daohaus.club <--> pokemol.com design philosphy

--- tags: Product --- # daohaus.club <--> pokemol.com design philosphy ## Background While our users are of course individual people, our most important stakeholders are the DAOs themselves. **Our strategic product and design focus should prioritize DAOs; the individuals that make up those DAOs should come second.** It's tempting to treat these as the same thing; after all, DAOs are just groups of individuals. But that's not quite right. DAO communities are emergent organizational structures that can outlast any individual members. Further, individual DAO members succeed when the DAO succeedes, not the other way around. DAOs succeed when their individual members are deeply engaged with the DAO's community, including participating in informal discussions and taking action on formal proposals. Deeper engagement from an individual member improves the DAO both directly (as the member adds to the collective decision-making intelligence) and indirectly (by stimulating responses and further engagement from other members). The logical conclusion is that **the goal of DAOhaus+pokemol should be to drive deeper member engagement with their DAOs**. ## Context-switching Within DAOhaus & pokemol, for a given user there are three possible levels of engagement, or contexts. From narrower to wider > A. The proposal (i.e. single action) > B. The DAO (i.e. single community) > C. The individual (i.e. multi-community) The existence of these three contexts requires us to ask: *what exactly does deeper member engagement mean*? ### Proposal-context (A) leads to DAO-context (B) We can cross off one possible answer right away. Since most DAOs will often have more than one proposal active at any given time, the focus cannot be entirely on a single proposal. Instead, our UX should endeavor to lead users to the next proposal action item with that DAO (if one exists). For example, imagine a user that comes to DAUhaus+pokemol via a link to a proposal from discord. The destination for that link should include everything they need to take action (vote) on the proposal, and it should also include breadcrumbs for other proposals or outstanding actions in that DAO. ### Should DAO-context (B) lead to user-context (C\)? This is a more challenging question. If our goal is to drive more engagement with DAOs, should we not encourage engagement with more DAOs? The answer can be yes, as long as we do not sacrifice depth for breadth. A user who briefly helicopters in to each of their many DAOs adds little value to their DAOs. Encouraging that behavior would do a diservice to our DAOs. Of course, our success grows with the number of successful DAOs on our platform, so we certainly should not discourage users from participating in multiple DAOs. However, we should seek to facilitate multi-DAO participation while still encouraging deep engagement in each DAO. For example, if a given user has outstanding actions in another DAO, our UX could lead them to their DAOhaus profile (though secondarily to oustanding actions within the DAO they are currently working in). But once at their DAOhaus profile, taking action on any oustanding proposals should require clicking into the DAO in question. Perhaps even better, our UX could lead them directly to the other DAO where they have outstanding actions. Another way to think about this: DAOhaus+pokemol is not a personal productivity app; it is not Superhuman; it is not about individual efficiency. Rather, it is a *community* productivity app, and that requires orienting primarily around the community. ## Meta-community Time for some wrench-throwing. We can also add a fourth context: > A. The proposal (i.e. single action) > B. The DAO (i.e. single community) > C. The individual (i.e. multi-community) > **D. The community of DAOs** By incubating a community of interconnected, interoperable communities that thrive with each other, (D) is where DAOhaus could create its greatest success in the long-term. With this in mind, we should start seeding the idea / training users to think about DAOhaus as a portal to many communities, not just their single DAO. For example, emphasizing users' DAOhaus profile page could start to create a platform from which to add cross-community features. As we do this, however, we will need to be careful to not accidentally prioritize the individual-context (C\) over the DAO-context (B).