My main gripe is one I’ve had since I initiated myself with DApps several years ago. As a user, every time I want to send a transaction on the Blockchain, I’m prompted with an ugly popup asking me to confirm, warning me of the cost, and scaring me away. As someone who’s been initiated in the space for a few years now, this isn’t as big a deal for me. But back then it was, and it still exists. I know for a fact that newcomers in the space are met with the same scary popups every time they try to do something. It’s offputting and is the main reason why the bounce-rate on DApps is so high.
Figure 1: Metamask transaction confirmation.
I get it, as a platform you need to make the user aware that an operation will cost money. The last thing you want as a platform is to be discredited because you didn’t warn users about the cost of usage, and your gas costs unknowingly drained their accounts of Ether. However, there are much better ways of doing this than the currently accepted norm.
Take a look at figure 1. Unless you’re very well acquainted with Ethereum wallets, DApps and the industry in general, you’re not gonna know what on earth this popup means. Some users will think the whole site bogus since popups emanating from button clicks is often considered shady practice. Yet here, it is the norm. And it appears every time a user wants to interact with a smart contract.
Not only that, but the fact that a whole extension needs to be installed to even be able to interact with DApps seems archaic. This is slowly changing. Opera have released DApp support in their mobile browser, and other wallets come with built-in DApp browsers now. But these are all so niche, they’re most definitely not mainstream.
Short of Google releasing DApp support for their Chrome Browser, or Mozilla for Firefox, the problem will still exist. It doesn’t matter how fancy you make the popups (Fortmatic has some yummy rounded edges), which niche products support Web3 injection, the problem remains.
