Kin Marketplace: Designing for Crypto
Even though they are gaining mass adoption at an increasing rate, crypto technology and crypto-based services still remain mostly inaccessible to the general public. Challenges range from technology barriers to the difficulty in buying cryptocurrencies (or managing ledgers) to even discovering new digital products that have not yet been wrapped into a compelling service package.
We hope to change this. Kin’s vision is to become the world’s most accessible cryptocurrency ecosystem for mass use. For those who missed the previous posts, I’m stealing Noa’s recap «Why is Kin building an ecosystem»:
Our goal as a whole is to provide a new monetization model where everyone involved can benefit; from users, brands, and digital services alike. This will be a model that compensates everyone fairly for their contributions. Kin is an alternative to the centralized model, giving birth to a vibrant and growing ecosystem of digital services that is compelling for consumers and fair and open for developers.
The main challenge for our design team is to introduce complex technology through an intuitive and beautiful UX. As a first step, we focused on the onboarding flow.
Let’s assume that our user doesn’t have any cryptocurrency background whatsoever. From the first moment they land into our marketplace, we need to establish trust by covering two bases: To introduce the marketplace itself, and to explain the general idea behind Kin.
We decided to turn this mission into the first earning offer: After finishing a 3-step tutorial about earning and spending Kin, a user will be rewarded their first tokens.
Rewarding a user gives them instant gratification: They understand that they can (and just have) earned Kin by performing simple tasks. It makes them less uncertain about crypto and willing to stay around to explore what else they can do with Kin.
By the end of the flow, a user’s wallet will be opened and they will have already completed one transaction. Hopefully at this point, the concept of cryptocurrency, illustrated by the Kin marketplace, seems more transparent and graspable.
For the next step, we addressed the look and feel of the marketplace.
What is important for us here is to keep it user-friendly and avoid a
bank-like feeling. With playful visuals, quirky icons, and less-than-serious intonations, new-generation fintech apps are winning users over the «heavy door» attitude once adopted by legacy banking systems (and certainly over the shady aesthetic of some cryptocurrency platforms).
We were aiming for good rapport and visual ease of mainstream social services like Airbnb or VSCO. Who said crypto can’t be sexy too?
For example, instead of traditional iconography and color code (red down arrow = money spent; green up arrow = money earned), we chose icons that communicate a win-win scenario: Earning money is great, but spending money on something valuable can be just as good too. After all, this is the point of the digital sharing economy.
Today, technology is developing and evolving far beyond the human ability to quickly understand and adapt to it. But the cryptocurrency glass ceiling on mass acceptance isn’t a lost cause. UX/UI design offers an excellent set of tools to explain innovation in a simple way and enable everyone to become a part of the cryptocurrency conversation.
So, what do you think? Give us your constructive feedback and get ready to see more soon!
