Topic Q - Interface between the User and the Wallet Instance

[phin10]

Description
The question here is whether the ARF needs to contain high-level requirements regarding the UI of a Wallet Instance, and if so, which ones.

Planned publication discussion paper
3 September 2025

Link to discussion paper
link will follow

Links to discussion thread(s)
link will follow

Discussion close
Three weeks later.

[JohnOnGH]

Hi @phin10 - the answer is "yes".

We (Sezoo) are currently supporting Swinburne University (https://www.swinburne.edu.au/, one of the global design factory universities) in research on wallet design, looking specifically at the need for guidelines to provide consistent messaging and experience for users as wallets support higher risk/value/privacy interactions.

Swinburne have just finished the literature research and will be moving onto questionnaires with wallet designers shortly. We have a few good links into the wallet UX design community, but would be happy to have others proposed.

Our thinking is that we need guidelines at a high level to ensure that the experience is uniform enough that we know how a wallet will inform us about other parties, warn us about risks and help us make informed choices.

Imagine if car designers were allowed to play with which way round the brake and throttle go in a car. No-one wants wallet choices to suffer from as many (poor) design interpretations as cookie choices.

The guidelines need to be developed by a multidisciplinary team of digital sociologists, UX designers, technologists, lawyers, anthropologists, behavioral scientists etc. Think WCAG for mobile wallets.

Here's a deck we produced sometime ago explaining the rationale: (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ayMoKOh3PImBaOiUHULaojQsW_1Me4rhKMnXmjaRzB8/edit?usp=sharing )

John.

[OBIvision]

Usability is a critical question. So more important NOT to dictate and preventing change and upgrades.

A wallet will have many different form factors depending on the use case and citizen. Creating structure that force mandatory top-down design is a certain way to prevent solutions to the many real problems.