Version 2.0

HIFI Bridge

Timeline

August 2023 - 4 weeks

1 Project Manager

2 UI Designers

My Role UX Researcher

User Workflow Designs

The Team

B2B

Finance/

Cryptocurrency

Project Type

The Client

HiFi Bridge: The Game-Changer in Cryptocurrency

In the competitive landscape of tech startups, HiFi Bridge's entry into the cryptocurrency-to-FIAT merchant exchange market marks a significant milestone, challenging established players in the crypto wallet space. This move underscores their strategic approach and potential for industry impact. Our team played a crucial role in shaping the user experience, ensuring the platform's seamless and inclusive design. HiFi's distinctive value lies in eliminating mandatory customer sign-ups and providing a seamless purchasing experience. Furthermore, they demonstrated a commitment to inclusivity by facilitating conversions from a wide range of cryptocurrencies to the merchant's preferred currency, accommodating different coin types. Join me on a journey as I delve into how our team helped HiFi Bridge navigate the intricacies of user experience design to realize their innovative vision.

HIFI’s project presented our team with several intricate challenges, driving us to devise innovative solutions. These challenges, while demanding, underlined the importance of our user-centric methodology:

1. Function Requirements: Balancing an extensive list of requirements, including an unprecedented pay widget, posed a significant challenge in ensuring a seamless user experience. (Add image of functions request list)

2. Empathizing with User Absence in an Emerging Cryptocurrency E-commerce Market: The absence of existing user data and behavior patterns added complexity in understanding user needs due to the project's unique nature. Furthermore, entering the cryptocurrency e-commerce sector meant navigating uncharted territory, including establishing trust and comprehending user behaviors.

3. Explaining UX to Stakeholders: Effectively conveying the UX process's value of meeting user needs, not just aesthetics, to less familiar stakeholders required clear, persuasive messaging.

Despite these challenges, our commitment to a robust product enabled us to confidently tackle uncharted territory, delivering user-centric solutions tailored to the cryptocurrency e-commerce market's unique demands.

The Challenge

Essential functional prerequisites and in-depth exploration of an uncharted market.

Our solution encompassed a fully functional responsive merchant portal and a seamlessly integrated pay widget for e-commerce sites, delivering immediate value and laying the foundation for future development:

The Solution

Strategically Planning for Future Sprints and Pioneering MVPs for the Inaugural Launch

We created a user-friendly portal for merchants with essential e-commerce management features and a customizable payment widget that can be added to their e-commerce pages, enabling consumers to pay for their items quickly and easily via alternative methods.

Desktop Merchant Portal & Pay Widget

We developed proto-personas and empathy maps for investor presentations to align with the needs of potential merchant users.

Proto-Personas & Empathy Maps

We crafted user stories and clear acceptance criteria to visualize the functions , priorities , and guide subsequent development phases.

User Stories & Acceptance Criteria

Cybersecurity best practices were implemented to secure the pay widget and portal development from phishing and hacking attacks.

Cybersecurity Expertise

Improved accessibility design and auto-layouts within the Atomic Design Library (ADS) made the platform more inclusive and streamlined development, enabling quicker, consistent coding and saving HIFI time and money.

Enhanced Accessibility

Stakeholders gained deeper insights into user needs, enabling more effective decision-making and future product development, while proto-personas resonated with investors, facilitating funding and support.

Understanding

& Engagement

While positioning HIFI for future success, our solutions met immediate objectives, enhancing knowledge, accessibility, and stakeholder alignment with our plan for initial and future sprints.

Add Users to Business Portals & Limit Capability Options

Secure Login to Merchant Portal

Top 3 Priorities for Our Stakeholders

Customizable Pay Widget for Immediate Use on Merchant Sites

Targeting Luxury industries such as automotive, Real Estate, and Hospitality as Hifi's primary market, I explored the financial landscape in these sectors to identify relevant research for our project.

In the quest for pertinent research aligned with HIFI's requirements, I delved into the financial sector. My investigation extended to platforms such as Reddit and Discord, where I conducted surveys among crypto consumers and investors to gather insights into their frustrations, needs, and behaviors.

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the merchant perspective, I conducted interviews with CPAs and industry experts. These discussions focused on three key areas of interest for HIFI.

