[FINAL] Dappnode: Future-proofing UI/UX of OP nodes

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions
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S4 Intent: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization (intent 1)

Proposed Mission: Future-proofing UI/UX of OP nodes

Proposal Tier: Ember

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above Tier:

I am a new community member that has not worked with or for the Optimism Collective before

Baseline grant amount: 50,000 OP

% of total available Intent Budget: 5%

Please check here if access to upfront capital is a barrier to completing your Mission and you would like to be considered for a small upfront cash grant: no

There is no guarantee that all approved Missions will receive cash grants.

Alliance name: Dappnode

Alliance Lead: Pol Lanski

Contact info: @Pol_Lanski

L2 recipient address: 0x2A5b95c0770BD74B66D7214E60ea6619FD233687

Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:

Pol Lanski - Alliance lead
COO Dappnode & building at dOrg / https://twitter.com/Pol_Lanski

Eduardo Antuña - Product Manager
Co-Founder and Project lead at Dappnode, zkEVM Polygon Core Developer & Giveth Contributor / https://twitter.com/eduadiez

Griff Green - Advisor
Co-founder of Commons Stack, Giveth 2, General Magic & DAppNode; Top Steward in ENS, Gitcoin, Optimism, Arbitrum, TEC as well as many other Ethereum community projects / https://twitter.com/thegrifft

Please explain how this Mission will help accomplish the above Intent:

  • Boosting Decentralization through User Experience: Our mission is to enhance the UX/UI of OP’s nodes, making it more intuitive and user-friendly. This not only makes Optimism governance more accessible but also broadens the scope for decentralization by inviting participation from a diverse range of Optimists.
  • Facilitating Information Exchange: By refining the interface, we aim to create a more seamless platform for knowledge sharing. This will empower users with easy access to information, fostering informed decision-making and a more engaged community.
  • Reducing Participation Hurdles: A key aspect of our mission is to lower the barriers to participation. An intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface is instrumental in encouraging diverse involvement in the governance process, aligning with the intent of fostering a culturally diverse governance community.
  • Strengthening Core Governance Infrastructure: Our mission also involves future-proofing the UX/UI to ensure the platform’s resilience and adaptability to future changes and challenges. This contributes to the robustness of the core governance infrastructure.
  • Promoting Community Involvement: DAppNode, being an open-source, community-driven project, encourages contributions from anyone. This aligns with the intent of expanding ownership to a diverse set of governance participants, further promoting decentralization.

In essence, our mission will not only enhance the user experience but also promote a more inclusive, informed, and resilient governance community, thereby fulfilling the intent of Governance Accessibility.

What makes your Alliance well-suited to execute this Mission?

  • Proven Track Record in Decentralization: Since 2018, DAppNode has been a significant player in the decentralization of Ethereum’s blockchain infrastructure. We have a deep understanding of the intricacies of decentralized networks and the technical know-how to enhance their functionality and accessibility.
  • Expertise in Blockchain Software Management: Our platform simplifies the hosting and operation of various types of blockchain software, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, IPFS, and others. This expertise will be invaluable in improving the UX/UI of OP’s nodes.
  • User-Friendly Interface Design: We have a history of creating user-friendly interfaces for node management and monitoring. This experience will directly contribute to our mission of future-proofing OP’s nodes UX/UI.
  • Promotion of Network Security and Reliability: Our platform empowers users to participate in decentralized networks without relying on centralized infrastructure providers. This not only strengthens network security and reliability but also promotes censorship resistance, aligning with the ethos of Optimism governance.
  • Open-Source and Community-Driven Approach: As an open-source project, DAppNode encourages community contributions to its development and enhancement. This approach fosters a collaborative environment where users can share resources to enhance functionality, mirroring the participatory nature of Optimism governance.

In short, our Alliance’s expertise in decentralization, user-friendly design, and community-driven development makes us well-suited to execute this mission and contribute to the broader intent of enhancing governance accessibility.

Please list a critical milestone. The critical milestone should be a measure of whether you’ve made best efforts to execute what is outlined in this proposal or not. If you fail to achieve your critical milestone, your grant may be clawed back.

  • The critical milestone for this mission is the successful deployment of a user-friendly UI/UX for OP’s nodes, with at least one significant improvement implemented based on community feedback.

