Proposal to start an ecosystem of mobile, tablet and wearable applications for the DAO.
Title: Bankless Mobile App
Authors: @0xNSHuman
Squad: @0xNSHuman, @addamsson .
Date Created: 9/03/2021
Date Posted: 12/06/2021
DELIVERY UPDATE — December 6, 2021
This proposal is formally posted to capture consensus around the Mobile App project that was started in the beginning of Season 2, and is now at the final stage of v1.0 development. The original proposal starts right after this section.
Please keep in mind the difference between the actual upcoming release and the original proposal to avoid confusion. The product roadmap underwent serious implementation changes and priority shifts to ensure maximum Season 2 value delivery, but the original proposal is left untouched since it was written 3 months ago, for historical accuracy and a broader vision of the future for our consumer-facing products.
Most feature ideas mentioned there aged well, and some of them became more viable from technical perspective to work on in the future than they were 3 months ago.
This is not Season 3 proposal.
As of December 6th, the Mobile App is substantially complete and submitted for Beta testing distribution. Please refer to the following video demonstrating the current state of the product on actual iPhone device.
This initial version includes features and user experience around content produced by Bankless DAO and Bankless HQ, as well as Bankless Academy interactive courses and member info such as BANK balance and POAPs collection.
Most of the content delivery is powered by Content Gateway.
Additionally, we have mobile interface for Bounty Board hunters (users who claim and submit bounties to earn BANK) substantially complete and ready for integration with the upcoming Bounty Board API.
Beta version of the app is submitted for distribution, and Beta testing program is opening later this week. More details can be found in #mobile-app channel in Discord.
The First Month of Season 2 was spent on creating a solid foundation for all the future features to be built on top of, giving a lot of attention to:
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Multi-form presentation, to make it possible to create iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV experiences without changing most of the code;
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Multi-language interface, to start offering native language experience along with the International Media Nodes content all over the world;
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Modular architecture that encourages contributors create new features by following the existing ones as examples.
The Second Month of Season 2 was spent on creating actual features you see on the screenshots above. It’s important to highlight how fast we can move now once we invested resources in the proper foundation.
The Third Month of Season 2 is planned to be spent on addressing Beta user feedback, preparing for Release distribution, and planning our next priorities.
Our Season 3 ideas are starting to take shape, thanks to many discussions we had and are having with other product teams and feedback coming after sharing our current progress. Here are a couple of ideas that we’ll likely offer to vote on in our next proposal:
Multi-language UI + International Media Nodes Content
Host all the translations in Content Gateway under their own directory, and then have Mobile App present it in the language native to the smartphone user automatically, based on the system language of their smartphone.
Education Guild Content
We started with Bankless Academy as the biggest splash to make on the education side of the mobile experience. Now we’re in talks with contributors interested in expanding the guild’s presence by utilizing Content Gateway as delivery platform, and Mobile App as user experience platform.
More HQ Content
We made Bankless Podcast accessible in the app, and would love to add the HQ Newsletter too. With the current platform capabilities, we’re able to make it an exclusive perk for L1, retaining its existing business model unaffected.
$BED + $GMI Retail Investor Interface
There is concept of creating an interactive user experience for retail investors that would create a better awareness for retail investors and help them make informed decisions about the proper mix of the two indexes based on their level of “degen-ness”.
iPad Application
Bringing experiences such as Bankless Academy or Podcast to the next level.
Apple Watch Companion
Not much utility we can think of at the moment, but an option on the table.
More Ideas
…to come.
POLL
You may be very familiar with this project, so if you’re just looking for the poll, please find it at the end of this post right here.
THE ORIGINAL PROPOSAL GOES BELOW
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SUMMARY
The BanklessDAO mobile app is a product that connects the user to everything that happens in the DAO, providing a mobile interface to:
- Get familiar with the core mission of the DAO, activities that are being undertaken to achieve it, precise ways to participate, and the benefits of participation.
- Get synchronized with the latest news and the state of decentralized economy, and the recent events in the DAO directly affecting it.
- Get educated by having access to the Academy and other educational resources produced by the DAO.
- Start engaging with and being involved in the DAO from the very first contact and receive measurable rewards and achievements for that.
- Continue to grow through levels of membership by unlocking more tools for everyday interaction and collaborating with certain DAO members.
The first stage of the project is going to focus on increasing conversion of joining members to contributors, as well as promoting the projects and content produced across the DAO, effectively aggregating it all in a single hand-held format that rewards engagement.
