Step & Spend: Kin Crypto Competition

Step & Spend is an app that helps users stay healthy by setting daily goals for their steps counts while earning Kin cryptocurrency. With a team of 6 developers, a product manager, and myself, we worked together to complete the app in a short timeline. My responsibility is to lead all design work including research, design, spec, and branding. I also work closely with the product person to generate product ideas and growth strategies.

Kin Crypto Currency

Kin is a cryptocurrency based on monetization model that incentivizes the innovation of new use cases or values of the currency. It encourages the exchange of value between users, as opposed to harvesting user data and attention at no benefit to users themselves, creating a sense of shared economy with focus on users rather than the big-data monopolies. Using this core belief, we focused on creating a non-intrusive experience that would allow users to earn crypto while also creating connections with other users.

Understanding People’s Understanding

Initial Phase: Gathering Data

We wanted target users who had a general understanding or interest in crypto, since education of users was not our main goal. In order to gain a better insight of the audience’s mental model of crypto, we sent out a survey outlining how people define crypto, its value (or lack there of), and how people access or acquire crypto. We were able get responses to the survey through different social network sites in addition to some interviews we conducted on the side with acquaintances. Due to the scope of the project, we kept only the responses that came from the US.

Synthesis: Affinity Diagraming

After collecting the responses, we began affinity diagramming to make sense of our data. We were able to group the sticky-notes into categories of ‘Definition’, ‘Accessibility’, ‘Expertise’, and ‘Environment’. How might we…?

Persona & Pain Point

From this, we identified a few personas: expert, intermediate ,novice.

After defining the persona, we were sure we wanted to focus on the ‘Novice’ persona as our audience. We identified some common pain points experienced by people who are either very new to crypto or are trying get into crypto.

It is difficult for novices who don’t want to invest too much money or time into earning crypto to get access to small amounts of cryptocurrency they could play around with. We also found through the short interviews that these novices like to buy few pieces of crypto during their downtime or whenever they are reminded through things like related news articles or upon the topic being brought up by friends or family. Already, we can see that the engagement with cryptocurrency on a daily basis is quite low for the novice user. How might we lower the barrier to entry for novices to have more frequent engagement with the Kin cryptocurrency?

Competitive Analysis

Cryptocurrency Trading apps

Robinhood

BlockFi

Coinbase

Other Cryptocurrency apps

Crypto Word

Explorations

At first, we gravitated towards apps like CryptoWord, where the gamification aspect of cryptocurrency lowered the barrier to entry, making crypto seem less foreign and more ‘fun’. However, upon research and brief questioning we found that mobile games have been declining in popularity since year. In addition, games require dedicated time and attention, which may not appeal to novices who usually spend short amount of time on-the-go on crypto.

How might we entice and encourage users to interact with Kin on a regular basis? We put together our favorite elements from our competitive analysis along with the affinity diagram we had made with the research earlier and started exploring different ideas

Cryptocurrency SNS

We thought about how Crypto could be used for social networking, as people interact with it every day, effortlessly. We looked at the Kik app which used KIN crypto as its original currency. Users are able to create content to post to a public board and other users are able to react to it using KIN coins, similar to how Reddit uses its Karma points. While this approach addressed the problem with lack of community and frequency of interaction, it will be a difficult option to pursue, as it will rely heavily on having a big initial user base to create that sense of community. In addition, users are already attached to their existing SNS sites, dues to factors like their friends or added features like messaging or news. It would also be challenging to monitor content being produced my users even if we adopt an API to censor posts.

Cryptocurrency Pedometer

We spent some time brainstorming about activities that are simple, daily, and does not require high effort or dedicated time. One of our developers had an interesting idea.

User Flows

I began by sketching out a brief user flow of what steps a crypto-novice would go through in order to perform the main task of the app, which is to set a goal, reach their goal, and claim their Kin.

Step Gauge

The main interaction of the app is to keep track of step counts to receive Kin. Once user sets a step goal, they would have to reach that goal every day to receive Kin at all. While we wanted an effortless, simple way for users to get Kin, we still want them to accomplish the task(walking) for the feeling of achievement. So to prevent users from setting a low goal on purpose to get Kin, we made the Kin claimable proportionate to the step goal— the higher step goal user has, the more Kin they can claim for the day. I iterated on several designs that displayed the step amount. From these wireframes, emerged ideas of the ‘step gauge’, which would visually communicate to users how much percentage of their step goal they have filled. When the user fills the gauge to the end, it would give them a feeling of accomplishment.

Onboarding

The simple user flow revealed that there needs to be an onboarding process where user first sets up their daily step goal they want to reach in order to claim Kin every day. Since we wanted there to be a peer-to-peer connection for the sense of community, we decided that each user should have a profile, conveniently linked to their Google account, which would also allow us to store user information on the cloud. During the profile design, I referenced some other pedometers, thinking about reasons why someone might want to keep track of their steps. The research revealed that users didn’t want to spend dedicated time for earning crypto, so our solution should also focus on the goal of a pedometer— such as keeping track of walk time and distance in addition to number of steps. We were able to implement these metrics through HealthKit and GoogleFit API.

