Aidan Dunlap
I made a small site to text you when ethereum gas prices fell below a set limit (fees for transactions on the ethereum blockchain that were very high and volatile at the time of development). This was a problem I had and wanted to solve, later also adding the problem of trying to hypereffectively represent gas prices and what they mean to an end user (ex. history, what specific transactions cost and how much would they have costed).
My main goal with this project was to get better at planning, designing, and executing very high quality, highly intuitive user interfaces for complex tasks. While I am proud of what I built, I also believe this could be so much better and even more intuitive and I plan on releasing a better version in the future.
This was a great exercise in getting better with the relationship with product vision and actual user feedback. I originally thought that I had designed the most intuitive user interface I could for this problem and was quick to defend my decisions come critique, but eventually realized that I was wrong and one of my assumptions was faulty (namely that I had raised the knowledge ceiling slightly too high, falsely thinking my design would be intuitive to everyone including people who didn't know how gas worked, but was wrong). I think if you spend a lot of time thinking about a UI it eventually becomes very intuitive to you, and you always need to be alert to and try to work around that bias, which sometimes can be really hard. Overall, learned a ton!
Stack:
Frontend: React, Tailwind, Next, Vercel
Backend: Express, Twilio, Firebase, Vercel Serverless Funcs, Replit
Apis: poloniex.com, gasnow.org