A DeFi User Experience Breakdown: Yearn Finance (part 1)

In this article we’ll take a look at the recently updated front-end of Yearn and evaluate it from a user experience perspective. We’ll highlight what it does well and give recommendations of where it could be improved to encourage more people to use the platform.

Why does my opinion on this matter?

In my normie career for the last 10 years I’ve been a consultant in an area called conversion rate optimisation. Companies hire me to critically evaluate their websites, identify the things that could be stopping users from buying/registering/depositing, and recommend improvements that — to use Yearn’s own words — make numba go up.

First, a framework for evaluation

This will be the first DeFi user experience breakdown I write but I plan to apply the same treatment to all of the top platforms in the space. To be able to do this fairly, and to enable comparison across platforms, we should establish a methodology for this type of evaluation.

Evaluation criteria

We will evaluate the Yearn front-end against 2 criteria:

1. Clarity of the value proposition
2. Usability of the interface

Put another way we’re looking at whether an average user landing on the page can answer two questions

1. What does this thing do?
2. How do I do it?

I am not a designer, otherwise a third criteria could be to look at the effectiveness of the visual style and design. I will leave that evaluation to someone more qualified.

Clarity of the value proposition

What does Yearn do?

Who is it for?

Why should I care?

Can someone landing on this website for the first time answer these 3 questions quickly and without much effort? If not then the chances of them becoming a user of the product vanish to zero very rapidly. That’s what we’ll look at in this section.

The Yearn homepage

The Yearn homepage is extremely minimalist in terms of content. That makes our job evaluating it easier but the job of the user trying to understand the product a lot harder.

Things have improved since ‘Numba go up’

It’s a cliché but first impressions do count for a lot. For most users that first impression comes from a gut reaction to the visual design, followed by a more conscious reading of the heading/subheading they see first.

Heading: DeFi made simple

“DeFi made simple” is in many ways better than the “Numba go up” headline that was present at the initial launch of the new front-end, but in some ways it’s also worse.

“DeFi made simple” makes an assumption that the user is familiar with what DeFi is. Whilst this might be a fair assumption in this early phase of DeFi adoption when the user-base is entirely Ethereum power-users, it will not be good enough if mainstream adoption is the end goal.

“…made simple” is definitely inline with the goal of Yearn but the “made simple” phrase is so overused that it has almost become a meaningless phrase and doesn’t convey any extra valuable information.

What “Numba go up” had going for it was that it at least hinted at the true purpose of the core Earn/Vault products of Yearn and that’s to generate a return on investment for users. But the meme-ness of the phrasing both sells short the innovation and power of Yearn and fails to instil a level of confidence/seriousness that most users will need to feel comfortable trusting a platform with their hard earned coins. So it had to go. But maybe we can bring back the essence of the phrase with a bit better phrasing.

Subheading: Yearn puts your crypto assets to work so you don’t have to

This is a lot better but suffers from similar issues as we saw with the headline.

“Yearn puts your crypto assets to work…” is good in that it tells me that the platform is about doing something with my crypto assets. The issue I have with this phrase is “to work”. As a user my goal isn’t to have my assets doing ‘work’, my goal is for my assets to generate me more money or more assets. I want my assets to grow in value. The phrasing here would benefit from being more specific.

“…so you don’t have to” is from the same club as “made simple”. It doesn’t really mean anything or add any additional information. The fact is I do have to. I have to choose my vaults, what coins I want to deposit etc.

Scrolling platform statistics: TVL, Market Cap, Volume

It has been many years since I’ve seen a scrolling marquee used. I’m not going to focus much on how this component appears though as I know the Yearn team are looking to hire a UX designer and I expect the first thing on their list will be to find a better way to display these statistics.

The idea of showing these key statistics though is a good one. Yearn is a DeFi blue chip and has worked hard to earn that position — so it should use its status to its advantage.

Statistics lend legitimacy to a project instantly in a way that no amount of words can. When we see that other people are using a platform it immediately makes us feel more confident in using it ourselves. This is a cognitive bias known as social proof. It’s a very common tactic used all over the internet and offline to persuade people to do things we want them to do.

My critique of this section is whether all 3 numbers are needed. Seeing one large number is convincing, seeing 3 starts to add opportunities for confusion. Which number is most important? What do they all mean? We want to add statistics that will help reassure the user but we don’t want to confuse or overwhelm the user. I expect just showing the TVL number would achieve the desired effect. Aave do this very effectively.

