A Look At Augur 1.0 From A Blockchain and UX Professional

A preface: I am a huge fan of prediction markets and the Augur project. When Augur or a project like it succeeds, it will have tremendous positive impact on the world and the accuracy of human knowledge. More on that here.

A bit about me: I've done UI/UX work on a product used by a few million people. I currently run LBRY, a blockchain-based protocol unrelated to and not competitive with Augur.

Below are notes and screenshots I took on my journey to make my first Augur trade.

The Journey

• The Augur homepage makes me use GitHub releases to download a binary. It ought to link directly to a binary based on OS detection, or at least show the links inside of the Augur website.

• The app installs on Ubuntu without an icon.

• After launching the app, we land here. The initial Augur landing screen is terrible UX for anyone not already at least moderately familiar with Ethereum. I clicked "Connect" without changing anything because I had no idea what these values were.

• The next screen is as bad if not worse. What is any of this? How would I know what to set it to or if I'm supposed to change it?

• At this point, I got stuck. The "Open Augur App" button did nothing. Eventually, I realized I needed to wait for the blockchain (or blockchain headers?) to download:

• This process takes a long time! I didn't time this precisely, but it was at least 20 minutes before the app opened.

• After being caught up with the blockchain, opening the Augur app puts me back in my browser. This switch is unusual UX that most people will not be used to, but the landing page seems sensible.

• At first glance, the app seems generally designed well. There are cleanly separated and labeled high-level areas. It was quick and easy to get into the screens that show trades and bets. A screenshot of a sample market screen is below. I'm not claiming I immediately understand how to use this page, but it seems reasonable. Any interface is always going to have application-specific irreducible complexity (Tesler's Law) and the complexity here seems necessary.

• Understanding how to actually make a bet, however, is much more confusing. Here's what happens when you click "Account":

• The account screen is going to shed anyone and everyone who does not already understand a lot about Ethereum. Even someone holding ETH on Coinbase would struggle with this screen. A link to a howto, which is never the ideal solution, would go a long way here.

• I chose to create an account via MetaMask, since that was the only option I was familiar with. Clicking "Connect to MetaMask" gives no feedback whatsoever if you do not have MetaMask open and authenticated, which could be mildly confusing. After authenticating, you end up here:

• Despite several more areas opening up, one cannot do anything in any of these areas without ETH. While I understood and expected this, the app would benefit from making this clearer. For example, you can click through several screens to create a market, but you won't be told you cannot actually finish the process without ETH until the 4th screen.

• One of the biggest flaws in Augur, and one I'm surprised their lawyers okayed, is the incredible lack of clarity in how a bet is resolved! Let's look at the market screen again:

• This says the market will be "determined by news media". But that is not true! The market creator is promising he will rely on the news media to resolve it, but the market creator chooses a specific address, frequently controlled by himself, to resolve the market. If the creator cheats, there is a dispute resolution process. But the news media itself does not somehow directly resolve this bet.

• At this point, the ETH I sent to myself finally arrived. Time to make a bet! I decided I wanted to bet on the World Cup. This highlighted another problem… there is no enforcement of uniqueness.

• I picked the one with the most volume. Several screens were involved to make a trade, I'll show them in sequence. Since I didn't really understand any of this, I just entered values that appeared to be valid and clicked through the screens.

Approximately six people in the entire world who didn't directly work on this screen understand it.

• I thought I had made a bet at this point, but the transaction was evidently rejected for insufficient fees. So my first Augur bet will come another day!

TL;DR

• Futures markets are amazing and Augur is a wonderful idea.
• Augur has a lot of UX issues related to first-run and new users.
• Augur ought to do a better job explaining how bets work and how they're resolved.
• The vast majority of people in the entire world would stand no chance completing a trade on Augur as-is.
• Nonetheless, a lot of the work here shows promise and I wish the best for the future of Augur!