Ethereum Foundation DevCon 6 - UX & Design Track, 15 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Understanding Latinamericans to Design a Local Flavour DeFi Platform by Diego Mazo

Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/understanding-latinamericans-to-design-a-local-flavour-defi-platform/

From El Salvador to Argentina, passing through Colombia, we applied local UX research iteratively with our own methodology TUD "Tropykal User Dive" to define specific financial needs across different countries in Latam. This process has helped us to define a DeFi product designed for the needs of Latinamericans and with a highlighted local flavour. We would like to share our method openly to be replicated in other emerging economies around the world.

Speaker(s): Diego Mazo
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: UX & Design
Keywords: multicultural,research,latam,

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers.
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

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We're here to talk about understanding, Latin Americans and to design a local flavor D5 platform.

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So the question straight to the point is: how do we understand Latin Americans- and this is not a global question- it's more local question, but we use a unique method in our team, a model we created, yes to understand all that we can with uh in-depth research and also combining with a community model. So what we do is basically we try to engage.

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We try to educate and we evolve with our users, but not they are not only users, they are contributors, so we created a two-level community. One part of the community are the global community and then we have the Community Builders. Why? Well we want to create long-term relationships and we don't. We want to engage with our users. We want to to create value together to co-create value and grow in together in a long-term process to to have a better product and to have uh contributors all along this.

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This way so applying this model, we we learned a lot of things. We brought here five main learnings and we will buy one by one. So the first insight, the first Insight is that convenience, it's decentralization for breakfast. What does it mean? Well, basically, users normal users. Average users, don't understand decentralization at the beginning, so it's a gradual process and we need to help them to educate them and especially to have decentralization as an invisible concept.

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So we we cannot ask our users just to have a ux or an experience that is so complicated for them that they will give up in the beginning.

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Then, as Latin Americans, we kill four dollars dollars are our store of value for the future, and local currency is the enemy, and most of you probably know it. So we need to also adapt to current mental models so in the crypto ecosystem. If you have a platform, probably you have several stable coins. But this is a non-existing mental model.

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Uh Current users, they will think there is only one dollar, so we need to adapt to these existing models just to provide them a better experience.

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If we're talking about savings, we think well, it's it's good a day. Our users, our contributors, will learn about web3, but first we need to teach them how to save. This sounds obvious, but it is not. Most of them in Latin, America in general is difficult to save it's, not a common Habit to save, and if you don't choose the right path, if you don't know how to apply certain methods to save, if you don't have the tools to do it, you will have that you.

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You will open the door of abusive loans, which is a vicious circle that it's very, very difficult to accept. So some of our users, we understood that it's very important not only to help them save, but also to educate them to get out of this visual Circle.

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If we talk about loans, that's how I was doing it. um First, loans are hard to get in Latin, America and harder to to pay, and we have high interest rates. We have a big barrier. That is the credit history, but especially I would like to to focus on conscious decisions. So if we have the urgency to get a loan, that's a bad situation. There is no negotiation, and probably we will get into this vicious circle that I mentioned before. So we need to educate our users in our platforms to make conscious decisions.

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We need to provide them the right information to understand the consequences of their decisions, because we are talking about financial products. We are talking about money and probably the well-being of families.

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Finally, our last insight is that trust is careful Source in Latin America, so scams are frequent not only in crypto but also in any Financial Service, and it's very, very complicated to differentiate between uh proper service and scam. Then in general governments don't protect us and people, don't trust governments. So it's also a big barrier and Banks take the advantage of its privileged position. So this it's a combination of factors which makes everything very particular and especially difficult.

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So with all these that I've explained, we believe we are working. We are building Tropicals. That is the platform to to create better personal finances using web web3 and in Latin America and just as a friendly reminder.

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We are not here for the technology. We are here for the impact.

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Gracias, what, in your opinion, are the top three low-hanging fruits? What we can do as Kanaya people involved in the crypto ecosystem to Foster, crypto adoption and education here in Latin, America.

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That's a good question, um so I think that the first part is, as we said, it's education right. So we need to educate in in the tools and especially try to differentiate from scams, which is a big problem, because this there's many people is not trusting crypto, they don't have their technical knowledge, they don't have the the whole context. So education I think it's the the main, the main tool and yeah, for example, in in tropicus.

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We would definitely believe that we need to use certain standards that are used in web 2 to bring to web3. So if we use a web to login without all the seed phrase or this kind of technicalities, it will help a lot to the average people to understand these kind of platforms.