I recently on-boarded someone young to Zcash using both ywallet and zashi. A mobile phone was used in both cases and I wanted to share my experience.
The Problem
Since this person was completely new to using a mobile wallet, they understood what a QR was but they didn’t know how to use it. The question of address types came up and we had a conversation about all the education:
shielded vs unshielded
transparent vs UA
do they have to stay close to another person/phone for it to work etc.
Too.much.Information.
The Solution
Address books
At first I showed them how you can scan someones QR code to “find” their address but this was still too abstract. When I started talking about how you can map any address to a person in an address book, I could literally see the turn on, a core memory was recorded.
Now how it works is irrelevant, and they understood the core concept of sending either money or a message to another human. I also added more education about the encrypted and shielded part, but again, they didn’t really latch on to that yet.
My take
I think every wallet should have some form of an address book to better onboard new users into the ecosystem. I love the fact that we have shielded memo’s which allows this to be saved without regard to phone damage/lost. Further, this is recoverable with the seed phrase!
In fact, I would even go further an say folks will better understand what a “seed phrase” is by saving an address to your Address book, and using the seed phrase to recover it like magic!
Address books are an excellent feature that can help the most basic users understand how a wallet works as if you were using your phone book to make a call or send a message.
Going from something as old as that phone book where we wrote down the numbers and then stored them in our wallet, a resource used for years before the phonebook/contact apps appeared on mobile devices, to a digital process, but with the same purpose, to save those frequently used contacts to be able to communicate easily or in the case of wallets, to be able to make transactions in a more accessible way.
Wallet addresses can sometimes cause problems for first time users, especially when you have to understand that you don’t have just one address, you have 2,3,4,5… or more, either in Zcash for each Pool or combination of unified addresses, or in other cryptocurrency projects that are added to the portfolio.
That’s why when I first used ZecWallet Lite on PC I could see that it was great to have an Address Book as a feature that facilitates sending and receiving transactions, then the same came to YWallet (with the possibility to save to the blockchain ), then in Zingo and now in Zashi.
Other wallets like Unstoppable and Edge also have similar and very good options dealing with multicrypto wallets.
Through this feature and the Messages feature, we at Zingo have been changing the way we explain to users how the addresses, wallet and Zcash work, and the feedback has been very good due to the UX they perceive.