Scenarios
The Scenarios are to help designers and developers with situations they are likely to encounter when creating mobile apps and services for IPFS.
Each scenario shows an example of a how mobile apps and services using IPFS could work. Each scenario also has a prototypical user in mind. These persona-users are archetypes that are composites of users discovered in the research. The purpose of these is establishing design and feature sets focused on user needs.
An illustrated user flow with screens show how an app or service could express the scenario. The interaction and component design of these flows is not intended to be prescriptive. It is to help show how apps on IPFS could or should be designed. This is then followed by design considerations which summarise each scenario. Likewise, these are helpful hints to keep in mind when designing and building.
In these examples of mobile interfaces, there is an abstracted operating system. It is not iOS or Android, but an amalgam. This is to avoid bias in design for either operating system and develop patterns that work for both. App X and App Y in the Scenarios are fictitious and serve as an example to show how the interactions would work.
When a user gets started with an app or service using IPFS, they shouldn't have to need to know they are. They should know IPFS works and provides a better way of handling data.
Discovering and installing a new app is already a barrier to entry. A bigger barrier is managing another application to message or transfer data. This is especially the case when the user usually does it another way.
One of the largest issues with transferring files and messages is discoverability and security. A large part of security is the ability to control who and what can access files.
Unlike cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive, IPFS doesn't need centralised Internet access to transfer files. The files can be transferred direct device to device. This is because they don't need to first go through the Internet to a central server.
Messaging requires a network of users. Getting started messaging with other people requires knowing people connected to one another. Second to this is discovering and safely connecting to them.