Do You Want To Design Bitcoin Related Products? Start Here

The Bitcoin ecosystem never ceases to amaze. A group called Bitcoin Design Community realized there was a hole in the knowledgebase, a “startling lack of reference resources” for designers. They took justice into their own hands and produced a phenomenal guide that’ll be useful for both beginners and old-school veterans alike. The best part, the Bitcoin Desing Guide is free and open source. 

The community identified the problem, “the lack of reference resources produced the most duplicated work, and therefore the most pain.” Working remotely and using all the tools that the Internet provides, they developed a table of content.  And started working. The team consists of, “Dozens of designers, developers, and other contributors.” The guide’s chapters were, “created by individuals working with the community in an open and collaborative way.” Pretty impressive. 

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This is where the Bitcoin ethos really shines. These people produced a world-class product that fulfills a real-life need and released it for free. By doing it that way, the guide will improve countless non-custodial products and projects, raising the whole ecosystem’s level with just a nifty bit of sleight of hand.

What Can We Expect From The Bitcoin Desing Guide?

So far, the product has fifty nutritious pages. The guide is still evolving, this is just the first public version. The intro makes the scope clear:

Bitcoin’s use cases are as vast as its user base, building Bitcoin applications can be complicated.

We designed this guide to help anyone navigate those complexities—regardless of where they live or work. We can’t imagine every possible use case, but we can help you build for them.

The guide explains in simple words what the premiere cryptocurrency is, and goes into the design conventions that the bigger Bitcoin community has developed over the years. After that, it defines the “open desing” concept, “an alternative design and development method based on the free exchange of information.” Beautiful. Then, we get to the meaty part, “frameworks like the usage life cycle, and the intersection of Bitcoin and personal finance.” A whole chapter explains “how to create onboarding experiences” that work for everyone. 

Perhaps the most important part of the guide, the next chapter teaches the “best practices regarding private key management.” As you should know, “Protecting a user’s private keys comes with no less responsibility than safeguarding their bank accounts. That puts private key management at the center of all bitcoin application design considerations.”

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Then, it gets into payments, and “how and where they intersect with privacy concerns.” By doing this, they pass important concepts to other members of the larger Bitcoin community, “Thinking about privacy is critical during the design process. Your users will not have the same level of knowledge of how to use Bitcoin privately.” The last chapter is about case studies, “such as daily spending, saving, prototyping, and upgradeable and shared accounts with wireframes designs.”

For more info, read the announcement we quoted from.

BTC price chart on Gemini | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com

Can I Help The Guide Evolve And Expand?

Of course, you can. The more the merrier. Join the group’s Slack or go directly to the project’s GitHub. They even have a calendar of activities, “which you can then subscribe to via your favorite calendar tool.” Or check this page for even more options. The community is looking to help designers get the most out of the guide, “through workshops, mentoring, video how-tos, and other resources,” so be on the lookout for that. Or help them produce it.

The guide is just the Bitcoin Design Community’s first product. They have other projects you can contribute to. If you’re interested in all of their activities, you should subscribe to their Substack mailing list. As you can see in their last dispatch, this is a really active group doing it all.

Featured Image by Christoph Ono for the Bitcoin Design Community | Charts by TradingView