Finary.io
January - April, 2022
Role
Product Researcher & Designer
Responsibility - NFT Gallery
Research Lead of 3 & Recruit all users
Design - Hide & Pin, Profile Features
Client
Finay.io CEO
CEO, 1 Project manager, 1 Product Researcher, 1 Product Designer
Team
Intro - Finary.io
001
What’s Finary.io?
Back by Upfront Ventures with a $3.2 million USD seed-round founding, Finary.io is a social investing platform designed for GenZ and established in the 2020s. Thinking about ‘Discord meets with Robinhood’, Finary called itself a ‘Discord for investing’, or you can think of it as ‘Robinhood meets Discord’. With a mission of Making investing collaborative, Finary is helping investors to transform makeshift solutions from sharing information and chatting on informal-group chats like WhatsApp to a dedicated investing platform which builds product journeys around investors’ communication habits.
We learnt the product requirement and goal from Finary, which is to help Finary to be a centralized place to display and share NFTs online, no matter their purchased platform. Specifically, I am responsible for leading the Research Team of 3 to recruit all users, from interviewing to testing and designing the ‘sharing’ and ‘Hide & Pin’ features. Based on Finary’s existing design system and a UI mockup of Finary gallery, we delivered an enhanced product package to fuel its growth including a market & user research report, as-is and to-be journey map, and MVP prototype iterations with 2-round usability testing results. This MVP has successfully launched in Q3 of 2022.
Case Overview
002
Opportunity & Problem
The investor chat channel and portfolio watchlist on users’ profile were two of the most frequently used applications on Finary, as such, it was an incredibly high priority to improve users’ performances around it.
Back to 2021 Q3, there were a trending that 68% users on Finary shared and discussed financial information about Web 3, including 73% of them like to discuss topics related to NFT, share NFT they purchased or related information with their social networks by pasting a link from 3rd party. When our research team spoke with Finary and non-Finary NFT holders, they all mentioned that NFT was an investment and trending thing to further explore, but the process of searching information from multiple platforms, validating to copy & paste link to group chats made them frustrated a lot. Meanwhile, existing products only enabled users to show their NFTs on portfolio. Thus, they wanted a centralized information platform enabling to access authentic information source with seamlessly sharing experience and a gallery to show NFT in a safer way.
Challenge
How might we help Finary to create a NFT Gallery feature which enables users to display their collections in a fun but safe way, and offer a sense of community with smoother sharing experience?
Metrics
Weekly Active Users, Growth of #number of meaningful conversation, Users’ time spending on Finary, NPS, Tasks’ completion rate
01
NFT Curation
How do NFTs look when people view someone’s collection on their profile?
02
NFT Profile Picture
How do NFT owners intuitively learn someone is NFT owners or regular users on Finary, like profile picture?
03
Exploring NFT Collections
How do people to search and filter the specific NFT they are looking for?
04
Sharing NFT Information
How do people share NFTs’ validated information in a smoother manner?
So, what the heck is an NFT?
An NFT is a non-fungible token with digitally collectable property and different rarities. You can imagine it as an expensive Pokemon card, but you need to purchase it with a crypto wallet.
Most people consider it as a type of investment, or a pass to join in certain communities and unblock some usages of associated GIFs, videos, etc.
Then, how about displaying your NFT and sharing it in a centralized gallery?
01
Learn information faster and share it smoother
An important part of the user journey for Finary is how users learn the NFT information and share it with others.
As a user, if I find an interesting NFT from other’s profile, I can click the NFT picture to learn core information, and immediately share it to my group on Finary or third-parties like Discord. If I want to explore more insights, I can click those validated link from third parties, like Opensea to see its historical performance and purchase it.
02
The little thing - Opensea Attachment
According to user interviews and competitor analysis, we found out that 83% users were frustrated by the tediously sharing NFT experiences by copy and paste.
We explored several new content formats that supports Finary’s core value prop, goal of this feature, and thoughtfully layered in other relevant features. Finally, we decided to pivot with the integration with Opensea’s api to access data and magical preview offered by Peekalink api to provide a preview with in-depth content in chat. Also, users are able to choose type of information on preview setting in the new design.
03
Selectively Hide & Pin NFTs
But NFT gallery isn’t what makes the Finary unique. From the 1st-round user interview, we got a baseline understanding of users’ likes and dislikes on competitors’ product. Some users were afraid to publicly display NFT, as it might disclose their tamper-resistant crypto wallet IP address and potentially cause theft to steal it. But 60% of interviewees mentioned they still want to publicly display it to show their social status in a community or our society. Back to 2021, competitors only support users to show or hide all NFTs on their gallery.