Research

Identifying stakeholder & user needs across comparable financial markets enabled us to prioritize our top three user flow priorities.

Current Company Security Measures

Software Usage, Needs, & Pain Points

Decision
Making for Networking & Partnerships

C+C Analysis: Top 3 Competitors

According to our Competitive Analysis, most consumers were concerned about having to sign up for additional services, such as Bitpay or Coinbase, to use their crypto wallets for a single transaction. 80% of forum users conveyed this frustration and were petitioning merchants to avoid such companies.

It was also noted on our competitors' pay widgets that there was a lack of full price breakdown when considering the network fees to transition crypto-to-fiat currency, as well as real-time market prices, an area HIFI could leverage and improve the merchant and customer sense of ownership within the crypto market.

Although our interview pool was limited, we were able to gather sufficient insights through secondary research to develop hypotheses about our ideal target audience.

Proto-personas, lightweight representations of user segments, play a pivotal role in user-centered design by providing initial direction and alignment when comprehensive user research is constrained. While based on assumptions and educated guesses, proto-personas serve as a practical starting point for design discussions and decision-making. They help focus the design process, foster alignment among team members and stakeholders, facilitate early ideation, and encourage hypothesis testing. However, it is essential to validate proto-persona assumptions through research and to iterate on them as additional user insights become available, thereby ensuring a continuously user-centric approach throughout the project.

The three proto-personas and Empathy Maps we created, allowed us step into the shoes of our users and formulate realistic Task flows and Acceptable Criteria for our User Stories:

Understanding the User

Harnessing Proto-Personas to Create Informed Empathy Maps, Task Flows, and User Stories/Acceptable Criteria

Angela Sharp

"The Decision Maker"

Indira Adams

"The Ally"

Neal Mistry

"The Crypto-consumer"

As we worked on translating HiFi Bridge's innovative idea into a digital reality, we realized how vital user stories and acceptance criteria were for organizing the functions list by priority and workload. We used our proto-personas, empathy maps, and task flows to make sure our navigation system worked seamlessly for users. These design tools helped us prioritize tasks and make strategic choices as we developed wireframes and made relevant adjustments to the Atomic Design System (ADS) to ensure the layouts were responsive and compliant with accessibility standards.

We knew from the outset that this project was in-depth, so we divided it into phases. This approach enabled us to prioritize functions based on their necessity for the initial site launch and the effort required to develop them. By keeping our focus on users and being results-driven, we created a pragmatic plan that met everyone's needs.

Ideation

Creating Epics, User Stories, and Acceptable Criteria to break up the Scope of Work into Manageable portions

In sprint one, we put all our energy into Security and the Customer Widget to ensure HiFi had a functional product. The rest of the features? They are on the menu for the next sprint, which we laid out in a Gantt Chart.

What I Learned

Throughout our project, I gained valuable knowledge and identified unforeseen opportunities that could greatly benefit HIFI. Here are some key takeaways and the doors that our design process has opened:

Learning & Opportunities

Exploring insights from this project and forging new paths

Working with an actual client provided invaluable lessons in managing expectations, aligning objectives, and delivering results that genuinely address HIFI's unique challenges and goals.

Real-World Client Collaboration:

This project underscored the importance of clearly and concisely explaining the design process to the client. While "UX" is a buzzword in the industry, this project reinforced the crucial role of user experience research in ensuring that we design products effectively rather than merely aesthetically. Taking time to explain our process to stakeholders ensured that everyone was aligned and understood the rationale behind our decisions.

Explaining the Significance of the UX Process:

Opportunities

As HIFI was not yet ready to conduct usability testing, we recommended leveraging software and user forums to identify candidates who closely matched the personas we had developed. This approach ensured that future iterations would be grounded in user perspectives. I created a User Journey Map to help us visualize the testing results and any iterations we would need to make.

Usability Testing Strategies:

This project created opportunities for HIFI to pursue partnerships, particularly with established project management software companies. Collaborating with them could enable HIFI to offer an all-in-one service to their merchants, streamlining operations and enhancing user experiences.

Networking & Partnership:

As we move forward, these insights and opportunities will guide our approach to future projects and collaborations. This project has enriched my understanding of user research and positioned me to significantly impact the design and technology landscape.