Network conditions, support and UX

I understand at a high level the technical concepts of the blockchain and how BISQ is designed to enable P2P trading. Currently I am in a trade that is taking over 48h for blockchain verification, but I am not panicking because I understand that the BTC blockchain network is congested.

My concern is that my trading partner may not. On a most human level, I trust BISQ because it just “feels right” and my first two trades ran smoothly. I also understand for it to grow from strength to strength, it needs dedicated, non technical traders who are most likely to enter the market at times of volatility and experience something like the current situation.

For this reason, can I suggest the following User Experience improvements:

  1. Some form of alert banner under “Support” to notify all users of congestion, saying something like “Expect more than 48h for blockchain verification” and live reporting on congestion.

  2. If a support ticket is opened, enabling of two way communication between the trading partners so that we can reassure each other regarding our commitment and intent.

I feel that users of BISQ need to be aware that the performance of a decentralised exchange is at the mercy of external factors. If this is not obvious upfront, the experience could be negative, resulting in a loss of members to the trading community.

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Yes. It is always best to keep traders as informed as possible.
Doing this in the app might require application updates and certain dev work. Traders might not be willing to update the app during a trade either, so it might be just best to pin the topic on this forum.

Do you think we should pin this topic on the forum during Bitcoin congestion Unconfirmed deposit Tx: Don't panic ?

As a short term solution, yes. The post you link to did help me calm my nerves, but I also only arrived at it after a support ticket was opened by my trading partner, which firstly made me feel like I had somehow made a stupid mistake and that something had gone wrong.

My suggestions above are more of a long term strategic nature. Positive user experience will be essential for growth. My personal opinion is that the application needs to divorce back-end from front-end and publish an API. This will allow front-end development to safely and rapidly take it’s own development path, or even independent paths.

Yes, API is in the development. It is much awaited feature for Bisq.

I will pin the topic now :slight_smile:

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@citkane Thanks for your feedback. Luckily we have a dedicated UX specialist now who will work on many improvements. The current delays should be fixed by better and faster adopting fee estimations, so hopefully we don’t see such issues again soon!

APIs are already available. @mrosseel is the guy who implemented that. Get in touch if you want to use it.

With separating frontend you probably mean a browser based approach. Pure P2P is not possible in a webbased model. Using the html engine only as UI like OpenBazaar does might be more attractive to webdevelopers but has its own challenges with packaging the local server with it and get all cross platform. Code wise the UI and the rest is pretty much separated and it is just so much faster and easier to develop if you are in one language and platform. I have never regretted to choose Java and JavaFX.

Good arguments all Manfred. I am glad you have dedicated UX person. So important and easily overlooked. I will keep my eye on the API and do some tinkering.

My platform of choice is Electron, which allows you to package a standalone cross platform app using html and JavaScript for front end. Still does not solve cross platform with mobile, but does offer a web language based code base which can be interpreted to mobile on other platforms.