This milestone will involve the completion of the following sub-goals:

  • UI/UX Design and Community Feedback Integration (1 month): Using the insights from the community engagement, we will craft a new UI/UX design for OP’s nodes. The output of this stage will be a comprehensive design blueprint and a working prototype that reflects the community’s feedback.
  • UI/UX Enhancement Implementation (2 months): This stage involves the actual construction of the new UI/UX for OP’s nodes, resulting in a functional version of the improved UI/UX.
  • Testing and Iterative Improvement (1 month): We will undertake rigorous testing of the new UI/UX, incorporating feedback for continuous improvement. The outcome will be a refined and tested UI/UX for OP’s nodes.
  • Deployment and User Onboarding (1 month): The final stage involves the rollout of the new UI/UX for OP’s nodes and facilitating the community’s transition to the new interface. The end product will be a live, user-centric design, validated by positive community feedback.

How should Token House delegates measure progress towards this Mission: These should focus on progress towards completion. Including expected completion dates for each is recommended.

  • Insight Gathering and Community Interaction (Completion: Month 1): The successful engagement with the OP community, as evidenced by the completion of surveys, feedback sessions, and the delivery of a comprehensive report detailing the community’s UI/UX needs and preferences.
  • UI/UX Design and Community Feedback Integration (Completion: Month 2): The creation of a new UI/UX design blueprint and a working prototype that reflects the community’s feedback. The completion of this stage can be confirmed by the presentation of the design blueprint and prototype to the community for initial feedback.
  • UI/UX Enhancement Implementation (Completion: Month 4): The development and completion of the new UI/UX for OP’s nodes. This can be measured by the successful transition from the prototype to a fully functional version of the improved UI/UX.
  • Testing and Iterative Improvement (Completion: Month 5): The completion of comprehensive testing and subsequent refinement of the new UI/UX. This stage can be confirmed by the delivery of a final version of the UI/UX that incorporates all feedback and improvements from the testing phase.
  • Deployment and User Onboarding (Completion: Month 6): The successful rollout of the new UI/UX for OP’s nodes and the smooth transition of the community to the new interface. The completion of this stage can be confirmed by the live deployment of the new UI/UX and positive initial feedback from the community.

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission? These should be focused on performance and may be used by badgeholders to assess your Misson’s impact in the next round of RetroPGF.

  • User Satisfaction Score: Feedback from users regarding their experience with the new UI/UX. This can be collected through surveys or feedback forms. A higher satisfaction score would signify a positive impact.
  • Increase in Network Activity: The change in network activity, such as the number of nodes running, before and after the UI/UX upgrade. An increase in activity would suggest that the new UI/UX has improved the overall user experience and engagement.

Breakdown of Mission budget request:

  • Community Engagement and Requirements Gathering (10% of the budget): This includes resources needed for meetings, surveys, and feedback sessions with OP Labs, delegates, and other community members.

  • Design and Feedback Incorporation (20% of the budget): This covers the resources needed for the design phase, including the creation of validator launch plan based on community feedback.

  • Onboarding (20% of the budget): his portion is allocated for resources needed to customize the design for the toolkit, based on the specific needs and preferences of the users.

  • Framework Development (45% of the budget): This covers the resources needed for developing the new UI/UX, including software development, testing, and deployment.

  • Operating Costs (5% of the budget): This includes miscellaneous expenses such as software subscriptions, website hosting fees, and communication tools.

I confirm that my grant will be subject to clawback for failure to execute on critical milestones: Yes

I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies: Yes

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: Yes

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Improving and future-proofing UX of Optimism node is critical for decentralization - particularly once fault proofs are live and permissionless; but also for dapps, fast bridges, infra etc. Dappnode is well placed to pull it off. I believe the verkle/statelessness upgrade will be key - hope to see further work on that in the future.

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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I’m so excited to see dappnode on this.

I’m a delegate with enough voting power to approve this mission proposal.

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Hi @Dr.Suga! Wanted to make sure you were aware of the Optimism Season 4 Pitching Sessions to help find the 4 delegate approvals you’ll need by this Wednesday at 19:00 GMT for your proposal to move to a vote.

These sessions are happening in Discord on Monday, 26.06 2pm ET / 6pm GMT / 8pm CET and Tuesday, 27.06 11am ET / 3pm GMT / 5pm CET.

You can sign-up here!

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I am one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, and a Optimism Badgeholder. I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

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Thank you, @mastermojo, @Gonna.eth, @polynya, for your endorsement! We appreciate your support enormously. With the impending deadline, we would like to know if we could ask for your support in helping locate a fourth delegate to endorse this proposal? Thank you again!

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Hey @Dr.Suga I got you.

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

Can you guys also go into a bit more detail on what UI/UX improvements you would like to make and see? What exactly consistutes a node UI for you in regards to optimism? I did not really get that when reading the proposal.

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Thank you, @lefterisjp! UI/UX improvement details to follow.

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Hey there Lefteris! :wave:
Thanks for reading our proposal and asking the right questions! <3
The basis of our proposal is to create a UI that provides the right UX for the different typologies of Optimism users to be able to deploy whatever parts of the OP stack they need/want.

