Breaking down Bitcoin: A UX Design Case Study – Ng Qun Zhao
This is a documentation of a UX redesign of Coinhako, a cryptocurrency trading and digital wallet app.
For my capstone project at General Assembly, I worked in a team of 3 UX designers to deliver a redesign of Coinhako’s app platform over a period of two weeks.
As the team leader and lead UX Researcher, my team and I set out to craft a new and improved user experience and interface, and achieve the company’s business goals of higher user engagement.
To start off, we sat down with Gerry Eng, co-founder and CTO of Coinhako to learn more about the company and the objectives of the project.
The project objectives laid out were, in order of priority:
- Trade Process (Buy/Sell/Trade of cryptocurrency)
- Verification Process (Level 1 and Level 2)
- Rewards Section
In order to get a better understanding of Coinhako and its services, we began our research by conducting a competitive analysis of 3 of its closest rivals, Binance SG, Coinbase and Gemini.
Key findings:
- Coinhako is lacking in terms of onboarding and ease of verification.
- Security-wise, Coinhako is one of the most secure due to its many layers of identity confirmation.
Moving on, we looked at Coinhako’s user base. What age range did they fall into? What motivations and frustrations do they have? Does their financial status play a significant role in using cryptocurrency?
With these questions in mind, we created two personas to anchor our focus based on feedback from Coinhako, and their existing user base.
After talking with the Coinhako team, we gained a lot of valuable insights as to what the app was doing right, and what could be improved. However, we decided to dig deeper, and conducted a total of 13 user interviews, 5 of whom fit into Persona 1(50+years), and 8 of whom fit into Persona 2 (26–32 years).
Key findings:
- Potential users are skeptical about the topic of cryptocurrency.
- Persona 1 (50+ years) have financial investments, but not in cryptocurrency.
- Persona 2 (26–32 years) are keen to build their financial portfolio, but lack the monetary capability to do so.
Next, we conducted a heuristic evaluation of Coinhako’s current app, using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics as a guide for our evaluation. Here’s some of the major negative findings:
- Coinhako’s current app, while functional, suffers from over-reliance on technical jargon, and assumption that the user is well-versed in the financial and crypto sector.
- The app’s verification process is lengthy and inflexible, which causes significant user drop-off.
- There is a disparity of app experience between iOS and Android platforms, as well as one major glaring fault: The Account Settings page is easily located on iOS, but is non-existent on its Android platform.
In order to highlight the different touch-points in which the app affects the user’s experience, we came up with a detailed customer journey map.
To summarise, the problems we identified were:
- Perceptions: Volatile for investment, difficult to learn, skepticism surrounding the subject of cryptocurrency.
- Getting Users on Board: Users are put off by long wait time, different levels of verification, and confusing terminology.
- Core Functionality: While the trade process is functional, new users are put off by unintuitive interface and lack of information makes it difficult to pick up.
By introducing an onboarding process, improving the information display and layout, streamlining verification and introducing alternative methods, and optimising the app UI, user engagement and satisfaction while using the app will improve.
In bullet points (for easier reading):
- Onboarding process before sign-up page
- Improve information display to help users better understand cryptocurrency
- Streamline verification by re-prioritizing requirements and concisely explaining K.Y.C. (Know Your Customer)
- Introduction of easier sign up process via Singpass (SG users only).
- Optimise trading interface to make trading less ambiguous for new users.
We went through three rounds of wireframing, prototyping and usability testing before coming up with the final prototype.
The focus of the redesign were on the Sign Up process, Verification process and Trade process (Withdraw/Deposit, Swap/Buy/Sell).
Plus (+):
- New users understood trade processes fairly easily
- Singpass function received very well
Deltas (-):
- Verification via Singpass might have been too painless, feeling of security was not apparent
- Users expected next step after Level 2 verification to be automatic, did not look for a button to tap
- Calculation of fees and amounts could be more clearly represented
- Would like an option to skip onboarding (no skip button)
What was implemented in the final design:
- Introduction of onboarding process before sign up and on the homepage
- Streamlining of verification process to 2 levels with freedom to complete steps in any preferred order.
- Introduction of SingPass as alternate sign up and verification method
- Trade (Buy/Sell/Swap, Withdraw/Deposit) menu revamped for easier interaction
With the completion of the prototype, my team and I presented our project to the Coinhako team, which (thankfully) was received warmly, and revisions to the app based off our proposal are set to be implemented in the coming updates.
While we would consider the project a success, the future steps are just as, if not more important than what we have laid out.
Some areas of improvement still to be covered are:
- Content/information improvements
- Comparison table/feature between two or more cryptocurrencies
- Educating new users on cryptocurrency basics
- Deposit function can be further fleshed out/moved in-app
- Cross-platform research (how users utilise web and mobile and how we can optimise their experience)
- Marketing redesign to existing non-active users to test and measure results
Published at Mon, 07 Oct 2019 03:57:44 +0000
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