Alternatives and recommendations

What could be changed on the Yearn homepage to make the value proposition clearer and more compelling?

To construct a strong value proposition we need to understand that there are really only 2 impulses that drive consumers when it comes to a financial products:

• Make more money (or spend less)
• Spend less time

Some products focus heavily on one — requiring an investment of of time but saving/earning money as a payoff, or saving you time but you pay a premium for the benefit. The best products enable both.

I believe Yearn fits in this sweet spot category and so we need to make sure we make that abundantly clear to the user as part of their first impression.

Part of the difficulty of doing this well with Yearn is that the value proposition is a bit of an evolving beast. Many companies that offer multiple products have this problem. The most important thing is to focus on getting across the value proposition of your core product — the one that brings users to you in the first place. It’s about getting users in the door. There will be many opportunities to cross-sell them other products and services once they’re inside the ecosystem. We need to focus on getting them in!

For Yearn that product is Vaults. Vaults satisfies our users’ 2 primary drives.

• Make more money — Depositing your crypto assets into a larger pool of assets means that they are used more efficiently to generate higher yields than if you did things alone.
• Spend less time — You don’t have to try and yield farm yourself with all the time that takes on research, maintenance etc.

With these two parts of the value proposition in mind we can come up with a few potential starting points for an alternative heading and subheading.

Disclaimer: Writing good copy is extremely difficult. Any change or improvement you make should ideally be A/B tested to prove that it actually performs better. High traffic websites will run these tests on real website visitors without them knowing they are participating in an experiment and see which version leads to the higher success rate. This is probably not feasible at this stage in Yearn’s growth so an alternative could be to put these to a vote in governance or via a poll on Discord/Twitter to sense-check any changes. Or you could run smaller focus groups or usability studies to see which version resonates well with users.

Here are some heading + subheading options that could work well:

Some other potential headings

• Deposit. Earn. Yearn.
• Earn while you hodl

Some other potential subheadings

• Earn up to 30% APY when you deposit your crypto assets (this one might be better once V2 APYs have stabilized a bit and we can give a realistic figure)
• Generate a return from almost any of your crypto assets (again maybe in the future when there are more vaults)
• Deposit crypto. Earn more crypto. Yearn makes it easy.
• Let your crypto earn you more crypto
• Turn almost any crypto asset into a source of income

And whenever you’re writing copy it’s a good idea to throw some silly ideas into the pot. Sometimes they contain a good idea but just need a better execution.

Adding more content to the homepage

A minimalist design can be very effective. If done well it can have the added bonus effect of making a product feel easy to use. In the case of Yearn my feeling is that the homepage would benefit from a single additional panel below the main visual that explains how Yearn works in a little more detail.

Here is an example from PoolTogether that has this effect. It’s a “How it works” section with the 3 simple steps to engage with the platform. It achieves two jobs at once, it both explains what PoolTogether is to any users that hadn’t figured that out from what they’ve seen so far, plus it illustrates exactly how a user interacts and benefits from the platform.

Again I should stress that I’m not a designer so I won’t try and illustrate what this would look like for Yearn, but for the content it could be something like this.

1. Deposit your cryptocurrency — We have Vaults for ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT and 20+ more Ethereum based tokens.
2. Accumulate earnings — Yearn strategists compete to design the most profitable way to put your crypto to work across the hundreds of opportunities in decentralized finance.
3. Withdraw at any time — You can always access your crypto and simply withdraw your deposit and your earnings to your wallet.

It would probably make sense to mention the fee structure here as for most users that will be the next logical question on their minds.

For most users this content will probably be enough for them to go ahead and progress to the Vaults page. For those users that want to read more about tokenomics, the DAO, security, the tech and so on it’s generally safe to assume that they will be willing to do a little bit of searching to find that information. Therefore separate pages reached via the top navigation is most likely sufficient and saves clogging up the homepage with technical information that 95% of users won’t care about, and worse might be intimidated or put off by.

This post got far longer than I anticipated so it’s going to be split into 2 parts. The second part will cover the second evaluation criteria — usability of the interface — where we’ll look at the Vaults page itself and what Yearn is like to interact with.

If you enjoyed this article or got some value from it and would like to see more I have been known to type much faster after receiving tips

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