Optimistic UI

[wanderingstan]

Sid from Toshi giave good talk at ETH Denver, and pointed out common UX mistake in Dapps of freezing UI while waiting for blockchain transactions. We're guilty of that.

I propose that, after a transaction is confirmed by the wallet (el.g. metamask), we put a status area at top of page showing progress of transaction. The user would then be free to navigate around the rest of the site.

[wanderingstan]

@micahalcorn - In your designs around Identity, has this issue been addressed already?

Short version: It can take up to a few minutes (in worst case) for transactions to be approved, so we should let people continue using the site while we wait.

E.g. tdameritrade.com has a cool thing where they just add a sticky footer to the page with progress of your trade until it gets made.

[micahalcorn]

I don't believe that this has shown up in the designs yet. If there is going to be a similar delay on the profile publication (not just listing purchases), then Matt and Aure should probably be reminded. I'll keep it in mind.

[wanderingstan]

@matthewliu - Looping you on this.

[matthewliu]

I’m on it.

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[micahalcorn]

After talking with Stan today, I've come to a few conclusions on this. Though we don't want to block the UI for up to several minutes while waiting for some number of blockchain confirmations, we also can't expect the user to do much else while waiting for their transaction to officially be complete or the results to appear in the UI. Upon receiving a transaction receipt, we should immediately free up the UI and, in an ideal world, render the expected results of their transaction - á la latency compensation - but with visually distinct UI, such as less-opaque elements or something. We can also provide a more informative message indicating that "it takes a while" and/or automatically open the transaction confirmations dropdown. As for the degree to which we require understanding of the nature of blockchain, the end user should not have to understand why it takes several minutes, but the DApp developer should be familiar with blockchain confirmations. She can choose to supply a confirmation callback function or use a whenFinished promise that we may [re]provide in the future as a less-informative convenience.