One of the issues with profiles was that we wanted to protect user information as much as possible, as privacy was one of the biggest concern. We looked across different pedometers and realized many store biometric information such as weight or height. We leaned away from storing any of this biometric data to keep the app as lightweight as possible for the users. Looking into biometric data and sync with devices like Fitbit is something we could explore after MVP.

Marketplace

One of the problems identified from the user flow was that there was no circulation of Kin, meaning, no output for Kin to be used within the app. The flow ends when the user earns their Kin, and a novice user may not understand or find the value of it, especially because a few piece of Kin would not translate to sizable amount of money. Together with my team, we pitched some ideas that may be an appealing in-app use of Kin.

Because the most prominent factor in the app is the big gauge in the app home, we decided to utilize it as a way for customization by letting users change its appearance. Users would be able to buy different colored gauges with Kin, creating value of Kin and allowing for circulation. Bringing back the gamification factor, we also discussed ideas for ‘boosters’ that would let users earn 2x as many Kin or be able to claim kin without reaching step goal for the day. However, for MVP, we scaled down to just the gauge customizations, as the boosters would require additional dev work.

Leader Board

Building in the profiles and username functionality allowed for users to have an alias. This ultimately allowed us to build in a peer-to-peer connection through leader board. As stated above, we wanted there to be a sense of community without revealing too much personal information to make novice users feel at ease. Leader board would surface users who had the highest step count for the day and also let other users reward them with Kin. This not only encourages users to set a higher step goal, but also to engage with the app more often to check for their scores and Kin gifts.

In the end, our user flow looked more flushed out, with clear organization of features and user goal.

User Interface & Visual Direction

For our visual direction, we wanted to lean back into the gamification aspect of our original idea to make the app look more friendly. We realized from our competitive analysis that, while a lot of the crypto apps in the wild are wrapped in fun colors and game-like interface, it was actually quite hard to navigate around due to the complicated interactions/features and overcrowding of the screen with elements lacking hierarchy.

Our focus was to make our app seem fun and modern. I stuck with blue as our main branding color to communicate trust as well as branded icons and assets that reminded me of mobile games. Using Lottie, I was able to support devs with transition animations and loading screens I’ve created in After Effects. I also created a design system for components and set them up in Zeplin for developers, which helped to have consistent visual language throughout the app.

Usability Testing

Prototype Testing

At this point, we had already built a working prototype of our app through rigorous dev work. We identified 5 users around the office who we identified as ‘novices’ and gave them access to the beta app.

There were a few main tasks we were testing for: Onboarding and setting step goal to claim Kin, Buying gauge skins from the marketplace and applying them, and accessing the leaderboard to award high score users. At the beginning of the day, we watched the participants onboard and set their step goal, then asked them to connect back with us at the end of the day once they had reached their step goals. Then, we watched them perform the rest of the tasks such as claiming their Kin and using the marketplace and leader board.

Our notes and participant feedback during this session revealed several aspects of the design that worked well but also places we could make improvements on. I organized the common patterns from each task which we could incorporate into our designs.

Incorporating Learnings

We were glad to find that the main task of onboarding and claiming kin was very straightforward for the users. People liked the simple onboarding process that kept the personal information required to start the process to a minimum as well as the ability to set their own username. However, they were unclear about the need for their Google account. We could look into being more transparent by giving a notice to users that their account is only being used to store their information on the cloud.

In addition, during the step goal set up, we saw users try to tap into the actual number instead of using the slider, which we went ahead and implemented, as it was a universal pattern that also allows users to be more exact and in control of their units. Additionally, they wished to see their Kin count straight from home, as that was one of the most important element for people to see.

Lastly, we discovered that leader board was one of the least used features. One of the biggest problem was that there was no incentive to reward other users other than ‘feel good’ factor of encouraging others. In addition, they wished they could access the profiles of other users and possible add them as friends. We discussed future possibilities of incorporating bonuses for users who encourage high-scorer’s consecutively, but for now, were satisfied that users were able to understand how to use the feature.

Reflections

In two short months, my team and I were able to conceptualize, develop, test, and release an app in both iOS and Android platform that could help novice users engage with Kin cryptocurrency effortlessly and daily. In the past years, cryptocurrency has been a rapidly growing field that bridges technology and finance. Like any new technology, it is essential that newcomers feel welcomed through low barrier of entry and low risk in order for cryptocurrency to continue its growth.

If we were given more time, I would have wanted to explore the community and incentive portion of the app more. In addition, we could have explored the notifications more, reminding users to get back into the app to claim Kin or to encourage them when they’re close to the step goal.

Step&Spend currently has 100+ downloads and is one of the only apps to sync cryptocurrency with healthy habits. We were also able to claim the prize for the early submitter prize for the Kin competition. Working as the sole design lead for this project, I was able to learn how to project manage and self-direct an end-to-end design process. This project also gave me an insight into the app development and release, including the legal and technical complications of the process. Ultimately, it challenged and improved my skills as a well-rounded designer.