UI / UX / Web Development /

Improving the experience of buying cryptocurrencies

Founded in 2014 in Paris, Coinhouse (formerly Maison du Bitcoin) is a pioneer in cryptoassets investments. Both an online platform and a physical space, it is the trusted partner to analyse and trade cryptoassets, for both individuals and institutional investors.

Context

Founded in 2014 as “la Maison du Bitcoin”, with services both available online and at a Paris-based store, Coinhouse has evolved to become the trusted partner for investors looking to understand, acquire, sell and securely store crypto-assets as Bitcoin, Ethereum and many others. It currently serves more than 150,000 users from across Europe.

I’ve joined Coinhouse in July, 2018 as product designer. The team was working on launching a revamped version of the online platform, who was at the time suffering from scalability and safety issues. I’ve joined a team of two (a technical architect and a product marketing manager) doubling as product manager. The platform has been partially conceived internally with the help of an external agency. The V2 of the platform was launched in November 2018.

Where should I start?

I’ve spent my first weeks auditing the organisation and the product, to find out a few outstanding issues.

Organisation

Stakeholder has very different “definitions of done”
QA tests before releases were not implemented, leading to massive regressions
No product documentation available
No precise process for migrating V1 user to the v2 platform
No design asset repository

Product

Few user data available
Platform was not responsive
A very long onboarding process resulted in poor user engagement
The current website was not responsive and has a very complicated navigation

Working towards a better platform

A more collaborative organisation…

In order to improve collaboration, a weekly stakeholder meeting was established along with a few collaborative workshops (to identify our user needs and to revamp our website).

To speed up the product development I’ve identified and mapped all the main user flows of the platform. Additionally, I’ve created a shared repository with all the specifications and the corresponding design assets, actively translating business requirements into actionable epics (and their corresponding tickets).

To help reducing downtime time and avoid rollbacks, I’ve collaborated with the development team to lay down a comprehensive regression testing routine for every release, spotting countless bugs.

Regularly meeting with all the stakeholders involved, I’ve helped them to draft and successfully implemented a migration plan to move over 100,000 users from the v1 to the v2 of the platform.

…and a sturdier product

Ongoing improvements

Another issue was the lack of information regarding our user base. I’ve collected all the quantitative and data available and did some qualitative user research myself interviewing the user support and a few clients. I‘ve also helped to build a permanent user panel, dedicated to give constant feedback to new and old features.

Talking about user complaining, a recurring one was the lack of mobile support. According to analytics, 30% of ours clients use the mobile version of the platform…which unfortunately did not work very well. To address the issue I’ve designed from scratch a responsive version of the platform.

Growing the team

Another designer soon joined the team. With more heads and hands, we decided to run a extended usability test on your platform in order to improve our user experience (and our conversion rate). We focused on our red route: the onboarding, and the buy process.

Some figures

1000 users with a form
48 Users selected according to our persona
10 Usability tests and interviews

Building a design System

We also spend some time collecting and consolidating the elements that build our interface, in order to document and consolidate our design process.

Credits

Lead Designer

Luca De Battista

UX Designer

Anthony Ghisolfi

Client

Coinhouse

Year

2018

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