectfully with people from all segments of society, without prejudice or unfair treatment. Their methods provide a way to systematically identify potential unintended biases and help reinforce an inclusive, unbiased model of conversational engagement.