At the start of my transition from Art Director to Product Designer, I took a couple of freelance projects that were mainly focused in interface and visual design for apps and their respective websites. Bull Exchange was one of the products being developed by a company that had already brought together a team of back-end engineers and data analysts who had experience in blockchain, and front-end developers to bring the website and app to life. I stepped in to create the interface design and to evolve the branding and create marketing assets.
The Project
Create the app interface and website for a cryptocurrency exchange built with the latest technology and providing the security users need to have the best experience possible. The goal was to democratise investing in cryptocurrencies and offer a simple solution to do it directly on a smartphone.
The crypto market was attracting more and more attention from investors and with the short supply of Brazilian exchanges, there was a great opportunity to create a local product that would satisfy the increased use of digital currencies.
The Challenge
One of my biggest challenges was designing all the user interfaces without a proper design process and neither collaboration with product managers and researchers - but I didn't know it by the time due to lack of experience.
With the whole idea and user journeys already approved by investors and stakeholders, the short deadline to transform the wireframes, sketches and screenshots into a proper interface and navigable prototype was my main concerns.
Besides meeting deadlines, another challenge was keeping the trading charts clean and simplify the pricing lists in a way that users would find using the app easier than operate the web-based exchanges.
The Process
Without a defined process, I did my best to tackle the project and bring close to me all the people that was involved since the start so they can answer all the questions I had. The CEO and the Marketing Director were the ones that have sold the idea and had all the wireframe in his head - they had some documents and slides used for the sales pitch, but we needed more.
The competition benchmark has been done mainly against web platforms as their intention was to transform the same experience to a mobile app, and that was used as point of start. After a couple of brainstorming sessions (how I wish I already knew design sprints by then) we finally decided on user flows and a a wireframe that was enough for the developers to start work while I was getting my hands full designing the website.
After doing some retouch on the brand we decided to change the colour palette to differentiate the product from the usual and I suggested to use less colours, more contrast and a clean white background to make the big amount of information shown in the price and chart lists lighter to consume and even enjoyable.
With the website ready to be implemented, the biggest fun - and challenge - was about to start: the design team - well... it was me, myself and I - had two months to have the first version of the app up and running.
By the end of two months there was good progress made and I managed to deliver an interactive prototype showcasing almost all the main functionalities. But then, not only the time was a constraint: the business was pivoting again and the project was paused.
Solution highlight
One of the concerns of the team was that, because the cryptocurrency market is very volatile, the user should have the possibility to make the purchase and sale at any time, while analysing the currencies for example
How might we enable users to make a transaction while browsing other sections of the app?
By transforming the "buy" and "sell" buttons into floating buttons that would appear in the screens containing currency details, trading charts and pricing lists. Always visible but without interfering on the navigation nor covering sensitive information. In future iterations, a voice command solution could be tested to check the viability and the impact of possible cognitive overload.
