Project Strategy
Design
Research
Development
UX Researcher
2 Months
Tech Fleet Community DAO
The Kadena blockchain is a proof-of-work based that is scalable and secure along with featuring a gas station that would help pay transaction fees.
Tech Fleet DAO is an apprenticeship agency and a UX community that does work with nonprofits and impact-driven organizations. Part of Tech Fleet's mission is to create opportunities for professionals who's transitioning into UX or bootcamp graduates to work in real world.
As one of the UX Researchers on the team, I collaborated with my other UX researchers to design and conduct interviews and usability tests. We also analyzed the results in order to be able to create recommendations for the next team.
Tech Fleet wants to create a cross-chain wallet in the mission that would be accessible for people who are new to Kadena and cryptocurrency in general.
The team came to the project with the stakeholder having already listed out their vision for the project in a Medium article for the team to read beforehand.
As the research team, we had 8 weeks to understand the problem space of cryptowallet users and find the trends in the results to send to the rest of the teams.
While we had the vision article created by the stakeholder himself to reference, we still had questions around the project, from what the stakeholder expected by the end of the project to how he would define success for this project. Working together with the Product Strategy, Design, and Development team, we put together a collection of questions that we asked the stakeholder.
Once we had a better understanding of both the project expectations and the industry, we were ready to start planning our research. While the design and product strategy teams worked on the competitive research, the research team broke off to prepare the research plan. This was our opportunity to align our goals in what we were looking for in this phase.
We decided that we wanted to focus on recruiting more experienced cryptowallet users to understand the problem areas they dealt with when they worked with cryptowallets as a starting point. We were also looking for opportunities that our competitors created for us to iterate off of, based on these users' experience with the wallets.
While we wanted to do some exploratory research, our stakeholder wanted us to jump out of the gate with conducting usability tests using a prototype he created off of MetaMask, a popular open-source cryptowallet.
To accommodate for both party's needs, we decided to split the team into two teams - half of us would be focusing on exploring users' experiences with cryptowallets while the other half of us conducted usability tests.
We conducted 4 moderated tests and 4 unmoderated tests through Maze using the stakeholder's prototype to understand:
We also conducted 5 exploratory interviews in order to understand the user's general experience with:
After we were all done with the tests, we compiled all of our data together into an affinity map that would make it easier for us to see all of the finds together and find patterns in our results.
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To help the design team understand where we recommend they should focus on based on the research, along with the affinity map, we created a rainbow chart to figure out where there was the most overlap in user issues.
From there we created a revision priority matrix to give the Design team some suggestions on what to work on for the next round of usability testing.
Based on the results from this phase, we started to work on creating personas. While we hypothetically believe that we could have created at least three different personas, only one truly came out fleshed out based on the research. We decided that the other personas would become more fully fleshed out in the next phases.
The Investor works in Stem who wants to use the crypto space to maximize profit, so needs the best wallet available for their needs. They utilize multiple strategies to achieve their goal, but is worried about losing money by a lack of transparency or scams.
Our stakeholder, in this phase, specified that they want to focus on getting users that were new to crypto to use this wallet, with their first chain being Kadena. Despite that, based on not only our discussions with crypto users in our last phase but also talking to members of the team familiar with Kadena, we found that Kadena is a blockchain with an audience of mostly cryptocurrency enthusiasts which means that the users most likely available to use this wallet would most likely not to be brand new to cryptowallets in general.
Therefore in this round, we would focus on users transitioning to Kadena from other blockchains as our 'new users'.
With this pivot in our user focus, we wanted to conduct a new set of exploratory interviews. Along with this, the Design team had tasks that they wanted us to test in the prototype with new users. However, at this point in the process, we were left with only a short period of time to prep, conduct, and analyze the data brought in.
Therefore, we changed tactics when splitting the work for this round. We combined the usability test and interview into one session for half of the team to conduct and had the other half of the team focus on synthesizing the recordings and notes as sessions with participants were done.
This allowed us to compress two weeks of work into one week while keeping up with synthesizing the data.
We conducted 7 moderated sessions using the updated prototype to understand:
We also conducted 5 exploratory interviews in order to understand the user's general experience with:
While conducting the sessions, half of us was also taking the notes and recordings coming in and synthesizing them, putting the information onto the affinity map to find new trends in the current phase.
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By the time we had completed the second round of research, we were at the end of our seventh week, which meant that we had only one more week together for this phase. We debated on whether we would try to squeeze in one more round of research.
In the end, however, reflecting on the trouble we had with starting this phase, we decided that it would be more beneficial to work on a handoff document that would outline what we did, important findings, some of the troubles that we had along with our solutions, and tips that we think new apprentices coming on would appreciate to know. This way, we hope to streamline the next phase's first few weeks as we know the project lead wants to recruit apprentices with no experience in crypto like in our team.
This was my first project where I worked with a stakeholder and a cross-functional team. Having a whole group of people I'd need to check in with and collaborate with on a project was a complete change from me being a sole designer on my past projects. I've learned how important it is to keep lines of communications open between all teams from the start in order to avoid confusion in the team and keep the project going.
While my team struggled with the issues that cropped up during the first half of the project, the challenges allowed me to gain confidence in my skills as a researcher and a member of the team. There was no room for imposter's syndrome if this team was to succeed. As a result, I became stronger in defending the choices I and my team made and speaking up when I had questions or worries that came up in our research meetings.
This ultimately gave me the confidence to become a Research Lead myself in the next project I would be involved in.
