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KRAKEN DIGITAL ASSET EXCHANGE

As the Lead Product Designer at Kraken, I took on the major undertaking of building a team and holistically improving the user experience of the entire legacy platform and end-to-end client journey. The consistent feedback from clients was that Kraken failed to meet expectations in user experience and interface design over our competitors. Over the course of two years, my team reinvented a complex legacy trading platform built by traders for traders to a user-friendly destination for investors and traders of all different backgrounds and levels of experience by redesigning the onboarding, trading, funding, security experiences as well as introducing a new consumer focused product for the casual crypto investor.

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Project: Onboarding & KYC

As the Lead Product Designer at Kraken, I was tasked with the major undertaking of building a team and holistically improving the user experience of the entire legacy platform and end-to-end client journey while still maintaining the highest security standards. The consistent feedback from clients was that Kraken failed to meet expectations in user experience and interface design.

Through user interviews and analyzing the support tickets filed with our Client Engagement team, we discovered that the onboarding and verification experience was one of the top critical issues reported and of utmost importance to fix. There were many steps a new user had to take before achieving the intended goal of buying/selling cryptocurrency; each step was a critical drop-off point. Our task was to rethink and streamline the user journey so new user could go from creating an account to executing a trade in as few and intuitive steps possible.

Project: Information Architecture & Navigation

The platform was originally built for traders by traders. As part of the ongoing effort to be more accessible to consumers and retail investors, we ideated on how to optimize the platform for our 4 million+ clients and 6 market segments without alienating or shutting out the others. The reality is that advanced savvy traders have completely different needs, goals and drivers than the casual retail investor, aka Buy & HODLer, so it would be impossible to optimize one trading experience for everyone.

After researching dozens of competitors and traditional brokerages and exchanges, I proposed the major change to separate the Kraken platform into two experiences: Kraken Invest would be tailored for the retail investor and Kraken Trade would continue to be tailored to advanced traders. Both would have optimized user journeys with the respective features and nomenclature tailored to their needs and level of experience. For example, the Invest experience would have a Direct Buy/Sell functionality and the Trade experience would continue to have the standard trade ticket with Market/Limit orders with other advanced order types and margin trading.

Project: Dashboard

Google Venture Design Sprint

The dashboard is the first interaction with the platform after login and authentication and needed a major overhaul, especially for first time users. Along with the information architecture and navigation redesign where we separated the platform into two experiences (Invest and Trade), we also tailored the dashboard view for each to reflect the relevant data and needs of each experience.

The Invest dashboard is much more simplified to hide advanced features like Margin and Open Orders and also showed a data visualized asset allocation chart by default based on the user test findings. The Trade dashboard included important “birds eye view” of the current state of the traders’ accounts by showing actionable items like Open Orders, Margin Levels and also displayed the table view of balances by default based on the user test findings.

We did a collaborative Google Ventures design sprint with the whole team. Above are some snaps from the process.

Project: Two-Factor Authentication Workflow

At a crypto exchange, security is of the utmost importance.  We received a concerning report from the security department that of all client accounts that were compromised, none of them had two-factor authentication enabled.  Because of this we immediately prioritized a forced two-actor authentication feature for all new and existing clients to help clients protect themselves.  The feature was designed to only allow clients to skip if they accept liability of putting their accounts at risk.

I designed an easy workflow using the modal and card components from the design system.  Upon sign-in, a modal displays over the dashboard to guide you through two simple steps to setting up your two-factor authentication whether it’s Google Authenticator or Yubikey.  I tested the prototype with our internal advisory panel and 100% of test participants completed the task and had positive feedback for the user-friendly and intuitive user flow and interface.  It also resulted in a 25% increase in accounts with 2FA enabled.

Project: Design System

A large part of the redesign effort involved creating a proprietary design system and component library as a foundation for the modular redesign strategy. We couldn't redesign an entire complex trading platform in a waterfall fashion so as we were rolling out new and redesigned features there would be a period of inconsistent visual design with the old and new look and feel. I created the initial design system of atomic reusable components as well as collaborated with the Frontend development team to implement the component library which was a 1:1 representation of the design system.

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