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SelfKey is a self-sovereign identity system that is based on the blockchain and can provide control and management of digital identities to users. Additionally, users can use SelfKey to securely manage a crypto portfolio and apply for financial services in the marketplace.
My Role
My Role
Trough the year and a half working on this project I served as the Lead Product Designer, while also fulfilling a project management role for 2 months.
In doing so, I have managed not only to shape the entire design process that the company was lacking but also to contribute intro creating a good remote company culture.
Toolbox
Toolbox
Balsamiq, Sketch, InVision, GitHub, Miro
Timeframe
Timeframe
Aug 2018 - Jul 2020
Design Challenge
Design Challenge
When I joined the company I took over a product that was just out of beta, with a UI design initiated the year before, by a designer who left the company months before I joined, with testing poorly done and only over wireframes and big usability issues.
I needed not only to start testing the actual product and improve it based on users feedback but to also make the life of our developers easier and create a standardize UI that can be replicated throughout while following the standard best practices.
At the same I was faced with the limitations of the technology itself, designing for blockchain comes with its own set of impediments.
Team Challenge
Team Challenge
Unique to this project and company was the need for the development and product teams to communicate better and be more structured. We needed to set up a good iterative process that would sustain our product development moving forward. We also needed to learn how to communicate better among ourselves and with the rest of the company.
Coming with an Agile background I started working with the development teams to set up more meaningful calls, to discuss real problems not only "fancy" updates, create a comprehensible Scrum board, start estimating our work and have a process in place for developing new work as well as for releasing new updates.
Two months later our velocity and internal communication increased tremendously. We were ready to face new challenges and hit points on our roadmap.
Design Audit
Design Audit
As a starting point, after analysing all the work done before, I created the first Design Audit. I was looking to get a glimpse on where we stood with our product and with our image as a company.
User Testing and User Feedback
User Testing and User Feedback
Analytics and Quantitative Surveys
Analytics and Quantitative Surveys
To be able to make decisions based on data we started tracking both website and product analytics, using GA, HotJar and later Yandex Metrika for the website and Matomo for the SelfKey Wallet. We set up goals for every new feature that we launch and we analyze the data every week alongside the marketing and product teams.
Also we now periodically run surveys, to get a better understanding of how our user base is changing, how they are using the product, what feature should we focus next and at the same time to pre-qualify users for the user testing sessions.
Usability Testing and User Interviews
Usability Testing and User Interviews
As we moved from only testing small features with the help of wireframes to testing on high fidelity prototypes and every 6 months with the actual product we faced new challenges. Our team is remote and our product uses ERC-20 tokens (crypto coins) so to test the actual product means to use one of our test wallets, which holds enough funds for the testing session. We manage to do so by using Zoom's feature of allowing remote control of the device during a call.
As this doesn't emulate user's conditions 100% we also conduct user interviews to understand what problems they are currently facing and what their future needs might be.
A few key findings and problems that have popped up during our interviews and testing
UX Audit session
90% skipped the upload documents part when creating a profile
From the accessibility test resulted that the text is hard to understand at first read and also the legibility was low
Too many steps when creating a profile, people were just skipping to the end
Even for avid users it was hard to find how to add new tokens to their dashboard
Corporate Wallet session
Users were surprised to see a crypto style dashboard, with no area related to identity
The naming of items and actions should be changed to match the business norm
Creating a company ID is not straightforward, users are trying to change the wallet first
Confusing when trying to access marketplace services under a corporate profile
Other sessions
They would rather copy their Public Key than download the Keystore file (which will be an alternative way to a password)
Without pointing it people don't associate Selfkey ID with creating/seeing their profile
Too much redundant information displayed in the marketplace dashboard and weak CTA
Wireframing
Wireframing
While the wireframes were quite advanced when I joined and well linked together they were obsolete compared to the actual product screens. So in time, as soon as I was working on one of the sections, I made sure I updated the correspondent wireframes as well.
Now every new feature or idea is built as a wireframe first, as this allows both developers and designers to shape it up. Depending on the impact it will either get an initial testing in this form or will be advanced to a high fidelity mockup.
Prototyping
Prototyping
The initial step when I took over the project was to create a UI Style Guide that would ease development work on the interface and standardize all the existing screens. When this process was over I started working on the updates needed to improve the product usability and accessibility, based on the findings during the initial user interviews.
Present-day the prototypes are done in Sketch and shared with the rest of the team using InVision.
Style Guide
Style Guide
While work progressed I created a style guide to be used by the entire wallet, that will allow our dev team to prototype faster. The components were built over Material UI, using Storybook for developing UI components for React.
Design Thinking Workshop
Design Thinking Workshop
As I am always looking on getting more people involved in the design process I took advantage of one of our annual gatherings to run an in house design thinking workshop.
I chose a light decision jam as a format for a quick 2 hours workshop, focusing on generating ideas to increase user acquisition and retention.
Bellow, you can see all the ideas that we had, nicely organised with card sorting technique, using Miro.
Ongoing improvements
Ongoing improvements
Desk Research
A key point in the blockchain industry is always being up to date with the latest trends in the industry and what competitors are doing. The user's mental models aren't yet formed and the specific technology is hard to understand for the general user.
Iteration Process
We try to build as much as possible on the user and market feedback. We have switched from Agile to the more fast-paced Shape Up methodology, which allows us to test new features every 6 weeks. Fail fast to learn fast.
Defining better KPIs and a product wide action plan
Defining better KPIs and a product wide action plan
We take every opportunity to improve our product based on the data that we have. That's why it's important how we think of that data, setting the correct KPIs to track, for both product and marketing, so to take action further on.
Because we wanted to increase conversions and expand our user base, I created a so-called Engagement Masterplan and redefined what we are tracking, and what activities we should be doing for the next 3 months. Here's a glimpse of how the masterplan looks like:
New opportunities
New opportunities
The deeper we got into the iteration process, I started creating new artefacts based on the latest user interviews, that led to the identification of new opportunities and provided better support for product decision. I created journey maps, empathy maps and feature flowcharts as part of this process.
Contact
Contact
Want to get in touch? Drop me a line at oana.mangiurea@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter @caelea.
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