Overview
HouseToken is an ambitious start-up that has a unique vision. It wanted to build a platform that allows users to invest in digital real estate using blockchain technology, make trading cryptocurrencies easy and give the rewards back to the user.
My role
I was the product designer right from the very start and had to lead the design and product vision from the get-go.
The challenge
Investing in real estate and understanding cryptocurrencies is complicated. The goal was to make a platform accessible to all and easy to start the HouseToken journey.
Discovery
Understand and Research.
It’s important to note that the goal of product discovery is not necessary to ship features. Rather, it’s to promote an environment of learning that will help you improve your product incrementally and consistently. Discovery is an allocated period of time where you explore the problem space before any design or development takes place. Discoveries look very different from one project to the next in terms of the time it takes, who’s involved, and what the outputs are at the end.
Discovery is a great time to understand about, stakeholders, teams, goals, users, strategy, tasks, success metrics, and risks.
I had to understand the whole process of buying and investing in real estate as well as exchange services. I visited the company investment company London & Oxford to learn how the trade is done. Valuable research was undertaken with the company which helped build personas, competitive research, and use cases. I gained a large client base of real users for research.
I conducted 1:1 interviews with the company’s investors and customer support staff. We quickly gained an understanding of the users: their behaviors, pain points, questions, and concerns. I categorized the results of user interviews by pain points of using current investment platforms. After categorizing the pain points I prioritized them using a 2x2 matrix which led me to concentrate on particular areas.
I created some user personas and set up some user focus groups to discuss how they would use such an application for investments. A major insight was how users were put off investing with the connection of a cryptocurrency. So we decided to separate the mobile apps and desktop site. The app would be solely for driving investment and transferring funds with a complete desktop application. For the test case, I will concentrate on the process of the mobile application. User journeys and stories were all collaborated on across teams.
"Show me the money"
Another important user insight was that over 90% of users wanted to see how much potential returns they would be getting upfront. returns on investment would be a key part of the experience.
Ideate.
Creating user flows helped us test ideas with users and engineering for feasibility. We found out many technical challenges involved with payment and this pushed us towards partnering with stripe to reduce engineering costs. Wireframes designs were produced to get the first round of feedback via some usability testing.
Prototyping.
After exploring Lo-fi mockups I created Hi-fi mockups and a working prototype to test my solution with users. feedback was given on many areas, here are a few examples of improvements I made.
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Most users were confused by the arrangement of navigation and buttons on wallet screen. I re-arranged it and removed some buttons to keep the overall organization simple.
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Every user had a problem buying and selling tokens. I changed the exchange flow to buying and selling flow so the feel of the app is closer to a typical shopping app.
Implement
The next stages called for close collaboration with our developers to standardize and implement code snippets for existing elements and layout guidelines for the creation of new patterns. A design system was built and shared via zeplin to ensure ease of hand-off. A first release candidate was built. The process of evaluating now begins.
Take aways
Financial apps are seemingly at a disadvantage because of regulatory and legal requirements. Until recently, this has led to poorly designed, bland, and sometimes incoherent apps, features, and processes. However, in UX, these limitations can be a blessing and provide a structure for designers to work with. With a small amount of extra effort and thought, creating clear and simple experiences is actually made easier when requirements like regulations need to be followed.
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This is where the new-age fintech products have an opportunity to score. By identifying their users and tailoring the experience towards a niche, the legal restrictions and requirements are a challenge to design for rather than a problem to circumvent. Those requirements also provide an opportunity to educate within the product in a fun and informative way.
