Modular Banking

The problem
Banks want to offer cryptocurrency but don't want to build a digital currency exchange.

Imagine you work in the innovation team at a mainstream bank. Your customers are curious about sending and receiving cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. You don't want to risk losing customers to digital banks as the market evolves.

Sketch exploring the crypto transaction system, who it serves, and where value is added

Getting to clarity on what we are offering, to whom, and why they should care.

“

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Corinne has incredible attention to detail while still being able to zoom out and see the business objectives - something we really benefited from.

We went from rough concept to a fully functioning application by leveraging Corinne's UX work. She worked seamlessly between our engineering, product, and business teams.

- Alex Treece, Co-founder at Modular Banking

We went from rough concept to a fully functioning application by leveraging Corinne's UX work. She worked seamlessly between our engineering, product, and business teams.
Corinne has incredible attention to detail while still being able to zoom out and see the business objectives - something we really benefited from.

- Alex Treece, Co-founder at Modular Banking

KEY GOAL
Create a working proof-of-concept to secure banking partnerships.

COMPANY
Modular Banking, an early-stage startup.

My role
UX strategy to engineering-ready designs.

TIMELINE
20% time for 4 months: Sep 2018 – Jan 2019

Understanding the Customer
Selling to potential partners while designing for users.

Mind map exploration for Modular Banking's bank admin tool and acquiring partners

Mind map of potential partner motivations and obstacles to overcome.

During their seed-funding stage, Modular Banking targeted blockchain investors and mid-size banks with innovation teams. These folks needed to understand the product's usefulness and usability. But they are not the actual product user, who would be banking staff in IT, customer service, finance, compliance, and administration positions.

I helped the founders identify these different short- and long-term target audiences. Then we worked to align their business and user experience goals. This work, combined with a sound technical strategy, set up the startup for success—ready to move fast in the right direction.

process
Discovery, concept ideation, final UI design

Bank-Admin-Areas-and-Interfaces

Mapping out key areas of the interface.

I worked directly with the three founders and UX advisor through weekly remote working sessions, reviews, and team standups. Participants were located in the US and internationally.
Discovery process:
  • Clarifying project goals
  • Validating that project goals support key business and funding milestones
  • Identifying users and user stories (what people want to do and why)
  • Uncovering working assumptions
  • Reviewing related and competitive products
  • Meeting with subject matter experts and potential partners for feedback on our proposals and to gain contextual insights into the decision makers' concerns and priorities
  • Documenting the project plan and getting stakeholder buy-in, iterating until clarity and agreement are achieved

Iterative design:

  • Mapping out key areas of the interface
  • Outlining the information architecture
  • Designing all MVP screens and some future-looking screens
  • Creating hand-drawn sketches of various pages and parts of the system to generate and evaluate many ideas quickly
  • Wireframing draft designs in Figma app
  • Reviewing designs against goals with executives, UX strategist, and engineering
  • Finalizing engineering-ready UI handoffs of all pages and their system states with functional 'UX notes' about interactions and system behaviors
  • Creating and editing Jira tickets for the team's agile sprints to include Figma design links and to surface important functional design requirements
IMG_3595

Ideation of page concepts and navigation relationships.

Results
Working 'sandbox' was presented at the 2018 BlockFS conference.

Dashboard screen showing the asset value chart.
Final design of System Dashboard showing transaction volume chart.
System dashboard showing the chart of transaction fees.
Transaction view with filters
Detail view of a specific transaction
Customer detail view.
User and group permissions for administrators.

Modular Banking enables established banks to quickly and securely begin offering cryptocurrency to their existing customers. We created a 'sandbox' for sales demos, a technical proof-of-concept, and a testing space for potential partners. The sandbox helped banks see Modular Banking's secure and easy-to-implement system. The designs I created show:

  • Key data that banks will need to access
  • Infrastructure for securing access to the system
  • Methods for ensuring regulatory compliance
  • Insights into data at both an aggregated and granular level

The sandbox interface was demoed at BlockFS conference in NYC in November 2018.

See more of my work

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Corinne Sherry Design, Inc.
Independent UX specialist based in Seattle, WA, USA. Since 2009 I've been creating great products remotely with teams located anywhere. This is a woman-owned business.

Contents of this site are copyright by Corinne Sherry Design, Inc. and by the companies whose products are represented.