The following stages would extend the functionality, introducing collaboration, interaction with the blockchain (Bankless Mobile Wallet), as well as features and improvements based on feedback from the members and the DAO projects participating in the integration.
Finally, the ecosystem would be extended with tablet, wearable and Internet-Of-Things interfaces in the future.
BACKGROUND
The idea came from evaluation of the current ways the DAO delivers content to the members and non-members, and the existing interfaces for the emerging products in Season 1.
Having extensive experience building and launching mobile app ecosystems in the past, the author haven’t found any ongoing discussions in the direction of taking advantage of this doubtlessly powerful platform to drive member engagement and provide users with a way to progress through the organization in a much less overwhelming way with potentially more rewarding experience at the first stages.
MISSION & VALUES ALIGNMENT
Here’s how BanklessDAO Mobile App addresses the mid- and long-term objectives.
Season 2 Priorities
- Happiness and retention (link to Season 2 planning section)
In a research done by @angyts for the #first-quest-project it’s clearly seen that most (86.5%) people entering the DAO have never really interacted with it, not even talking about making contributions. Despite the promising plans to introduce more onboarding and education steps to the member introduction experience, the author believes this effort might be undermined by “Discord fatigue” — the experience of a user being bombarded with different crypto community interactions fighting each other for the person’s attention. The mobile app is seen as a great differentiating factor because of its proven model to retain user engagement through system notifications, periodical achievements, and overall exclusivity compared to being just another corner of the Discord window.
Going beyond the onboarding experience, the plan is to have the app extended with tools for communication and collaboration based on the members’ feedback, adding value to their everyday experience being involved in the DAO.
- Doubling down on revenue-generating activities (link to Season 2 planning section)
This is a long-term vision for the ecosystem in general rather than the initial stage. But the mobile platform is potentially seen as a supplemental (if not the primary in certain cases) interface for many of the DAO products or services. Mobile platforms have historically multiplied transaction volumes in the web 2.0 world, and there is an equally great chance they will in the web3 world. We don’t see too many web3-powered mobile apps popping up around other than plain mobile wallets with staking feature. However, given the general trend of Ethereum moving towards consumer products boom driven by L2 solutions, BanklessDAO may become a pioneer by putting decentralized consumer products in the users’ pockets or hands, or on their wrists.
Long-term Priorities
- Help 1,000,000,000 people go bankless
Mass adoption is driven by frictionless experiences. Everything the mobile app ecosystem is going to offer will be based on this core idea.
- Audience and product exposure growth
Mobile presence opens a whole new traffic channel and a gateway for the DAO products to gain more exposure. The sophisticated user behaviour analytics available on mobile platforms enables a more targeted content aggregation and filtering, so that the users consume content and products that they actually care about.
- Attractive partnerships and DAO-to-DAO relationships
The mobile app can be an attractive distribution platform for commercial and strategic partnerships with other DAOs and other entities. Being a “real estate” in the user’s pocket, it can be used for seasonal interactive content and functionality in addition to the web platform.
SCOPE OF WORK
The BanklessDAO Mobile App v1.0 sets a limit on the feature set to minimize risks in Season 2.
Objectives:
- Establish mobile presence for BanklessDAO.
- Provide new members with less intimidating and more inviting experience.
- Aggregate the products of many guilds and projects into a single smart, compact and portable interface.
- Enable better member profiling while respecting privacy.
Features:
- Smart Timeline featuring news sources, academy courses, active bounties, quests, partner offers and potentially other kinds of content.
- Interactive Content Scenarios, such as First Quest, to complete with rewarding experience around them.
- Rewards and Achievements collectible by the user for continuous engagement and/or quests completion. Think Apple Fitness, Strava, other streak-based rewards potentially married to NFTs/POAP.
- Projects and Bounties section where the user can filter available opportunities by their skillset, availability or passion.
- [Stretch Goal] Newbie Team-up Wizard section where new members can be matched to discuss the opportunities, apply for Guest Pass and rock it together.
Executables:
- Complete and approve product, experience and user interface designs.
- Evaluate the required assets and coordinate with other guilds if needed.
- Complete the roadmap for the project based on the specifications, designs and guild priorities.
- Develop the iOS application.
- [Depending on Resources] Initiate the Android application development.
- Integrate the data from across the DAO via Content Gateway API (see below).
- Test and release several iterations of the product on the market.
