I met with a veteran designer a few weeks ago who was looking for her next gig. And I asked her about the different types of work she was looking for in evaluating potential new opportunities. Her response stuck with me. She said clearly that she looks for big, complicated ideas that need simplification. At their core, good product and design function to deliver a complicated idea via a simple user experience.
Simple is important, because products need to be used to be successful. Simple things are easier to understand, use, and spread than complex things.
In crypto, for some reason we often tend toward complexity rather than simplicity. I don't know why, but we do. Multi-party computation, zero knowledge aggregation, fully homomorphic encryption, delta neutral hedging, impermanent loss, kzg commitments, loss versus rebalancing are just a few of the jargon filled words and phrases you might hear on a crypto podcast today.
Sometimes I wonder if it's because jargon preserves this sense of iykyk. Regardless of the diagnosis, it's something I have become acutely more aware of in the past couple years. It's easy to feel like you've buried your head in the sand when you work in crypto. But many of the most successful crypto networks and products can be simply described:
Bitcoin is digital gold.
Ethereum is a platform for decentralized applications.
Solana is Ethereum, but faster and cheaper.
Coinbase makes it easy to buy and sell crypto.
USDC is a 24/7 available, globally accessible dollar.
If you can't describe what you're building and why it's important in a sentence or two then you probably need to simplify. Let's make crypto simpler.
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