AMAN SINGH'S UXR PORTFOLIO
HDCRYPTO INC.
Role: UX Researcher
Duration: 12 months
THE CHALLENGE
Support executive and product teams in identifying precise user personas to drive product design decisions. Follow up with user testing on initial concepts to validate business goals and understand customer mental models.
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THE OUTCOME
Drove key product design and business decisions based on research outcomes. As a result of the initial pilot program, startup was able to raise a substantial seed round and is currently in talks for an acquisition.
SUMMARY OF KEY RESEARCH METHODS
Stakeholder Interviews & Value Opportunity Analysis Workshop
Preparatory Desk Research
User Interviews (in person and remote)
Contextual Inquiries
Mass Survey
Usability Testing for Rapid Iteration
THE WORK
I was brought in as a research and usability consultant to help the team identify and target their core user base. As a part of this effort, I was required to become highly technical and literate in finance, trading, and crypto.
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HDCrypto is a complex execution platform driven by cutting edge trading algorithms. The team’s vision was to reduce the barrier to entry for everyday crypto traders to set up and execute on complex trading strategies. Starting with initial desk research and diving into the industry, I realized just how nascent the thinking was among most traders.
PHASE 1. Kickoff Workshop
Before starting primary research activities, I first ran a workshop with internal stakeholders to align us on the core values and principles of our product offering.
The focus of the workshop was to arrive at a Value Opportunity Analysis (VOA) -- a mapping of the extent to which our product’s aspirational qualities connect to an audience.
THE WORK
I was brought in as a research and usability consultant to help the team identify and target their core user base. As a part of this effort, I was required to become highly technical and literate in finance, trading, and crypto.
​
HDCrypto is a complex execution platform driven by cutting edge trading algorithms. The team’s vision was to reduce the barrier to entry for everyday crypto traders to set up and execute on complex trading strategies. Starting with initial desk research and diving into the industry, I realized just how nascent the thinking was among most traders.
The outcome of this workshop revealed three core principle missions of HD Crypto:
Educate users
on how to construct trade strategies
Provide tools
that enable complex trade executions
Make it accessible
to the average crypto trader.
User Interviews and The Big Survey
With a core mission in mind, I set out to better understand our target audience through In depth user interviews and contextual inquiries.
I supplemented the qualitative insights derived from the user feedback with quantitative, empirical data collected from large International Survey of about 300 crypto traders from over 8 different countries, my intent was to learn about the financial literacy of the average crypto trader. I wanted to understand how they make trade decisions, and how they trade on mobile.
Interview and survey design: I began by first trying to define the goal: to better understand the user persona most appropriate to target for our product, how they trade, and what motivates them to use new tools for performing market executions. I prepared the questionnaire to include a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions.
Pilot survey : With an initial draft ready, I moved forward testing the pilot survey with group of users who were already engaged with our brand, as well as colleagues to see if it was easy to understand and respond to. This was a moderated test done to learn the problems and hardships in a form that conformed to user expectations. Here it was important for me to track the time taken to complete the survey -- for both experienced and inexperienced traders.
Reiteration and Launch: Time to completion is a major factor in setting expectations and maintaining engagement until submission. With some initial data points from the pilot, I iterated on the questions, simplifying them, and rephrasing some of the language to be more knowledge agnostic. I reduced the time to completion by over 30% and refined the questions to better resonate with both new and experienced traders. With a polished survey ready to send out, I started socializing it with an initial screener to ensure we were targeting the right audience that coincided with our intended personas. Participants that passed the screener were asked to complete the survey.
After Administering the survey and synthesizing the results collaboratively with the product team, we concluded with the following core findings on how crypto traders make decisions.
Traders Rely on Instincts
“In crypto, every day is a new day. What you thought was good yesterday could be down by 50% by the time you wake up… that’s why I go with my gut.”
The Market is Unpredictable
“...unpredictability in the market makes me not want to place orders until i’m ready for them to execute. Who knows what’ll happen over night.”
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Ain't Nobody Got Time for That
" I don't have time to set up complicated orders. There's so much volatility you only really have time to buy and sell.... [you] gotta watch these markets 24/7 if you want good timing."
Interviews and Survey Analysis
BITCOIN TRADED BY MONTHS TRADING CRYPTO
Users that have been trading for longer have accumulated more bitcoin and trade at a higher average volume per day.
FREQUENCY OF TRADING BY TYPES OF COINS TRADED
Users demonstrated a trend of having higher execution volume based on the number of unique crypto currencies they traded. This correlation should be based on value of coins traded, but due to lack of available tools in the market, users did not exhibit that behavior.
VALUE OF TRADES BY NUMBER OF EXECUTIONS
We expected a higher correlation of number of trades to executions. Our hypothesis is that due to lack of available tools in the market, users were trading high value accounts with very simple and inefficient execution strategies. Often single executions for high value trades.
From the research we developed a strong understanding of what motivates our users and how they experience the market. We also began to synthesize around design principles that would help support their trading experience. The following were identified as our core approach to best address the identified needs of our users.
SHOW INSTEAD OF TELL
Crypto traders are largely uneducated in finance and economics. To generate value for HDCrypto, we had to start with education. By teaching users how to level up their trading with advanced techniques, we had to simplify complicated financial lingo and multi-step order flows into something tangible and accessible.
ACCESS OVER POWER
Users indicated that running trading strategies in the background of their daily lives would not be possible without a high quality mobile experience. Many popular exchanges don’t support native apps, so users are stuck with an extremely clunky and unreliable mobile web experience.
LOW BARRIER TO ENTRY
Crypto traders are skeptical, have a low threshold for security and privacy anxiety. They may use the app without connecting to an exchange API or providing personal information. We will need a way to engage these hesitant users, educate them on advanced trading techniques, then convert them to paying users.
Design & Test
With our core mission in mind and design principles to guide us towards it, I participated in an iterative design process to begin crafting a solution that solves real human needs. Every major iteration was accompanied by user testing with a handful of research participants and internal stakeholders to optimize around our core principles. I collaborated with our product team to develop an effective research plan for identifying core gaps in our product offering and designs.
My role was next to identify our needs in user testing, design the testing protocol, and execute a research study to find actionable insights to guide our agile product development decisions moving forward. We executed in total of 24 usability tests on 3 different prototypes.
Below you will see a draft of our first user study.
The user testing was an invaluable step in the process of improving and refining the product.
Our usability testing led to major changes in the application structure, language, and presentation of content to promote more effective education and simplify the steps required to complete the core tasks tested. Here are three principal discoveries that were uncovered from user testing:
THE LANGUAGE BARRIER
Since crypto traders are not traditionally trained in finance or economics, they were unfamiliar with even the most common finance and trading language. In order to effectively communicate, we had to simplify common concepts and substantially reduce technical jargon.
REITERATE & REITERATE
Many of the trading and strategy-setting actions are complex and multi-step. Whenever a user finalizes a decision or commits to a strategy, it should be explicitly reiterated using common-english language.
COLORIZE CONSISTENTLY
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Traders expect red and green to indicate up/down price changes and buy/sell actions . Don’t mix mental models by also using these colors for success/fail. Use these colors sparingly to highlight critical data instead of action status.
The product is still undergoing major development and is being continually tested. Finding local participants has become difficult due to how niche the market is. There are plans to perform the next round of user testing using online platforms. I am currently recruiting remote participants based on our initial survey. Here are some screenshots of an iteration of our product that was used for testing:
DESIGN V2.3
(Work in Progress)
