Zignaly — Crypto Platform Redesign With the Help of UX Research
Step-by-step process with the lessons learned
Zignaly is a cryptocurrency trading platform that helps investors make trades by either copying other traders (copy-trading) or receiving trade suggestions based on technical and fundamental analysis.
UX studio collaborated with Zignaly to help them improve onsite usability and increase the product activation rate.
Upon the project completion, we documented our collaboration, design process, challenges, and achievements. Here is a summary of our UX design partnership with Zignaly with the key points to remember.
2 Primary Reasons Led to a Redesign
Zignaly discovered usability issues when their customers logged in and used the product for the first time. It has, later on, resulted in the subnormal activation rate.
Upon registration, multiple users have never made their first investment through the platform. It was one of the key reasons to investigate the case and come up with a solution.
Apart from that, the process of connecting and managing multiple exchange accounts (the platforms where cryptocurrencies are bought and stored) was causing a misunderstanding.
The Key to Success is a Strategic Collaboration
UX studio has dedicated a UX designer and one UX researcher to handle the project. Our researcher has later on taken a project manager role as well.
One of the key reasons that led to a successful outcome was the ability to directly collaborate with Zignaly’s CEO, the head of marketing, and lead developer.
Continuous communication with the stakeholders helped to speed up the process and discuss all the decisions on a strategic level. Close collaboration from both sides is always the core of the successful design and development process.
1. Discovery: Validating Our Initial Hypothesis
The first step is to find the roots of the problem. To discover the main usability issues, we decided to interview people from Zignaly’s user base who signed up but never made their first investment.
We asked about the reasons why they had started to use the product in the first place, their expectations, first impressions, and overall experience with the product.
Additionally, we asked them to show us what they understood, what was not clear, what they liked, and what caused frustration.
We have also conducted usability testing with the individuals interested in the crypto trading, but who have never used the Zignaly’s product before. It helped us to get a better sense of the problems that may arise when users log in to Zignaly for the first time.
Multiple interviews and usability testing helped us to make valuable discoveries, such as the following:
- Some users didn’t understand that they had to connect an exchange account.
- The process of connecting an exchange account required information from users, which many of them struggled to find.
- Some users misunderstood the concept of copy-trading and its difference with trading signals.
- Users required more information about the copy traders to trust them.
- Most of the users did not manage to discover the possibility to trade with virtual money, even though interview participants appreciated it.
The research findings helped us to complete our hypothetical user journey with real data. Our UX researcher has prioritized the main pain points in that and created a clear roadmap for the project.
2. Ideating, Prototyping, and Iterating
While the researcher was busy with product discovery, our UX designer scrutinized Zignaly’s direct and indirect competitors to see what they do differently, gain a better understanding of a market, and gather some UI inspiration.
In a close collaboration with the Zignaly team, we’ve brainstormed and came up with multiple different approaches to solving the usability problems.
The first low-fidelity prototype was created in Axure, which was intentionally designed to simulate the product usage.
The prototype was tested with actual platform users and iterated every week. The initial usability tests revealed multiple issues in the original design.
Moreover, we have also discovered new usability issues with the prototype design. All the wins and losses built a foundation for weekly conversations with the stakeholders from the client’s side.
With the weeks passing by, we aimed to tackle every single problem to ensure test participants can correctly understand the product’s value and use it without any instructions.
Finally, our designer iterated the look & feel of the design with Zignaly’s head of marketing.
After a few rounds of conversations and feedback sessions, we managed to produce the final design.
3. The Outcomes and Deliverables
Upon the project completion, we exported the final designs to Zeplin, a handoff tool that simplifies collaboration with developers by providing all the specifications and ready-to-implement CSS.
The designs included all feature screens, different states, edge cases, mobile version, and a dark mode.
Our designer has also crafted a UI kit with clear guidelines and rules that help Zignaly keep design consistency when developing new features in the future.
Apart from the design deliverables, Zignaly received a research report summarizing all the findings, along with a playlist of all the user tests and interviews that were conducted.
Takeaways and Our Learnings
Working with a crypto space company was a challenging but exciting experience. We were delighted to re-shape a crypto trading industry and collaborate with such a dynamic and entrepreneurial team.
Lessons learned
It is crucial to ensure a complete understanding between the client and the contractor to align each design decision and achieve a fruitful strategic partnership.
It took us a while to understand the complex crypto world, wrap our heads around the problems at hand, and come up with a strategy. It created some anxiety at first, but consistent efforts helped us move fast in the second half of the project.
In our internal ideation process, we switched from using the phrase “yes but” to using “yes and.”
This method helped us share feedback and ideas more constructively and free our counterparts from the pain of receiving negative feedback when ideating.
Although we prefer running workshops in-person, in this case, the whole project was done remotely. Tools like Miro, Hangouts, and Slack helped us stay in touch and share relevant information easily.
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