Uniswap — Product Sense 2

Swap, earn, and build on Uniswap… But how easy is it to find on the website?

Product sense today is on Uniswap. Following my product sense notes, I reviewed Uniswap.

Before using the product

1. Marketed value — Uniswap advertises a set of features rather than a general value — users can swap, earn, build, etc on the Uniswap protocol. I’d need pre-existing information on swapping, earning and and building — it isn’t clear from the landing page nor where to get instructions on what it is
2. Outcomes — After reading the homepage, i’m now interested in swapping, earning, and voting
3. Reference — Uniswap is the OG, or one of the OG swapping protocols. I’d heard about it from word of mouth

Whilst using the product

1. Onboarding — as a crypto-native, someone that uses DeFi and is familiar with interacting with Dapps and crypto products, the UI is somewhat familiar; the placement of the icons and the bright red button make the next step obvious (Hit the red button!), but it isn’t obvious what that will achieve. The outcomes I wanted to achieve were swapping, earning, and voting.
2. As a non-crypto native, I asked my partner what they’d need to do to swap, earn, and vote — this resulted in confusion, landing on “push the red button”

I conclude this product isn’t intended for someone new to Crypto/DeFi

3. Direction — the intuitive UI points users towards “Launch App” but doesn’t explain what the app does

4. Engagement & time— I wasn’t particularly engaged with the site. The community and governance were more interesting than the product and interface. I didn’t spend long on the sites and was quickly diverted to other sites e.g. governance site

Swap

Clicking into the app, I can see the swapping capability. Swap between ETH and another token — great, I’ve found a 1/3 of the advertised value.

Earn

As someone who uses DeFi, I’m pretty sure earning happens in the pool — providing liquidity for swaps. As someone unfamiliar, I’d probably google “How to earn on Uniswap”. The first result is a website offering 7.25% interest if you deposit Uniswap tokens in their service.

Luckily, there are a few tutorials further down the page explaining how to provide liquidity. Note most of the first page tutorials are out of date.

Build

Similarly, I’m looking for the ability to build on uniswap, I couldn’t find how; I Google “How to build on Uniswap”, and I find a blog from the Uniswap team

Comparison

1inch — value presented upfront “one-stop access to DeFi” but essentially the same.

Pancake Swap

Pancake swap — matches the feature/value list to elements in their dropdown. This helps provide instructions on where a user can click on to navigate the website, something a new user is lost in Uniswap.

KyberSwap — my favourite because they’ve thought about the onboarding process for new users. Like many successful SaaS companies, they’ve created an interface walkthrough including the basics — how to set up a MetaMask. I think this level of detail is helpful for first timers — when I accessed the site the 2nd time I wasn’t greeted with the walk through.

After using the product

Could I achieve my outcome: my outcome was to swap between ETH and USDC and for that, yes, I achieved my outcome. However, I don’t feel there’s a competitive advantage between Uniswap and other DEXs that would compel me to return to Uniswap over others.

I understand the product is an undeniable success, probably has the lowest impermanent loss and is the building block for many other DEXs, the layout of the website doesn’t attract new users.

How to improve

1. Match their value Swap, earn, and build with items on the website to direct users on where they should go
2. Match Twitter value prop with website a protocol for trading and automated liquidity provision on Ethereum.
3. Possible onboarding flow for new users, or at least an option to learn how