Project Brief

Design a digital savings wallet through which the people of Nigeria can:

1. Safely invest their savings in Crypto Dollars - USDC
2. Monitor, invest more or withdraw their savings
3. Earn interest on their saved dollars and track investment growth
4. An activity log to track all transactions
5. Additionally buy and sell other cryptocurrencies i.e. Bitcoin and Ethereum
6. Other necessary features - Login, logout, notifications, account details and support

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Research and Understanding

We understood everything about the product and the landscape from the founders first. We had multiple meetings to understand what they wanted and what kind of approach were they looking for. A happy surprise was, that the team had already laid out most of the features and functionalities. This gave us a good head start and saved us plenty of time going back and forth on what should and shouldn’t be there. Once we figured out what the product was and what we were building. We had to understand who we are building for and how.

During our first week, we did heavy research on the following:

1. The people of Nigeria
2. The economy of Nigeria
3. What role Crypto has played in the country - Funding the End SARS movement
4. Role of dollars as a form of investment for the country and the current state of it.
5. Current forms of investing in Nigeria
6. Basic understanding of how the blockchain works - for us to understand what was and wasn’t possible. And to have a correct conceptual model of the inner workings of our product. This included readings on how different exchanges work, what liquidity pools are, what blockchain network where we using and what are they in the first place. The list goes on and on.

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Our Users

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User Flows and Information Architecture

As per the PRD given to us by the team we began building an information architecture along with the user flow. This would help us walk a mile in our users shoes and understand deeply, what could be done better, what can fail and what we must plan for.

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The information architecture and the user flow went through a couple of rounds of changes and we added as much information as we could to build a complete user flow for all the happy paths in our application.

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Low Fidelity Wireframes

Once we had the user flows laid out we knew exactly which screens are required for our "happy path" to work. With this we began designing the layouts for the application. There were two rounds of wireframe designs with each refining the layouts and the user flow more. Making things more tactile and easy for users to use, even if there was no colour involved at this point.

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Some of our most Important Layouts

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High Fidelity Wireframes

Before we jumped into creating high fidelity wireframes we were yet to figure out how the final UI would look like. So to figure out this visual treatment we tried out a bunch of different variations. We messed with different colours, typefaces and aesthetic elements to arrive here.

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Some of our early explorations

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Finalised UI Direction

After a bunch of iterations and changes to these approaches, we arrived at the current UI. We wanted something that looked approachable and is easy to understand.

Now that we had the visual direction of the mobile app nailed down. I went ahead and designed the remaining screens. And for ensuring we were adhering to the principles of atomic design I began creating a design library simultaneously in Figma. Time was of the essence so I couldn't optimise for all scenarios but for the most common ones.

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Here's the what the Design System looked like

Quick and rough but self sufficient. This also helped reduce some of the friction in dev hand offs later on.

Edge Cases

As I mentioned earlier, we planned out all the happy paths first. But as we know Murphy's First Law - "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.". We began planning for the worse, so our users are left with enough of an idea of what went wrong and if they can fix it or whether they should just wait it out.

That's all folks!

Thanks for you viewing! Do drop me a message if you'd like to know more about this project.