Create a subscriptions case study

[Bosch-0]

Offers (BOLT 12) will enable the ability for users to have subscriptions with various services. LNURL is also working on this (lnurl/luds#77) feature.

As designers, we can think ahead on the UI/UX level so when BOLT12 / LNURL subscriptions are widely adopted on the technical level, we can all the usability quirks worked out ready to go. A case study would be a good way to go about this.

There are several ways in which this could be achieved based on my current understanding:

• The user scans an offer generated by a merchant, an invoice is sent automatically to the user every pay period.
• Merchant scans user generated offer, invoice is then sent to the user every paid period.

Having this automated without manual payment of an invoice each pay period isn't something possible yet but may be something to explore as part of the case study anyways.

[GBKS]

Just for fun, some mock-ups from July 2020, goofing around with subscription ideas @johnsBeharry and I discussed.

[john-zaprite]

This is something I'm very much interested in, and currently planning to integrate into Zaprite. I'll be working on this shortly.

[Bosch-0]

Zaprite looks great! Hadn't come across you guys before. Will you be doing this with offers? I see you use Core Lightning so I'd assume so

[john-zaprite]

To be honest, the marketing site needs a revamp as some of the info may not be accurate anymore.
Initially we planned on using Cyphernode, which has Core Lightning included, so that's why the logo is there. But as of now we don't have our final tech stack decided.
My plan is to use simple email reminders to send Zaprite users to a standard Zaprite hosted invoice page where they pay for their upcoming month/year. In this case, we can use anything really, as it will just hit our node as a regular payment and we'll do our user account logic on the backend.
I still need to do more reading on Offers to see where we might find benefits.

[ConorOkus]

Following up on Discord chat where I highlighted upcoming changes to BOLT 12 for supporting subscriptions - lightning/bolts#1240

Copied from Discord:

"Historically protocol proposals have not had much input from a design perspective and I think it can be extremely valuable in that it gives us a chance to catch usability dead-ends early and suggest some good wallet-level conventions.
This particular BOLT 12 upgrade is a shift from the "simple payment" model to a more user-stateful and protocol-complex interaction. So some notable design points to consider are:

• Push vs. Pull: A push model is used (merchant expects payments from users without pulling funds), ensuring better user authorization
• Stateful Wallets: Recurrence introduces the need for wallets to track state and perform scheduled actions, a step up in complexity
• Cancellation Message Proposal: Suggests sending an onion message when a user cancels a periodic payment, to differentiate between cancellations and failures.

Would be great for us to prototype subscription UX early and and agree on some must-have UX principles for recurrence."