_ Mobile-first product redesign
_ Marketing campaigns
_ Systems & style guide
Creative Director
& Product Designer
Full time, remote
Feb - Nov 2020
Sketch
Invision, Principal
Indesign, etc
Invision DSM
Earn on your crypto.
Cred Inc. is a global digital asset platform that bridges traditional and decentralized finance, enabling wallets, exchanges, foundations, and providers of financial services to offer earning using the power of the blockchain.
Cred, a San Francisco-based digital finance company, launched their first product on an aggressive timeline and were growing quickly, adding users and partners. They hired me to update their look, clarify their messaging and help make the product more user friendly.
MVP: The primary function of the Cred app was to create ‘Programs’; assets pledged at a defined duration and interest rate. Think CD’s for crypto (the financial product, not the music). We wanted to first serve existing customers, so the most simple version of the product needed to include a Dashboard and a way to view programs and balances.
Analytic data of the existing product told us that 85% of users were accessing their Cred Dashboard through their phones. At the time, Cred did not have a mobile-first approach, so we decided to start there. Future feature updates would address program creation, moving funds and, of course, signing up.
To ease Cred toward a financial industry feel, I designed a more expected onboarding look;
simple, clean and mobile friendly.
Dashboard was redesigned to be mobile-first and include quick graphic overviews
Program details and payout schedules are easy to read
Wallet users can add or send their digital balances with another wallet or linked debit card
Expanded Dashboard concept on desktop;
Balances and programs are bundled for a quick view of totals
Link accounts to other wallet providers for easy access to those balances
The user could then start programs from external accounts.
Getting started
Onboarding can be challenging in the crypto space and we needed to cut down on the amount of information we were asking people for. Using a third party ID verification, we could collect some data from uploaded documents and ask for whatever was missing later in the flow. By simplifying the flow, we saw an increase in the successful onboarding if users.
We also wanted to help the users create more programs with less overhead so we moved legal agreements forward to the initial onboarding experience and from there only showed the user a new agreement when it was updated, which cut down on the tediousness of signing up for new programs. We simplified the look of forms and agreements, inspiring trust in the validity of these delicate processes.
Mapping the onboarding flow
I find that keeping everything in one visual space is helpful when working with remote teams.
Developers, PMs and designers can access one source of truth and easily collaborate. I include thumbnails
of comps, which are helpful for a quick reference on Zoom calls, and link to Invision demos and JIRA tickets.
Mobile to Desktop
When translating from mobile to desktop, sometimes it nice to have those layouts laid out in direct comparison.
These maps are accompanied by style guides and annotated comps.
Mobile to desktop grid
Email layout for desktop and mobile
Just the numbers, please. Now that users are able to see their programs, we wanted to expand our self-service offerings. We needed to engage the customers in a more meaningful way. Throughout our user interviews we heard one main theme; show me the numbers. If people were going to pledge their assets, they wanted to know how much they could make and in what currencies. They wanted to imagine the future of the market and decide if the additional interest was worth the price of the membership. Do you pay out in bitcoin? It became clear that we would need to offer tools to help people make calculated decisions. We also found a few moments for up-sell that actually felt helpful.
Making decisions
Calculators
Because the market is so volatile and rates are set per coin, we needed to show constant statuses of each.
A Premium account can get you better rates and most users wondered why we offer standard interest when obviously daily compound will earn you more.
Longer terms will also earn more compared to shorter.
User interviews
Sometimes when you’re very close to a project it’s nice to have someone else conduct the interviews. Deb was funny and disarming and really got people to open up about what they expected and wanted from our product.
After each interview we’d review our results and I’d create a new set of demos for the next round based off our findings.
Q. Do users want fiat?
A. Depends.
Most of our users are pretty savvy with the blockchain. Many come through partners who may be wallet providers and for those who are not, Cred hosts non-custodial wallets, basically a short-stop to pledging assets to a program. Crypto enthusiasts that we spoke to were pretty comfortable here, but now we wondered… how could we engage the more typical financial product user?
Hypothesis: Enabling use of debit cards would make the less crypto cosy feel a little more confident in moving funds. Earning and paying out in fiat (US dollars, for example) would bridge the math and be a good entry point to earning on crypto.
Findings: Users were happy with the experience and found starting a program easy with the new design and familiar patterns, but they were wary of the high interest rates and wanted to know how we are able to offer such impressive returns. Some were skeptical of linking their debit cards, noting that a big part of the crypto experience is not having to engage too deeply with the status quo. Rebels. All users insisted on the fine print and wanted respectful but accessible terms and definitions because at the end of the day, it’s all about making money. Smart.
Conclusion: People were pretty excited about earning and paying out in fiat, so supporting those assets along with stable coins and other crypto currencies would be a win. Using a debit card to enable these transactions would also be popular among our crypto curious but most importantly; explain the details. In the wild west of crypto, users want all the terms up front and along the way.
Feature demos
Using Invision demos and a third party recruiter, we tested our program creation flows on 28 users in three rounds.
Relating to users through our partners.
Partners use Cred’s regulatory compliant platform to offer borrowing and lending of digital and fiat assets. Edge or Bitcoin.com can plug into our earning and lending capabilities to offer these features to their users. This relationship requires some amount of collaboration, cobranding and consistency in communication to users, even as the partners themselves have a wide range of capabilities and offerings. As the company evolved, we began to see ourselves as a more supporting role, the power behind the partner.
Customers come to us through a trusted partners or organic referral, so much of our trust came from established relationships. Although the inner workings may not be simple, we wanted our message to be one of simplicity.
We make borrowing and lending simple.
Marketing campaigns for new coins, features or partnerships.