Design on Hard Mode: Notes from the Bitcoin Design Guide

The open-source Bitcoin Design Guide just went Lightning-first. Why a Shopify studio is reading a bitcoin manual, and four things worth stealing.

Published on February 15, 2022

The Bitcoin Design Guide went Lightning-first last week, and I’ve been working my way through it since. If you design anything that touches money, whether that is a checkout, a donation form or a fintech, it is the best free design education on the internet right now, whether or not you ever go near bitcoin.

What it is

The Bitcoin Design Guide is an open-source handbook for designing bitcoin products, written by the Bitcoin Design Community. By its own count that is “an open group of over 2,400 product designers, developers, and creatives”. The community was kick-started in the summer of 2020 by Square Crypto, the open-source bitcoin initiative inside Jack Dorsey’s Square, which chose to seed a community of designers with grants rather than hire one designer of its own. In December Square renamed itself Block, and Square Crypto became Spiral.

The first version of the Guide went public on 2 June 2021. Version two landed on 9 February 2022, rebuilt around the Lightning Network and one very specific brief: help people build mobile-first, non-custodial Lightning wallets. Everything is on GitHub, under open licences. To be clear about our part in this: none. I joined the community as a newcomer. Invisible Building is not funded by Spiral or anyone else to do this. I’m here because we’re building a fintech of our own and I wanted to learn from people who’ve already made the mistakes.

The Bitcoin Design Guide introduction page in February 2022, with its map of the guide drawn as a bitcoin-shaped island — The Guide on 9 February 2022, the day version two launched. Archived copy.

Why a Shopify studio is reading a bitcoin manual

Because bitcoin is design on hard mode. There’s no bank to ring, no password reset, nobody who can reverse a payment. Every safety net a normal app gets for free has to be designed in. If you can make that feel safe for someone’s granny, a login form is not going to trouble you.

Four things I’ve underlined so far

The key trade-off, in one line. “If your application is not secure enough, you risk losing the user’s funds. But if it’s not convenient enough, you risk losing the user.” That is every sign-up flow ever built, with higher stakes.

Progressive security. Don’t front-load people with a 12-word recovery phrase before they’ve done anything. Start simple, and introduce stronger protection as the amount at stake grows. The principle is written as “appropriate and progressive security for all types of users”.

No jargon at the door. The Guide tells designers to avoid “technical terms like seed phrase, XPUBs, mnemonics” with new users. After a year building FixIT for families who couldn’t read the labels at all, this one was familiar.

Units are a design decision. “Bitcoin, bits, sats. The format and presentation of bitcoin values are probably amongst the most challenging for application builders.” One bitcoin is 100 million sats. A coffee is ₿0.00005 or 5,000 sats. It is the same money and a completely different feeling.

The seven principles

Self-custody, security, inclusion, interoperability, transparency, privacy, decentralization. The one that travels furthest is inclusion: “Build borderless products without location, language or social barriers.” Swap “bitcoin” for whatever you’re building and most of the list still stands.