May 2025: Studio Twentyone Newsletter

May 07, 2025

Enjoy this month’s edition of the design newsletter! Writing this from Bitcoin Park Austin at the Texas Energy and Mining Summit.

- SAHIL

Cleanup: Unchained vaults view

Unchained dropped a sharp homepage redesign, elevating their vault dashboard to new heights. You can now view all your vaults—personal, business, retirement—on a single, streamlined page. No more juggling separate account logins, which is a massive usability boost. The UI is crisp, clean, and intuitive, making navigation a breeze.

The standout? Key View. It consolidates all your keys across accounts into one hub, riffing on the key visuals update we spotlighted a few months ago. Gone are the days of uploading the same key for each vault (personal, IRA, business). It’s now seamless and works exactly as you’d expect.

This redesign shines on the mobile app too, delivering a consistent, user-friendly experience. Big kudos to Unchained for a vault dashboard that’s both practical and beautifully designed.

Shoutout to Unchained for delivering a polished, user-friendly vault dashboard!

Breez: Leveling up spending wallet UX

I’ve been long waiting for a user friendly spending wallet that uses Liquid with Lightning swaps( for interoperability) under the hood, without KYC requirements. In the short term, I believe this stack is the best balance for spending wallet usability.

On one end you have fully self-sovereign self custodial lightning wallets, which are a usability nightmare (speaking from personal experience) and are a total nonstarter for normal people. And on the other end you have fully custodial apps that require KYC, like Cash App. For a couple years now, it seems like there hasn’t been a great middle ground option.

There have been other wallets with a similar model: no KYC, federation at the base layer, and lightning swaps for interoperability (Fedi, Aqua, and others). However, in my experience, all of them had their usability issues. Fedi requires adding a federation manually and staying up to date. Aqua… I don’t even know where to begin here. Not a real option.

This Breez model might just be the one. Where I can recommend my dad download this app, write down or save the encrypted 12 words to iCloud, only use it for pocket money, and move on with his life. It just works. Hope to see more like this!

Don’t RTFM: The Paradox of the active user

Users of products would have a much better experience if they read the f*@#ing manual. But the reality is they never do. How many times have you read the carousel of cards when setting up an app for the first time? Probably never. Therein lies the paradox.

People usually have a goal, and they are super motivated to get it done. By shoving info down their throat all at once, you’re derailing them.

What’s the solution here? In context guides! Progressively disclose how-to information in the form of tooltips or other patterns to guide your user through the product as they are walking through the flow, instead of pulling them away from their goal.

What they say vs What they do

The point of this article is simple: make a distinction between behavioral research and attitudinal research. Both are valuable, but don’t conflate them.

Attitudinal research is basically: what is your user thinking, how they feel, understanding their wants and needs. Things like that.

Behavioral research involves more directly observable results. Usability testing. Click tracking. Things like that. Actions speak louder than words.

A combination of different types of studies is the winning approach.

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Erik: Ecash mint selection

Erik’s been thinking about the ecash user experience for a long time. Probably more than anyone else on the planet. Related to the Breez topic a few sections above, a fundamental challenge with ecash and ecash-like models is selecting the mint (bank that gives you transactable, private IOUs). Since you are fully trusting the IOUs from this bank, it’s an important decision. But that also presents experience issues with onboarding and rotation (say, if the bank shuts down).

Erik suggests a few options here: automatic, manual, and just in time mint selection.

My preference, despite the security tradeoffs, is the automatic selection approach. This is basically what Breez does. Breez selects the best federation for you, in this case the Liquid federation. Personally, I trust this federation more than random ones that have only been around for a few months.

Another idea I wish was touched on more: automatic splitting of balance across mints. Imagine if you could split your ecash across 10 different mints? That both reduces rugpull risk, and if automatically selected, has much less cognitive load than manually selecting (don’t make me think!).

That said, there’ll likely be many different ecash wallets with different target audiences, that pick different tradeoff balances. I appreciate people like Erik thinking deeply about this.

Skyler: Gladstein’s book design & Bitcoin Bond Co

I just had to give Skyler a quick shoutout on the gorgeous book cover design he did for Alex Gladstein.

Just look at the hyperbitcoinization easter egg on the back cover! No one does it better.

Speaking of: another shoutout to Skyler for the branding of Pierre Rochard’s new company: The Bitcoin Bond Company.

Sometimes the best visual identities are those that make you think “hey, I could have done that!”. But think about how many directions Skyler could have taken this? The simplicity was an intentional choice.

As Skyler says: “The wealthcore aesthetic builds trust & bridges the gap between tradfi and bitcoin, enabling The Bitcoin Bond Company to accomplish their goal to acquire $1 trillion of bitcoin for clients over the next 21 years.”

Less is more.

See you next month!

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think on Twitter or Nostr. Feedback is welcome!