Company: Certhis – Role: Product Designer (Freelance) – Tools Used: Adobe XD, Illustrator, Miro
Certhis is an early-stage startup willing to revolutionize the NFT creation, management, and deployment.
The Market problem
Despite the buzz around NFTs, several significant barriers hinder widespread adoption by creators and businesses:
- Lack of Blockchain Specialists and Developers: A shortage of experts complicates the development and management of NFT projects.
- Unclear NFT Ownership: Existing platforms often lack mechanisms for establishing clear NFT ownership and rights.
- Underdeveloped Automated Platforms: Current NFT platforms offer insufficient automation for creation and management.
- Limited Minting Systems: There are no systems designed for large-scale NFT creation and minting.
- Restricted Publishing Options: NFTs are often only publishable on specific marketplaces, limiting their exposure.
- Underutilization of Branding and Marketing: Many businesses fail to effectively leverage their brand and marketing strategies in the NFT space.
The Possible Solution
- Simplify NFT Management: Create a streamlined, intuitive interface for NFT creation, management, and deployment to lower user entry barriers.
- Integrate User Experience: Develop a unified platform that consolidates various NFT and blockchain functionalities, minimizing the need for multiple tools.
- Enhance Accessibility: Design an interface that caters to users with diverse technical expertise, making Web3 and NFTs more approachable.
- Ensure Scalability: Build a flexible, scalable solution capable of adapting to evolving market trends and technological advancements.
- For Creators: Provide tools for seamless creation, minting, and selling of NFTs.
- For Businesses: Enable businesses to convert products into NFTs, publish them on their websites or e-commerce platforms, and create 3D NFTs for integration into major metaverses and virtual stores.
When I joined the project during its conceptual phase, my role was to translate this vision into a practical, user-friendly, and scalable beta platform.
As a freelance product designer, I was tasked with:
- Translating Vision: Converting the founders’ abstract ideas into a clear, intuitive user experience.
- Simplifying Processes: Streamlining complex NFT and blockchain functionalities for ease of use.
- Ensuring Scalability: Designing a flexible solution that evolves with market trends and technological advancements.
- Designing for Diversity: Crafting an interface that accommodates users with varying levels of technical expertise.
To make verify those assumptions and hypothesis and make sure this solution is complete I also recommended some user research to make sure the strategy is complete (if not for the launch, for the next phases of the product roadmap).
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Empathize : User Research & Discovery
- User Research: Analyzed user behavior and pain points across major platforms like Discord, OpenSea, and Binance.
- Potencial User Interviews: Qualitative talks with an NFT creator.
- Stakeholder Interviews: Conducted in-depth meetings with the founders to grasp their vision, goals, and expectations as they also did some qualitative interviews with some of their contacts that were less approachable for me.
- Terminology Immersion: Gained proficiency in crypto jargon to ensure effective communication with the target audience.
- Empathy Mapping: to empathize with what those users think, feel and do.
- Personas: Analysis of the Target Audiences and their different pain points.
- Designed user journey maps to understand how users try and solve their problem without Certhis.
2 – Define User Needs and Problems
- Analyzing our audiences’ problems & needs: listing all problems our audiences are facing.
- Defining the success criteria: Established clear goals for the MVP, including attracting early adopters, onboarding creators, engaging businesses, and ensuring blockchain compatibility.
- Competitor Analysis: Reviewed competitor features to understand industry standards and identify differentiation opportunities.
- Value Proposition: Developed a compelling value proposition to ensure the platform’s intuitiveness, even for newcomers to Web3 and NFTs.
3. Ideate
- Team Workshop: Organized a workshop to make sure everyone was aligned on the problems we were trying to solve, where everyone could share his insights and discoveries and where we made a list of all possible solutions for the problem Certhis tried to solve.
- Initial Hand drawn sketches (on white board): Developed and iterated on sketches and concepts to visualize potential solutions.
- Feature Prioritization: Collaborated with the team to prioritize features for the initial launch.
- Team Decision: evaluated all potential solutions and chose the most viable and effective solutions for those ideas based on feasibility, relevancy, desired position in the market, time and human resources.
4 – Design
- Defining the Product Architecture and User Flows: Designed system structure and user interactions for intuitive use, organizing features with flow charts and refining based on co-founder feedback.
- Wireframes: Designed low-fidelity wireframes and explain their purpose.
- Mockups & Prototypes: Presented high-fidelity mockups and interactive prototypes. Explain how they evolved through feedback and iterations.
- Design System: Prepared the design systems and style guides used for the developers to implement the design.
