Case Study: New Finance
I designed New Finance for Newcoin foundation, a layer 1 protocol for creative coordination and value distribution.
They wanted to build a staking platform for creators as part of their ecosystem with a similar branding to their social media app NewLife.
I lead the process from UX research to designing & testing the final prototype in collaboration with their product team.
UX Process
I started by mapping out the market position of Newcoin, studying their ecosystem and created a SWOT analysis and an overview of competitors.
I created a Lean Survey canvas which helped me to phrase questions for user interviews. As when we worked on this there was no equivalent product in the market we looked especially at existing creator focused products across DeFi, NFTs, web 3 social and metaverses.
USER QUESTIONS
1. What is your experience with NFT’s?
2. What is your experience with Crypto?
3. Have you used DeFi/ Staking platforms?
4. Which DeFi projects/ NFT platforms do you use & what do you usually do in these platforms?
5. What do you like about the projects you have interacted with?
6. What do you dislike about them?
7. Why do you use these projects?
8. What’s the hardest/ most frustrating part about using these projects?
9. Could you describe your ideal project/ experience?
10. If you had a magic wand, what would you change?
11. What data interests you when interacting with a project? What data do you usually look at? Which charts are the most insightful/ helpful to you?
12. Do you understand the different data/analytics that is offered to you in the projects you use?
13. The last three times you used the platform which data points influenced your economic decisions?
14. Do you feel like the data is displayed in a way that is understandable?
15. Have you ever bought an NFT?
16. What do you think about getting rewards in DeFi projects for being an early or very active user?
17. Which different Crypto wallets do you know?
18. Which wallets do you use?
19. How do you decide what to invest in? What data do you use? What information do you need? Do you use any tools?
The next step was to conceptualise the UX strategy as well as a Lean UX Canvas, I proceeded by conducting user interviews with Newlife, DeFi & NFT users. I reviewed the data gathered from interviewing 14 people and conducting a user survey via Google forms with around 70 participants and created an Affinity Diagram & overview of insights.
After discussing the results with the product team I made an empathy map, user persona, user stories and a user journey map.
The next step of my user research was to find “jobs to be done” by the product.
The final steps of my user research where finding a problem & hypothesis statement, summarising features for the MVP and mapping out the user flow.
Problem statement:
In web 2 creators don’t own their audience, big companies do. Creators need a way to own their content & audience.
Hypothesis statement:
Web 3 will give creators ownership of their platform and the tools to interact with their audience in new financial ways.
We believe that building a staking platform that allows patrons to invest into creators will allow users to be financially rewarded for their participation in the ecosystem and empower creators. We know we are right/wrong by seeing how many quality creators are able to grow their brands on our platform and the TVL.
UI Process
Newcoin wanted New Finances design to resemble the branding of their social media app New Life, so I created a moodboard of the app with images I found across their websites.
They gave me font styles, colors & icons from their existing design system. I started with concept sketches & Mid Fi’s, before creating a V1 interactive prototype. I tested it with existing New Life users via remote calls and members of the Newcoin team. After receiving feedback I refined further and made a V2 interactive prototype.
