Meet Siglo UX/UI expert, Alix Gallardo

Born and raised in Mexico, Alix is a user experience expert in every sense of the word. Alix worked for years at Claro Media, the division of America Movil that operates digital media platforms. America Movil is the largest telco in LatAm. Alix also worked with the founding team of Aldea Digital, an initiative focused on reducing the digital divide that takes place annually at the Zocalo (central square) of Mexico City, where more than 250,000 people come for educational content about how to use the internet for the first time and how to use the mobile internet for business and personal productivity.

Alix joined the Siglo team in 2016 where she brought her experience to lead UX/UI and user acquisition. Clear-minded and fearless in trying new flows to make users’ experience with apps better and easier, Alix keeps meticulous spreadsheets to track 1 day, 7 day, 30 day, and 90 day churn for different cohorts. She has been in the frontline of building the Siglo wallet, does blockchain/cryptocurrency education for our userbase, and runs the beta program for the Siglo wallet.

She is closely involved in design, making sure that the users will face a friendly interface for the mobile-only userbase in emerging markets. Her passion for optimizing flows and building impact products that will decrease the financial inclusion gap puts her on the vanguard of thought leaders with experience in UX for the unbanked. Alix is an essential part of the Siglo team, keep on reading to find out more about her thoughts on what makes a good UX, why is blockchain education is important, and the impact of Siglo in people’s lives. See this article on UX in the blockchain world that she wrote recently.

What is the key to understanding users needs and meet them with a good result?

Listening to and understanding the user.

In our experience, we listen to the user, identify their needs in different contexts and scenarios, and build proposals that can improve their experience. We facilitate usability by eliminating the barriers, questions, and “obstacles. The goal is to improve retention and engagement rate, increasing the user interaction with our product’s interface. It’s about making sure the user can complete an action simpler and faster.

Don’t build the UX/UI if you don’t consider the users’ ideas. Think and act as a user. Put yourself in their shoes, so you build a relevant experience.

What is needed to include the most vulnerable population to the the blockchain world and cryptocurrencies?

The biggest challenge we face is how to introduce new users to the blockchain world, and it all starts with design. We create content with the Pig.gi users in mind. We familiarize ourselves with their lifestyle and language to avoid falling a language that’s too technical.

Blockchain is a new technology, and it’s important to have a foundation about how the internet works first: connectivity, browsers, apps, etc. We start from these foundational concepts. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to present and explain the concepts, and about the words we use inside the app. It’s a whole an internal communication strategy. Design should build trust and intuitively guide the user through making a transaction. The objective is not just inform them, but empower them through information so they are capable of making decisions. We want our users to have a clear overview of blockchain technology. We measure adoption and rentention careful to measure success of each communication strategy.

In terms of cryptocurrencies, the potential market is very big, according to the Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study of 2017 just 0.05% of the world population owns any cryptocurrencies. We reduce the learning curve through transparency of information management and education. We’ve build content libraries of CryptoTrends and Internet Basics for our users where we introduce them to subjects and concepts in friendly and easy way.

When you are creating an experience for a brand, how do you achieve balance between what the client’s objective and what the user wants to see?

Thanks to all the opportunities we’ve had showing users content in their lockscreens, we know what they like to read and see and the rate of interest that we get from every content we put.

On the brand side, we also know what works best to create more interaction and conversion.

Knowing the needs and expectations of both parties we can establish an equilibrium, achieving a good practice that meets the objectives.

How has the User Experience evolved in the digital world?

With time, we’ve seen that products become more and more personalized. From Henry Ford’s one-size-fits-all black T-Model to a world where our Starbucks frappe is personalized.

Every industry, especially digital products, needs to learn from users to optimize processes and flows. We try to optimize at time to complete a task, steps to complete a task, texts, graphics, and even white spaces! This represent the solution to daily problems increasing the usability through user interaction. It generates a positive perception and satisfaction thus increases the conversion rate.

Technology helps us understand the user’s profile, so we can personalize flows depending on user behavior.

• Who is visiting my site?
• How is (s)he looking for my product? Customize ads and campaigns according to specific audiences.
• What call-to-action work best for “X” audience? Machine learning can find the content that interests me more — like Netflix’s recommendation engine.
• What products or services can we suggest to this user that likes “Y”? Just like Amazon.

All of these questions come up as we watch and listen to our users. The beginning is very functional, “we need a site to sell t-shirts” without thinking: do we need a site in english and spanish? Do we add pictures of all the sizes? Should we have different forms of payments? Do we add a description of the cause/company?

How will users benefit from Blockchain technology?

According to the The Global Index Database of 2017, 1.7 billion people are unbanked and one third of them have a mobile phone. This indicates that people have a better chance to get a mobile phone than a bank account. And a third of existing bank accounts are inactive. These shows that there is an opportunity to develop products and technologies that allow financial inclusion.

Because of this, I think is very important that our users are informed about new technologies, like blockchain, and the benefits of using it.

Some of the benefits are:

• Access to a free virtual wallet
• Trade tokens to buy or send airtime top-ups, one of the products with higher demand in emerging markets
• Protection of personal information
• Transaction transparency
• Siglo Tokens as a reward for sharing information in a secure and controlled way with the applications that use Siglo protocol

Do you think that Siglo will have a positive impact in people’s lives? Who and how is the impact going to be?

Siglo is the best option for people that are interested in controlling their personal information and monetizing anonymized information. It’s an inclusive environment designed for usability and first time crypto use.

Let’s not only think about users, also in our partners, who are all the DApp developers that are interested in using Siglo Token to reward their users. And the brands who will have access to real time information to optimize their products through a loyalty program for their customers.

Our main objective is protect the users internet connectivity through blockchain technology. Brands will be able to make more targeted campaigns, while rewarding the user for sharing their opinion.