An Easy and Intuitive Way to Buy and Sell Cryptocurrency
With tZERO, your cryptocurrency is held in your personal wallet from the moment of purchase. This means only you have access to it and it cannot be hacked or stolen as long as you maintain control of your phone and password. Centralized exchanges hold the keys for you. This is convenient but can cause customers to lose their funds when hackers see large amounts of cryptocurrency in a single location or an exchange ceases to do business either temporarily or permanently. It also results in additional, hidden fees for the withdrawal of your cryptocurrency from the exchange.
Learning as Much as I Can
tZero, now an enterprise sized company started as a small start up. We had a small cross functional team which primarily consisted of back-end developers, with a few front-end developers and myself as a designer.
I loved working with a small team, we all shared roles and bounced ideas off of each other. My first task was to create an MVP iOS app, being new to the day trading environment I had to create a detailed plan of how I would learn as much as I can and produce high quality designs as quickly as I could so our developers could stay busy and our sales team start working.
Taking what I learned from past experiences I determined my actions would be as followed:
- Understand the Market – What are the trends and observations I am seeing
- Understand the Customers – Who are our prospective customers. What is their demographic, goals, needs, pain points and the problem we will solve for them.
Working From The Ground Up
Once I understood the space I reached out to our known users and advisors to do a user interview session to further dive into their goals and pain points. After the sessions I consolidated the learnings, shared high level findings with our sales team and jumped into refining project goals and journey mapping. Journey mapping as a team of one is hard so I invited our sales team to participate as they spent more time in the day trading space. Once the user journey was understood I promoted the sales team to participate in a feature mapping session to help us further drive into the features that would turn our product into one day traders would want to use.
Due to us needing to get a quick MVP out I had to skip designing a design system and rather jump into medium fidelity designs. I planned all of the tasks into a task management tool and assigned myself due dates to continue to hold myself accountable and share transparency with the team.
All of the designs were presented to the CEO and moved to high fidelity after his review. Having an opportunity to work closely with the C-Suite helped shape my presentation skills allowing me to feel comfortable sharing my work with others and those above me.
Once designs were moved to high fidelity, I spent time creating a clean file to hand off to developers to make sure they had what they needed.
Post design handoff, I went back through the design work and started working on a simple design system that would help us down road. Looking back, I am glad this time was spent because we did several iterations of the app, included Android, iPad and eventually moved into desktop.
