Crypto banking on the blockchain

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

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

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

TEAM
Three co-founders, small development team, UX strategy advisor Tamara Adlin, and me.

My role
Sole designer. UX strategy, discovery, wireframes, and engineering-ready designs.

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

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

Modular Banking is a early stage startup that lets established banks quickly and securely begin offering cryptocurrency to their existing customers.

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

Understanding the users
Early-stage startups' are targeting potential partners and investors while designing products for end users.

For Modular Banking, the targets during their seed-funding stage were traditional mid-size banks with innovation teams and blockchain-technology investors. These were the audiences for the design—the users who had to understand the utility, value, and usability of the product. These audiences are not the true end-user, which will be banking staff in positions such as IT, customer service, finance, compliance, and administration.

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 sets up the startup for success—ready to move fast in the right direction.

Mind map of potential partner motivations and obstacles to overcome.

Custom process
Discovery, iterative design, final UI design

I worked directly with the three founders and UX advisor through remote working sessions, reviews, and team standups each week. Participants were located in the US and internationally.

Discovery phase:

• 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 maker's 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

Mapping out key areas of the interface.

Ideation through hand-sketching of page concepts and navigation relationships.

Final design of System Dashboard showing transaction volume chart.

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

We focused on creating a 'sandbox' that could be used for both sales demos a technical proof-of-concept and testing area for banks interested in their API. This enabled partners to see firsthand that Modular offers a secure and easy-to-implement system for banks to offer blockchain to their existing customers.

The designs I created for Modular 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.

Like what you see? Let's chat.

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.

(206) 383-0748
newbusiness@corinnesherry.com
No solicitations

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