My Role

• UX Research and Design / UI Design

• Branding

• Product Development

Results

• Went from non-functional prototype to polished product in three months, navigating challenging regulatory and technical requirements.

• Developed a UX solution that became an independent business

• Created a Design System robust enough to support white-labeled additional products.

Ronin One aimed to be the first app to truly deliver the promise of blockchain to the ordinary person.

Blockchain is a common buzzword in tech, but for Ronin it represented revolutionary potential. What if people could interact with and use their money without relying on a bank? What if they could hold their money in any way they wanted? Ronin was a team of extremely talented developers, security pros, and financial experts who dreamed of making this a reality. The dev team were world class level security experts, hackers, and coders.

I became obsessed with solving some of blockchain’s stickier UX problems, and producing a world class app worthy of the technology behind it.

Not a bank. Better.

Ronin was envisioned as a way to fully interact with blockchain based digital currencies. In order to be a full solution, it needed to allow users to do everything they could do with a banking app, but completely independently of an institution. That meant buying, selling, sending, and investing money all in one. It needed to be as secure as possible, and stay 100% on the phone.

So simple it is dangerous

Achieving smooth UX with blockchain required extreme attention to detail. We wanted users to be able to “think in euros” even as they interacted with exotic currencies. Thus the flows were designed so that they felt as natural, human, and familiar as possible. At the same time, we had to carefully design for the many edge-cases presented by blockchain. Rapid price movements needed to be addressed, explained, and accounted for in a transparent and fair way. Fees needed to be clear and concise. Transitions to third party payment and banking apps needed to be flawless. Close collaboration with developers and rapid prototyping and testing resulted in flows that one early user called “dangerously simple.”

The Pizza Problem

While working on Ronin it became clear that the currencies themselves were part of the user experience. This was described as the “Pizza Problem",” or “how do I pay a friend back for pizza?”

Rather than shrug and say “that’s bitcoin,” I collaborated with the company’s expert blockchain developers and bankers to developed our own stable, blockchain based currencies. Now we had a good UX solution for blockchain users. They could hold bitcoin as an investment, but pay each other in EuroX, a 100%-Euro-backed currency.

By solving this UX problem outside the typical world of design, we created a new method for minting stable coins in blockchain. The company founders were so pleased that the newly branded “X tokens” were branched off into their own, profitable company. They became a core part of the UX, allowing Ronin’s userbase to benefit from the freedom and speed of blockchain while still working in familiar units.

Design System

Ronin was a complex app, so the design needed to be stable, simple, and modular. To achieve this I designed Ronin using a component library and systems thinking. This approach was refined during development to the point that the whole app could be white-labeled using a json file and icon pack. This not only provided much needed structure and stability, but also helped the user experience feel more solid, cohesive, and safe. After all, when you are working to make the future you must also be trustworthy.

Challenges become opportunities

As a blockchain-based financial app, Ronin needed to be best-in-class in the eyes of regulators, tax authorities, and banks. As the app was plugged in to the wider financial system, key partnerships, like the collaboration with ING bank, were needed in order to maintain a strong and healthy connection with the world of traditional finance. To achieve this, the highest standard was imposed on KYC (Know your customer). From a UX point of view, gathering photos of the user and asking for facial verification is typically not the best way to make friends with your user. Since Ronin did not aim to be typical, however, the process was turned into an opportunity to show off some high technology and smooth transitions. This helped optimize the onboarding funnel and increase the number of users converting all the way through the process.