Bincentive - a platform that helps traditional investors entering the crypto world
Role
I decided to join Bincentive, a crypto asset management startup, as a UI/UX designer in August 2018. I worked on all UI and UX designs, concepts, onboarding and the design system. With an MVP of the product successfully launched, I further developed the product inline with user feedback, behaviour analysis and designed both the iOS and Android apps from scratch.
Timeline
After the Beta release, Bincentive launched a full-featured website after 6 months. In 2019, we added more premium features and had several pivots in response to the market.
Credits
The PMs and engineering team at Bincentive for building this product.
THE CHALLENGE
Reducing the cognitive load
of using blockchain
The aggressive growth rate in the cryptocurrency industry has created a perplexing investment environment that continues to grow in complexity.
Bincentive provides a subscription model for trading "strategies" operated by professional traders. For security reasons, the company tries to keep most of its services decentralized. As a consequence, users have to sync their API keys with the platform. In process, there is also a staking/margin system that requires users to purchase a specific token.
In addition to the existing "high entry barrier" in blockchain, all these concepts and features make the product rather complex without detailed documentations. Generally users are not familiar with most of the required steps in the investing process.
Early onboarding flow
THE GOAL
Simple, clear and data-focused
We were tasked to create an easy and efficient crypto investing experience for both crypto users and none-crypto users. The beta version we built in an intense timeframe no longer fit the company’s need of showing new products, also its user experience could be improved in many ways.
It should empower the user to:
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Easily setup required settings and accounts
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Efficiently find and compare strategy performances
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Subscribe to a strategy with clear understanding of its features
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Check their current investment performances
THE DISCOVERY
Listening to, and observing users
Our end users are mostly male, aged 25-35, with at least minimal experience in cryptocurrency or traditional investments. From interviewing some early adopters and talking to our product managers, I improved our primary persona based on their background, needs, and pain-points. I also conducted several task analysis to better understand what problems they were facing using our platform at that moment.
Understanding the usage contexts of the website helped me develop a clear vision of our user expectations.
Reframing the problems
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The onboarding process should be as simple as possible, the experience was too long and confusing.
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The user should be able to find strategies that suit his needs by an organized presentation. The carousel is nice but it’s hard to compare the performance of different products.
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The overview page should display enough information required for decision making, like trading records.
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The subscribe process should seamlessly combine the key importing and token staking with sufficient explanations on why they are required. And it will be clearer if not been put in such a small space.
Home page v1.5
THE FRAMEWORK
Structuring the experience
Since many of the terms might not sound familiar to users, I conducted a card sorting session with people in our office who have less prior knowledge with cryptocurrency. The idea was to see how they grouped contents together and whether they were confused about some specific words. This approach really helped me with structuring the architecture for the scaled website.
Unlike the original dashboard that included almost everything, I displayed our main products in individual pages, and made the personal portfolio page stand out from the rest on a dedicated page. The extra functions that are occasionally used by registered users were moved under the account section.
Simplifying the onboarding flow
One of the main problems users were facing was the complex “Getting Started” process. The 5-step journey included every task a user must complete between sign up and their first subscription. Thanks to the technical team, we were able to remove one of the steps from it at that point, but that was just not enough. It was a good intention to guide users through all the steps, but we didn’t realize it could cause stress and confusion when they were given too much to do before having been able to get a better grasp of the platform.
We decided to reduce the account creation to 3 steps and show the subscription process in a popover with illustrations of each scenario, letting users quickly understand what they can expect next.
After discussions with PMs about my ideas with sketches on paper, I illustrated wireframes and made clickable prototypes for testing and identifying any potential flaws in the flows.
THE REDESIGN
Returning control back to the users
A clean and structured interface which enables users to easily focus on what is important, was what I was determined to create. An investor should be able to immediately find what they are looking for without limitations or distractions in the way. Also, we should provide just enough support at the right time, enabling users to dig deep only if they think they need to.
The iterations of strategy detail page
The first impression
After a simple sign up, the user is guided to account creation and verification. Each step is displayed in separate pages with a clean design. Each page is task-focused and only has a few input fields, which minimizes the distractions for users and increases the willingness to complete them.
Key metrics that an investor needs and wants to see
The product page shows the strategy performances straight away, giving users the ability to know if there is any good investment opportunity at a glance. We kept the carousel for showcasing our featured strategies and promotional messages since it’s the most visually powerful area on the page.
As I mentioned before, the company now has more strategies to provide. I moved contents below the carousel to more suitable parts of the website, making rooms for more strategies to display. Each strategy is a card component, which responds well to devices and screens of all sizes, showing 3 of the most important metrics a user needs to know for making an investment decision.
With many options and numbers in sight, users might get overwhelmed. I categorized the strategies and allowed users to filter, search and view them as a list for easier comparing and sorting by each metrics.
Search results page
A design with more emphasis
What we’ve learned about the users is that they want to check the performance history of the product before investing. The original detail page wasn’t serving the purpose well. I replaced the slideshow with real-time performance charts and included trading records as supplementary information.
Each content related to each other is housed within a card-like display. Additional information such as how we come up with those numbers and explanation of the technical terms are accessible via little info icons.
Critical to the experience is the intuitive subscribing process. The obvious CTA gives users a clear guide of where to click. It is also accessible no matter how far the users scroll on the mobile, giving them as much convenience as possible.
Communicating crypto investing in a more intuitive way
Knowing the main obstacles of investing in our product are API key importing and staking, the team had quite some in depth discussions on how to reduce the pain for the users in a technically feasible way. Ultimately, we agreed to introduce these steps only after users decided to subscribe to our product.
The first step of the subscribing process is “Import API Key”. The key allows the company to trade for the user without holding his money. If a user has previously imported a usable key, the key will be set as default. A user can import a new key if that’s not the case. Additional tutorial specific to the exchange is accessible through a button click.
In the second and last step, we show the available asset in the exchange account right away for reference. The user enters the investment amount and the stake amount is automatically calculated based on it. The stake is used as a performance fee for the platform. The user who doesn’t have enough staked tokens, will be guided to his “Wallet” for deposit.
After clicking subscribe, a success page shows what and how much the user just invested, also provides an option to check one's portfolio, where one can see the performance and unsubscribe the service at anytime.
THE IMPACT
A good start
The new design received positive feedback and is well accepted by users. The account creation conversion rate increased by 50% during the iterations. But there is always more to improve. The behavioral data indicate that the strategy detail page doesn't have the desired conversion outcome. I knew that there was no quick fix. This issue could be an UX problem, a performance problem or even a trust problem. I planned to conduct more user interviews and testings in the future to better understand the reasons behind it.
THE TAKEAWAY
The earlier we learn from real users, the better
Having great pressure launching products to the market and catch the trends in the crypto community shapes the mindset of the team. At the beginning, we were focusing more on the output than the outcome, sacrificing the quality of the product in many ways.
But, as a startup, the whole company is learning by doing. What I think we could have done better is to do more research before getting down to development. Communicating the value of UX study sometimes isn’t that easy in a profit-focused and technology-led industry.
I’m glad that after a few pivots, the company realized the importance of user testing and analysis. And as I’m writing this article, we are implementing more ux methods into our developing process, enabling the company to build the product with the users’ needs as top priority.
