Case Study

Zignaly – How UX studio Redesigned a Crypto Trading Platform

Zignaly is a cryptocurrency trading platform that helps investors make the right trades by either copying other traders (copy-trading) or receiving trade suggestions based on technical and fundamental analysis (signals).

Considered to be one of the most promising players in the market for its highly innovative value proposition, Zignaly had just raised funds and was willing to invest heavily in delivering the best possible experience to their users.

The problem

Prior to contacting UX studio, Zignaly had detected certain frictions in its customers’ first experiences with the product, which resulted in a suboptimal activation rate.

That is, from the total number of users who signed up for the product, many never made their first investment through the platform.

Additionally, the process of connecting and managing multiple exchange accounts (the platforms where cryptocurrencies are bought and stored, like Binance or Kucoin) was also causing problems for many users.

The team: a strategic collaboration

One of the keys to the success of this project was that we collaborated directly with Zignaly’s CEO, the head of marketing, and lead developer. This direct and continuous communication with the highest stakeholders from the client’s side kept the conversation at a high and strategic level at all times.

On our side, we had one UX designer and one UX researcher, the latter of which also taking on the role of project manager.

Remote kick-off

We kicked off the project by running multiple UX workshops in order to gain a deeper understanding of our client’s problem and close the knowledge gap regarding its market, customers, and broader product strategy.

We collaborated in real-time on Miro to create personas and job stories

These workshops, all held remotely, included a goal-setting session to make sure we were on the same page in terms of high-level direction and objectives; a persona workshop to understand the target audience, and a user journey workshop to map out our hypothesis concerning the main pain points users were facing.

Finally, we defined key job stories to clarify our hypothesis regarding the goals users might want to achieve with each of the features we were planning to work on.

Discovery: validating our initial hypothesis and defining the problem

The first step in solving any problem is to define it, and thus to find the roots of that problem. In order to do so, we decided to interview people from Zignaly’s user base who had signed up but never made their first investment.

We asked them about the reasons why they had started to use the product in the first place, the expectations they had, their first impressions, and overall experience with the product.

Additionally, we asked them to walk us through the platform and show us what they understood, what wasn’t clear, what they liked, and what frustrated them.

In design thinking, we always focus on understanding our users and defining the problem before thinking about solutions

Furthermore, we also conducted user tests with the existing platform, testing people that corresponded to Zignaly’s target audience but who had never used the product before to get a better sense of the problems that may arise when using Zignaly for the first time.

Throughout this process, we made valuable discoveries, such as the following:

Some users didn’t understand that they had to connect an exchange account, and when they did, its importance wasn’t clear.
The process of connecting an exchange account required information from users which many of them struggled to find.
Users usually had trouble understanding the concept of copy-trading and its difference with trading signals.
Users required more information about the copy traders in order to trust them enough to copy their trades.
The option that Zignaly had to trade with virtual money was very much appreciated by users, but only a few were able to find it.

Mapping out the user journey helped us identify and prioritize user pain points

This helped us complete our hypothetical user journey (from the kickoff meeting) with real data and observations, and allowed us to easily identify and prioritize the main pain points in that journey and create a clear roadmap for the project.

Ideating, prototyping and iterating

While our researcher was busy with the previously mentioned discovery research, our designer studied all of Zignaly’s direct and indirect competitors to see what each of them was doing differently, gain a better understanding of the market and gather inspiration.

Together, the designer and researcher ideated on different approaches to solving the problems at hand before agreeing on a direction in collaboration with Zignaly.

The first low-fidelity prototype was then created on Axure, a prototyping tool that allows rapid prototyping and complex interactions, ideal for simulating the use of the product.

Once the problems defined, the time had come to create, test and iterate

The prototype was then tested and iterated on a weekly basis over the remaining duration of the project. As is always the case, the initial tests revealed multiple problems from the originals ones that hadn’t been solved, as well as new ones that arose from the new design, and paved the way for weekly conversations with the stakeholders from the client’s side.

As the weeks passed, these problems were tackled one by one until, in the final weeks, test participants were able to perfectly understand the product’s value and use it without any instructions.

Finally, our designer iterated on the look & feel of the design with Zignaly’s head of marketing and, after a few rounds of feedback, applied the final decision to the interface.

Our designer created a look & feel for both light and dark mode

Here’s a snapshot of the final designs

Final deliverables

At the end of the project, we exported the final designs to Zeplin, a handoff tool that simplifies collaboration with developers by providing all the specs and ready-to-implement CSS.

These designs included all the screens for the features we had been working on, including different states and edge cases, as well as a mobile version and a dark mode.

Our designer also crafted a UI kit with clear guidelines and rules that would help Zignaly keep design consistency when developing new features in the future.

Additionally, Zignaly received a research report summarizing all the findings that could help them shape their product strategy and roadmap, along with a playlist of all the user tests and interviews that had been conducted.

Conclusions and learnings

Working with an innovative company from the crypto space was definitely a challenging but thrilling experience. We were delighted to help shape a project that will shape crypto trading in the coming years and collaborate with such a dynamic and entrepreneurial team.

We also learned a few lessons on the way, here are a few of them:

Working closely with top decision-makers once again proved to be ideal. Zignaly showed great interest in understanding its users’ needs and frustrations and will use the insights we gathered through our research to shape its product and marketing strategies.

They understood the reasoning behind each design decision and brought their vision and market knowledge to the conversation, resulting in a fruitful strategic partnership.

It took us a while to understand the complex world of crypto, wrap our heads around the problems at hand, and come up with a strategy. This definitely created some anxiety first, but our efforts to set a solid foundation helped us move fast and with confidence 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 from the improvisational world helped us share feedback and ideas in a more constructive way, and free our counterparts from the pain of receiving negative feedback when ideating.

Although we prefer to run workshops in-person when the situation allows, in this case, the whole project was done remotely. Tools like Miro, Hangouts, and Slack helped us stay in touch and share important information easily.