Augur, the open-source, decentralized, peer-to-peer prediction market platform built on Ethereum today announced it has partnered with IDEO. IDEO will be working closely with Augur’s front-end development team to enhance Augur’s user experience over the next two months.
IDEO is a global design company, taking a human-centered approach to innovation by focusing on ‘design thinking’ to transform products, services, and business strategies. Augur will be working with IDEO’s CoLab team, which also helped design Linq, NASDAQ’s private markets blockchain trading platform.
IDEO’s CoLab team wants to use its work with Augur to explore design principles for decentralized applications. User interface design is notoriously difficult for cryptographic and blockchain applications, and both teams said they believe that intuitive, easy-to-use user interfaces will be a key driver for mainstream adoption.
Also announced, Augur’s smart contract audits are ready to begin. Over the past month, two security-critical parts of Augur’s middleware (keythereum and ethrpc) have been audited, and last week SmartContractSolutions began its audit of the Serpent compiler, which compiles the Augur smart contracts so they can be uploaded to the blockchain.