When Mobile Carousels make sense

With Contextual you can create carousels without coding. But readers will know that I’m not a huge fan. I AM a huge fan of JTBD (Jobs-to-be-done) and to me carousels seemed to stand between the user and their job.

So thats not a good thing.

Elsewhere in a banking app, I was positive on using carousels for feature discovery. In this post, we look at how the world of cryptocurrencies is trying to become easier to consumers. Specifically why carousels help explain a new concept from a crypto project called Argent.

In the world of crypto, post-Mount-Gox, the familiar catch cry is “not your keys, not your coins”.

That won’t make sense to most people and hence why crypto is largely for either for geeks or the very committed. Like all movements, you have wearly adopters and eventually the movement “crosses the chasm”. The diagram below was made famous by Geoffrey Moore in his book of the same name.

Briefly:

1) when we store our cash in a bank account, the bank is the custodian – they hold the keys.

2) in the crypto world:

  1. you can choose to have an exchange (CEX) or some other entity (paypal, square, soon Robinhood) hold your keys but you need to make a leap of faith to trust them like a bank.
  2. you take responsibility for your own coin and tokens via “wallets” (paper, cold and hot).

If you are confused, no problem, this is because we are still on the RED left hand-side of the curve below.

Argent want to help change that.

Credit: slidemodel.com


Argent have a radical and new way of avoiding the custodial role by adding “Guardians” – but for a new user to understand: it does need education, and it does need people to collaborate. I’ll let them explain.

This is a complex new area for consumers and this use of Carousels by Argent is not interferring with the JTBD, but actually bootstrapping the consumers understanding. I think they’ve done a good job. They were probably tempted to use a video explainer, but this keeps the user inApp, contextual and ready to proceed.

 

BTW, they did have an introductory Carousel which I was less excited about. I’ve included it here for completeness.

    More Posts

    Contextual & StreetHawk Inc 2023.