| dc.description.abstract | Blockchain is a technology that makes it extremely difficult for any single one of the participants in a decentralized network to change what has been recorded at the end of a distributed ledger as time passes. The unfamiliarity of people with products utilizing Blockchain and the complexity of their user interface increase the cognitive friction during a user’s interaction and diminish the adoption of this technology. Researchers, designers, and developers lack insights about block explorers’ usability for implementing them as tools that assist on the corroboration of cryptographically certified documents with hashing algorithms that are timestamped via transactions recorded in immutable and distributed ledgers. Grounded on these challenges and lack of research about the topic, this thesis applies a usability engineering approach to propose a framework for learnability evaluation and utilizes it in a methodology to examine such important aspect of usability for the user interface of Blockchain explorers. Specifically, evaluating the learnability of these products during the first-time experience of users with varying levels of expertise and domain knowledge about Blockchain. First, a summative expert assessment gives a rating of learnability to three block explorers available in the market. Then, formative empirical testing is conducted on testers verifying data recorded in a transaction of the Ethereum Blockchain, validating a contractual document’s fingerprint obtained with the cryptographical hashing algorithm SHA-256. The outcome of this research allows concluding that the impact of neglecting the recommendations for a user interface’s suitability for learning might be more significant for products that utilize Blockchain than it is for products that do not require it altogether. This also suggests that a focus on improving the learnability of UIs can increase the adoption of solutions that implement Blockchain in an attempt to cover real-world needs. | |