I’ll go onto 2 lines of thought now:

  1. Short term - first order consequences: We will replicate the process that brought us to build Open Source tools that improve the UX of running nodes and validators like:

Optimism is close to having different use cases too, and nodes are about to become more modular - from a validator node, a fraud/fault prover, a sequencer, a bridge validator… and we want to make the UX of these as easy as point-and-click, similar to the examples above (see that not all examples are UI, as with the Keymanager API).

  1. Longer term - second and third order consequences: Why do we even need UIs or thinking about Optimism nodes in terms of UX? Decentralization is a continuum within which its desirable properties emerge. A system can be Byzantine Fault Tolerant, but if there is only one node, chances are it is strictly worse than a centralized counterpart because of the tradeoffs we took when making it BFT. At the same time, we get some benefits once we start having some nodes, in the same city (high availability, yay!), but we are still not resilient against regulatory attacks or city-wide blackouts - for this properties to emerge we need nodes in several geopolitical locations, etc. And we could find many other emerging properties as the node set increases in diversity. So, how does this proposal relate to it? If we simplify, Optimism’s decentralization depends on how many people run nodes. Simplifying again, how many people run nodes depends on how many people are incentivised to do it (not necessarily economic incentives) times the % of those who can run them. Can is a big one again, but we intend to reduce friction on the process so not only technically-able people can do it, and to make it simpler even for technical people so the time invested will be less, and the incentive needed will be less too. Overall, this increases the potential amount of nodes being run, in the different modalities that the OP stack will allow.

Thanks a bunch! For those reading and wanting to ask some questions feel free to do like Lefteris or if you prefer syncronously, I’ll be participating in the quick pitching session today at 5pm CET!

(sorry for the weird formatting of some links above, it only lets me post 2 links and had to break the others so you can still reconstruct them)

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EDIT: Thanks! Post has gone through!

Hey @lavande , I’ve treid to reply to @lefterisjp but the message got automoderated (might be because it included external links?) - could you please have a look and if it doesn’t say anything against the rules (i don’t think so!) accept it for publishing? Would really help me if I don’t have to re-write it :sweat_smile:

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I represent KyberSwap, an Optimism Protocol Delegate for Season 4 with sufficient voting power, and we believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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This proposal is now [FINAL]. This post thread includes the proposal, a video pitch, 5 delegate endorsements, a delegate comment requesting more details on proposed UI/UX improvements, and a response with those details by Lanski, COO of Dappnode.

Thank you.

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Will be voting in favor, UI/UX improvement is crucial for decentralization and excited to see the change outlined by Lanski above.

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Súper cool that this proposal it’s going trough. Happy to see Dappnode helping with the decentralization of optimism

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For some of us in the back: do you believe that the UI/UX is going to be substantially different from what’s been built before for other contexts, and in what way? (understand it may be hard to project out from here pre-design)

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Hey @jackanorak - Thanks for your question!

I thought it would be better to put my answer in video so I can show you what’s similar to what we have been doing with the StakersUI and what would be different and how it would look like with the OP infrastructure:

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great stuff, thank you for taking the time to walk through it. makes a lot more sense now.

I see that the critical milestone essentially amounts to deployment with one meaningful improvement. How do you intend to gather user feedback for something like this (ie how do we know that it’s actually good UX), and how can we see as Governance that the 50k OP is well spent and translates to real accessibility?

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Hey Jack!
I like to start thoughts around UX with the framework that the perfect UX does not exist, because the perfect products don’t exist, nor the perfect backends, nor the perfect users.
What we CAN do is to do something that serves the purpose and makes the Experience of the User :wink: easier and helps the product achieve its goals.
In the proposal we do mention user research and surveys and feedback integration, so I’m going to focus on the real accessibility:
The main goal is that you should be able to run a great part of the stack (hopefully all - but there’s too much uncertainty as of now, especially on the sequencer side) without command line. Only using UI. This expands your pool of infrastructure runners dramatically and reduces the technical barriers of entry, hence increases accessibility.
It is not in the original proposal but I would be very much in favor of proving better accessibility by comparing the number of steps a user needs to do to deploy a node + another piece of the stack and configure them both on a binaries vs docker vs dappnode basis.

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Thanks - makes a ton of sense.

I’m not entirely up on what sorts of constraints people have in deploying OP nodes. When you mean future-proofing (and when you mean ‘too much uncertainty’), is the implication that people are unable to do most things with nodea at the moment – that is, users will not see full functionality at this time?

Put more simply, what can we do with nodes now, and what can we not yet do (regardless of whether on command line) but will eventually be able to do?

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