Supporting Interface Experimentation for Blockchain Applications

Abstract

There is an increasingly diverse range of smart-contract blockchains on which decentralized applications (dApps) are built. However, HCI research has so far failed to address them, focusing primarily on Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is problematic as these new blockchains come with an increasingly diverse set of properties that influence the usability of dApps for end-users. For blockchain interface design guidelines to be valuable for practitioners, they need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of blockchains. However, evaluating novel interface concepts across different blockchains is resource-intensive as each blockchain has to be integrated manually, slowing down research. To address this challenge, we propose a system to support interface experimentation for blockchain applications. The system allows researchers and developers to connect interfaces to a unified API simulating different blockchains and facilitates the configuration, distribution, and evaluation of online experiments. A preliminary evaluation showed promising results.