Yang You is the Lead Product Designer at Syndicate. Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Club product allows friends, angel investors, and web3 communities to create and run investment clubs as a DAO Yang is also a member of VectorDAO, a collective of top tier Web3 product designers.

In this episode, we discuss Yang’s journey into Web3 design, what good Web3 design looks like, and the human side of Web3.

Learn more about Yang You:

• Yang’s Twitter: @_yangyou
• Yang’s Website: https://www.yangyou.space
• Syndicate: https://syndicate.io
• VectorDAO: https://vectordao.com

Episode notes and links:

• Yang’s Good Design in Web3 Talk for AllianceDAO
• Yang’s Designing for the Humans of Web3 Talk at EthDenver
  • Yang’s Slides from EthDenver Talk
• Yang’s journey from civil engineering to design
• How Yang advanced as a designer
  • Short courses on UI design and Research and Strategy
  • UX research: empathizing; removing your biases; understanding core user problems
• How civil engineering contributed to being a designer
• Yang’s first problem at Anchorage
  • How do we bring what institutions are familiar with and know (necessary for the survival of their business) and introduce these same actions to Crypto.
• What SyndicateDAO is and what they’re attempting to achieve
  • Enabling regular people to invest their money, or time to re-distribute who gets funding in Web3
• How Yang found and joined Syndicate
• Syndicate’s Web3 Investment Club Product:
  • Setting up a legal entity (optional)
  • Name the team
  • Set the rules - who can deposit, up to what amount, close time to deposits (written onto the smart contract)
  • Then, you can send an invite link to co-admins to deposit, track cap table.
  • Auto-track cap tables
  • Distribution.
• What is “good” design in Web3? What’s a good framework to think about good Web3 design
  • “Good design in Web3 isn’t that different from Web2 and what good design currently is.”
  • New topics: identity, governance
  • Principles:
    • Amplified decision fatigue and how to mitigate it.
    • How to help people understand and manage the new roles they are taking on
    • How to deal with the growth in noise and spam
    • Design as a practice: Building more intentionally towards the pluriverse
• Challenges to better designs, summarizing what’s happened over multiple transactions
  • Graph protocol
• CCS - Crypto, Culture, and Society
  • Austin Robey
• GitCoin
  • Quadratic funding
• One of Yang’s favorite communities / resources to help onboard to the space
  • She256
  • SheFi
• If you were to hire a new designer, are there specific concepts you’d onboard them to?
  • Aha moments:
    • How BTC vs. ETH addresses work behind the scenes
    • Working closely with the engineering team and asking them to walk through each step of an EtherScan
      • How to trace where a transaction came from
      • Association b/w a user’s contract and the club wallet representing the group of funds AND the user’s wallet
      • Getting an understanding of meta-data that’s on chain, so designers can help convey this information to users
• How has it been to work for a Web3 company? Advice? How do you think about it?
  • https://medium.com/@jillrgunter/trends-and-timescales-a9b738be3e97
  • Don’t look at tokens.
  • Take a long term approach

If you liked this episode, you can find more episodes at wld.show!