UX/I Use Case — Moving Your Kin Between Apps
If you’ve regularly been using Kinit, or any other app in the Kin Ecosystem, you’ve likely racked up a good amount of Kin that you’d like to use to explore other apps. But up until now, there hasn’t been a way for you to take the Kin you’ve earned in one app and use it in another. This is about to change!
In this UX case study, I’ll describe the process our team went through to design the new feature that will allow users to move Kin around the ecosystem, the insights we gained along the way, and the functionality we decided on.
The problem
Users in Kinit can send Kin to their friends quickly and easily based on their friend’s phone number. However, when trying to send Kin to another app (let’s call it app B), the only common identifier that everyone uses is their wallet’s public address, which makes things a bit more complicated.
A public address is a long string of alphanumeric characters that keeps a user’s Kin balance secure. It’s similar to a phone number, but too technical for a mainstream user, and it’s also too long to easily identify.
We explored multiple options and found that the fastest, easiest solution was to expose the wallet’s public address to users, ask them to copy the address from app B, and paste it back in Kinit — a known action in crypto apps, but we wanted to make a better experience. It was important for us to make a product that not only worked, but that was more user-friendly and intuitive.
The team’s challenge was to simplify the experience and lower the cognitive load, much like we did when we developed the ability to send Kin between users in Kinit.
Research and planning
We’ve conducted a full benchmark analysis on two main categories: crypto apps and mainstream consumer apps. In crypto apps, the most common functionalities are to copy a user’s public address and paste it where it’s requested to perform a transaction, or to share a QR code containing your public address and the amount you want via message. Mainstream ecosystems, like Adobe Cloud, Google, Slack, and Facebook, use integration solutions. The apps are known, presented in a directory, and with a simple click a connection is created.
Developing a deep understanding of the current landscape allowed us to move forward with building a simple, intuitive experience that has as little friction as possible. Being a part of an ecosystem gives us an advantage over other crypto apps because we are able to identify the other apps, and through that, achieve a simple solution similar to mainstream integration solutions. Although It requires a complex technological solution, it provides an easy experience for the user.
Next, we defined the technological and user goals that would help us measure the success and implementation of the feature:
Technological goals:
- User must stay in the primary app during the entire process
- This needs to be as simple and intuitive as possible (i.e. no copying and pasting required)
- Create a secure connection between apps
User goals:
- User explores new apps and understands how Kin is used in each
- User downloads new apps
- User sends Kin from Kinit to other apps
User testing
Remote testing was conducted through Usertesting.com. The participants were between the ages of 18 and 30, and they were all from the U.S. Each was assigned one of two experiences: Get app (download a new app), or send Kin to app B (send Kin from Kinit to app B). The research was conducted in order to assess user behavior and feedback on the experience of sending Kin so we could identify any friction points and potential challenges.
We learned plenty about the page layout, information hierarchy, cognitive load, language, and flow. Most users stated the process was straightforward and simple, and the directions were easy to follow. Despite the user flows being relatively straightforward, most participants were unclear about the context and language.
Functionality
The results of the user testing taught us that we should make the learning curve easier, and publish the feature in two phases. Rolling this out in phases lets the user learn one action at a time:
- Discover the apps users can enjoy with Kin, learn more about them, and download them to their devices
- Send Kin from Kinit to app B — supplementing the existing action
Phase 1 — Putting down the groundwork
Navigation
First, we had to find a place to accommodate the new content. The “Spend” page was the best place to start — Kinit users are already familiar with that page as the place they use their Kin. We changed the name of the page to “Use Kin”, as it seemed more intuitive. To be able to save the primary action and to give another hierarchy to the page’s content we created a toggle between “Gift cards” and “Ecosystem apps”.
App Cards
The number of apps in the ecosystem is growing daily, and it’s important to present them visually. In the first phase, the page will be organized with cards, similar to the gift cards section, in a vertical list of categories and horizontal list of apps in each category. These cards share basic information on apps, give users quick access to actions, and display the app. Clicking on them sends users to a page with more details on the app and what they can do with their Kin.
Promotion Card
We added a special card at the end of the feed for the endless scrollers. The purpose of this card is to excite users and motivate them to download the apps they discover by revealing the future to them. As we continue to add more apps we will optimise the interface with search, tagging, and more.
Phase 2 — Moving Kin between two apps
Once the users have had enough time to learn the new interface, play with it a little, and come across our promotional information, we will add the send action to the interface by adding a new state to the apps
Sending user’s Kin between two apps requires this functionality on both sides. We understood that not all the apps would have this ability from the beginning, thus we’ve differentiated between apps that have the functionality and ones that don’t, both on the main page and in the app page. On the main page we created two button states, and inside the app page added a note:
Users simply choose the app to which they want to send their Kin from the directory in Kinit, press ‘Send Kin’, and then the magic begins. Kinit reaches the second app, creates a secure connection, identifies and receives the user’s public address to complete the connection. Once the app gets the public address, the user sees a screen to define the amount of Kin they want to send to the other app, and presses “Send Kin”.
Next, the user will see a loader while the send action is taking place in the background. Once complete, they will see the feedback for the transaction in their history on their balance page.
This process taught us a number of things. Perhaps one of the most important, was a reminder that the crypto field is still young in terms of understanding best practices for design, and that as the industry continues to grow, there is much to learn, and occasionally borrow, from mainstream apps. By drawing on current design practices, we can help users feel more comfortable with emerging technologies, and help ease the process for new user adoption.
Want to know about the technical side of the feature? How we made the connection between apps? You can read all about it in a separate post coming soon from the Kinit team!