SPECIFICATION
The mobile app project is tightly connected to and relies on the infrastructure that is being developed as a separate project in the same season, called Content Gateway. The project details and proposal can be found here: link.
The two projects are being delivered by the same team in an effort to create a system for all the other product across the DAO to be able to reuse and create more exciting products powered by the same data platform as the mobile app.
This makes the app just the beginning of the new era and class of products that smoothly integrate all the creative potential of the DAO.
High-Level Architecture
The following diagram shows the main idea behind the system:
Content Aggregation Across Guilds and Projects
In order to make the mobile interface feature everything that the DAO and its partners make on one screen, we need to create a data infrastructure where all the sources of information can be plugged in and aggregated. This will also be a destination for user behaviour analytics data that will potentially be used to create a smart timeline algorithm in the future.
The most beautiful thing we realized while designing this requirement is that this infrastructure is going to serve not just the mobile app, but many other DAO products to come. That is why is was extracted into its own project and proposal.
For the sake of risk management in Season 2, we limit the scope of this infrastructure to data aggregation for the existing products, leaving a lot of amazing ideas for the future seasons.
Mobile Application
The consumer-facing part of the system will have a mobile application built for smartphones on the most popular platforms: first iOS and later Android (not a primary goal in Season 2). You can find the concept mockups below.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
The assumed hourly rate is 1,000 BANK / hour.
The assumed Season 2 delivery period is 12 weeks.
Project budget breakdown by role:
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Project Manager
- Duties:
- Manage roadmap and iterations delivery;
- Maintain weekly reporting to the DAO and represent the team;
- Organize weekly meetings and keep the history;
- Track resources and compensation.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Duties:
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Product Designer
- Duties:
- Define the product concept and its value proposition based on the strategic goals and seasonal priorities of the DAO;
- Design the experience and user interface;
- Produce the collateral materials to support the promotion and education around the product.
- Hours per week: 16.
- Weeks: 2.
- Role funding subtotal: 32,000 BANK.
- Duties:
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Software Engineer (Mobile Platforms)
- Duties:
- Evaluate the designs and ensure feasibility;
- Architect solutions and manage technical requirements;
- Implement the functionality;
- Integrate the other DAO products with the application.
- Hours per week: 24.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 288,000 BANK.
- Duties:
Additionally, the expenses to prepare the project:
- Multisig wallet creation gas fees 329 BANK (as of 2021-09-25).
Total Season 2 funding requested: 368,329 BANK.
BRAND USAGE
The possible name options for the mobile application are:
- BanklessDAO
- bDAO
- Bankless
- GoBankless
- <# Propose yours! #>
The app would use the DAO logo as its main icon, or have it designed specifically.
The app is meant to be directly associated with the DAO and make an impact on the brand, being one of its primary interfaces with the outside world.
SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS
- App distribution and user retention metrics:
- Percent of users coming from the newly introduced channels.
- Percent of users staying engaged after 1, 7 and 30 days.
- Average time per session spent in the app.
- Member engagement metrics:
- Percent of users per every N-day streak of consuming the content.
- Percent of users completed at least one quest, or per streaks of quests.
- Percent of users who made at least N amount $BANK after initiating executable items from the app.
- The member conversion funnel:
- Percent of users getting a Guest Pass after passing certain engagement threshold in the app.
- Percent of users achieving Level 1 after passing certain engagement threshold in the app.
- Other metrics:
- The field of potential metrics on mobile platforms is truly massive. Various macro and micro factors such as geography, timezones, network quality and many others can be factored in while respecting privacy.
NEXT STEPS
- Sync on priorities with the partnering DAO projects and finalize the roadmap.
- Kick off the work in tight cooperation with the data infrastructure project (Content Gateway).
SQUAD BACKGROUND
@0xNSHuman spent most of his career building and launching software products, first as a one-man army design & development professional, and later as an agency owner leading the digital strategy for various growing brands. Contributing to crypto projects since early 2021, @0xNSHuman joined the DAO in late Summer and immediately spotted the opportunity to add value towards its incredible growth.
LINKS
Discord channel: #mobile-app.
Mobile App project details: link.
Content Gateway project details: link.
BanklessDAO Mobile App Mockups: link.
Roadmap: link.
Marketing materials: link.
DAO Onboarding research by @angyts: link.
Season 2 discussion: link.
POLL
Do you support Bankless Mobile App development and release?
- SUPPORT
- DO NOT SUPPORT
0 voters
