Making crypto useful in everyday life

Overview

Bitso committed to its board of directors to deliver a card product amidst fierce competition in the industry. Our team was tasked with making the first transaction in H1 2022.

During my tenure at Bitso between October 2021 and April 2022, I led the design initiative for the Bitso Card product, enabling my team and I to design with customer feedback and reach a solution that met both business goals and informed by customer feedback.

Despite a delayed launch due to a company strategy shift, the shipped version retained most of the key elements of our original design.

The Challenge

The Bitso Card initiative had two big challenges: Finding its niche in the hyper-competitive crypto landscape… and actually shipping the product.

Recognizing the need for a compelling value proposition, my team and I strategically planned comprehensive user research to find potential differentiation opportunities that could serve the needs and pain points of our target audience.

Also, this was Bitso’s 4th attempt at launching a card product, making the stakes very high for our team.

Role & Team

For this initiative, I played a dual role: Principal Product Designer and UX Design Director.

As a Principal Product Designer, I:

• Defined the UX Strategy for H1 2022, in alignment with the Business OKRs and the Credit Squad.
• Planned, coordinated and executed UX Research activities, in collaboration with an external agency to scale recruitment.
• Co-created interactive Figma prototypes for the concept testing sessions, using customer and stakeholder feedback.

As a UX Design Director, I was responsible of:

• Staffing & performance management (9 designers across 3 teams).
• Creative direction for multiple disciplines (Product Design, Content Design & UX Research).
• Stakeholder Management (Marketing, Product & Legal) within the Credit & Lending Fleet.

Design Process and Execution

Our team’s goal was to successfully make the first Bitso card transaction by H1 2022.

As the project kicked off in January 2022, setting up a lean, yet customer-centric design workflow was key. As a designer, my priority was to balancing the Product team’s focus on delivering with customer insights.

With this in mind, I focused primarily on the UX Research activities, since having as much contact with users enabled me not only to inform this project, but also other design projects my team at large was working on.

Given the timeline of this project, and the internal coordination effort required, I was fortunate to receive support from two exceptional designers (in Product and Content Designer roles). Roles were blurry, but we all knew what needed to be done.

Also, the importance of this initiative (Top 1 priority for the company in 2022), stakeholders wanted full visibility and plenty of opportunities to provide feedback, so the design workflow had to be highly collaborative and transparent.

A Customer-Centric design workflow that (actually) included customers

From a Design perspective, the core of the design workflow were the user interviews.

However, since the project already had previous and comprehensive attempts, my first step was to collect and synthesize the learnings from both customers and stakeholders involved in those previous attempts.

I shared those insights with the Product Manager (who also happened to be the team’s lead). Together, we used this data as input to come up with a product hypothesis as a starting point for the first round of interviews.

Ideation and Prototyping in Figma

With this definition, the design team set out to build the first prototype that we used to test during the first round of interviews.

We were able to go straight to mid-hi fidelity designs since Bitso already had a good design system in place. This allowed us designers to focus on iterating the conceptual layer based on the feedback we collected in each interview and review round, without having to spend time on the visual design layer.

Figma was a great tool to build the prototypes collaboratively and collect feedback from several internal sources.

User Testing and Design Reviews

The main UX Research method I used was a mix of an in-depth interview around their experience and pain points when it came to cards, and a moderated concept testing session using interactive prototypes.

After concluding each round of interviews with participants from both Mexico and Brazil (the target markets), the core team shared those findings to a broader audience, including people from Product, Engineering and Management at the VP-level. These sessions were the main channel from which we collected feedback to integrate into the next iteration.

Results and Achievements

Within the project’s original timeframe, we were able to test and iterate 4 different concepts. The chosen solution was informed by about 30 customer interviews (plus the ones from previous attempts), plenty of feedback from other areas, including Data Science, Customer Support and Senior Management.

Thanks to the constant feedback this workflow allowed internal stakeholders to contribute, the team was able to align and get approval on a launch scope in time to keep the project on track.

This was critical so the design team had time to properly unfold the solution before handing it over to Engineering, so the user experience wasn’t compromised.

While the product didn’t ship as planned due to a sudden shift in Bitso’s strategy, I’m glad to observe that the Bitso Card did ship after my tenure, and it retains many of the key elements of the solution my team and I designed.

Retrospective

The Bitso Card project was a transformative experience for me as a designer, both in regards of strategic thinking and leadership skills.

As a Design practitioner, it was one of the most customer-informed projects I had the chance to work on. Although this required coordinating and executing ~30 interviews in a short timeframe, the candidness of the customers was inspiring for the whole team — from Product and Design people alike.

It was also a challenge to my leadership skills. Managing the level of exposure of the project with Senior Management, the communication and coordination effort required and supporting my team during a company wide reorganization was no easy task.

Although Management stressed the importance of being ‘customer-centric,’ the emphasis on meeting tight deadlines often took precedence. This occasionally led to some confusion within the team. This experience taught me a lot about the importance of trust and supporting my direct reports in such scenarios.