Examining Usability Issues in Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrency Wallets

Blockchain has emerged as a revolutionary technology that has been envisioned to disrupt several industries, including financial domains with its decentralised and highly-secure design. However, since the beginning of its evolution, it has been highly criticised for the difficulties in dealing with it properly. As cryptocurrency is the most successful application of blockchain, we aim to identify the potential obstacles and usability issues, which might hinder its wide-scale adoption, of five applications (i.e., wallets) that are used to manage cryptocurrencies. Applying the analytical cognitive walk-through usability inspection method, we investigate common usability issues with desktop and mobile-based wallets. Our results reveal that both wallets lack good usability in performing the fundamental tasks which can be improved significantly. We summarise our findings and point out the aspects where the issues exists so that improving those areas can result in better user experience and adoption.