Thus, we decided to serve up a curated collection of their collection with a selective ‘Pin & Hide’ function. Meanwhile, this personalized “collection” help Finary get smarter to learn users’ preference, consistently honing its abilities on hyper-personalizing news recommendations.
04
Search & Sorting NFT on Watchlist
Learning from secondary researches, major NFT players are whale users who owns >20+ NFTs within a wide range of monetary value. Especially, NFT is a pass to enter certain communities to meet someone and unblock associated prerogative services. Then, if I am a user holding a Bored Ape Yacht Club and want to see if other Finary user owns similar one as well, how does Finary could help users to explore it easier?
As we dug into our conceptual exploration, we noticed that some of the fundamental flows in the product needed a little TLC. Thus, we provided a search bar for users to explore someone’s public collection, and a sorting feature under editing mode which enables users to efficiently sort collections within certain criteria.
Design Process - Discover & Empathize
003
01
Competitor Analysis & Secondary Researches
1. Most of competitors are NFT owner-focus, which offers a NFT gallery on their platforms and enables users to display their NFT
2. All of those platforms offer picture and information link from OpenSea
3. Most of competitors offer desktop and mobile applications with trading services
4. Except for Metalink providing a 'Join a conversation feature, users cannot directly retweet it in a community
Baseline
1. Current NFT curating experiences only supports user to display or hide all of their NFTs
2. No centralized platform with interactive feature to support users to directly share NFT image and discuss it in app
3. There is no differences between NFT users' profile and regular users
4. A fun user account experiences with levelling up system
Underserved Spaces
02
User Research
We interviewed 10 users and conducted 40 survey responses from Finary v.s Non-Finary users, and NFT v.s Non-NFT holders who owns NFT from 1 to 50+ collections and monthly investment from $10 to $1 millions USD. The goal of this research was to narrow down answers to two key questions:
Is there any motivators for users to share their NFTs collections?
Is there any traits that we can directly show the scarcity of a NFT?
What kind of potential features can facilitate users with a better sharing and discussing NFT experience?
“I wish there is a better ways of sharing NFTs in an active community and people interested in its potential”
- by Finary user, Lion
Design Process - Define
004
How is Nathan’s as-is and to-be journey from exploring an NFT to sharing related information looks like?
Based on the Journey Map, we defined the design goal of this case as follow:
Help User
1. Gain equal access of authentic NFT information
2. Represent their identity by validating and sharing their NFT collection to Finary and third-party Community
Help Finary
1. Create an interactive NFT gallery experience, as part of the growth engine
2. Prolong investor's time spent and number of meaningful messages on Finary
Then, how might we help Finary users to better explore NFTs, share related information and display NFTs he owned on Finary in a fun way 🤔?
Let’s meet Nathan first.
Design Process - Developing
005
01
1st round iteration - Create basic feature
Consume verified NFT Information
- If Nathan see a NFT from someone’s profile collections or a message in a group chat, he can click it to learn more verified information
Curation experience with selective ‘hide & pin’ feature
- If Nathan has a lot of NFTs on his gallery, but some of them are expensive or less favourite, he can selectively pin it to the 1st place in his collection or hide those expensive collections all at once
02
Second-round iteration - improvement based on 1st usability testing
Based on 1st prototype, we conducted usability test with 5 NFT holders (1 power users on Finary) to learn user's completion rate of each task and NPS score as guidance for 2nd-round iteration.
Information Architect & Default Mode
Before
After
Split default CTA color and action color
Folded related information in same hierarchy
Iterated information format and user flow with surfacing sharing link to Finary Community
Before
After
Iterated user flow for key features with UI patterns
Following information is just a snippet of many features’ iterations - sharing experiences
Reorganized individual NFT information under the NFT profile picture
Surface the link of sharing information to Finary on the top which enables users to share it to group chat by one clicking and improve information circulation in the community
Design Process - Materialize & Inspire
006
01
Takeaway
There is no one-size-fits-all solutions, and designing complex system requires systems thinking.
Focusing on the core user job to match users’ mental models to improve products’ overall impact.
02
Next Step
Due to this is an agency work, we just finished it till MVP version, but Finary’s team is continuing to test and iterate on the product design concepts we created together. We can’t wait to see how it performs in the market!