Bulios

I was asked to join the Bulios team as Lead Designer for the project as results of previous successful cooperation on other projects. I was part of small agile team that decided to firstly build an MVP of Bulios that would be followed by rapid iterations based on direct feedback from users.

Our main goal was to combine heavy social aspect of discussions with focus on investing strategies, individual stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Goals and persona discovery

Our main goal for MVP version of Bulios was to provide quick and straightforward way to voice ideas of investors in easily digested way. This goal was distilled from discussions with members of investment communities as well as the lack of a similar tool at the time.

Throughout the process we identified main persona of a young tech savvy investor that seeks opinions and advices from other members of local community. Thanks to the persona, we also identified secondary goals such as a need to quickly link and look up information about specific stocks and cryptocurrencies as well as a high need to access the information quickly on the go through smartphone.

Next part of the discovery process was to ingest business goals of the project and combine them with the discovered users goals into requirements for MVP of the project. In case of Bulios, business goals were to engage the users in discussions and afterwards offer paid market overviews and advices by professionals in the field.

Brainstorming and sketching

First version of the simple design was based on hypothesis originating from validating the solutions of goals against the persona. These solutions were then presented and discussed with stakeholders in quick iterations. This allowed us to form a first version of the product design fairly quickly.

At this stage, we were usually presenting sketches of intended solutions and updating the details on the fly. First version of the design included a common feed with posts from other users. Each post was connected to a specific page with branching discussion supporting the social aspect of the page. Product was also connected to the database of stocks and cryptocurrencies and each mention of them created a clickable label with a link to the page with detailed data.

I was also responsible for defining the basic rules for UI design. Given the character of the product and quick iterations needed to launch as soon as possible I chose very clean and minimalist design which was easy to develop and prioritized content over graphics.

Design was based on simple grayscale color palette with one dominant color used on primary and active elements. Additional colors were used sparingly to distinguish between different categories of topics or specific ranks of users or to communicate the semantics of rising or falling markets.

Iterations of the design

Once the MVP version of the product was build, it was launched with the selected group of users. Feedback was collected via interviews and surveys and iterated upon. Close cooperation between stakeholders was essential to resolve all of the discovered pain points.

Some of the discovered pain points and solutions to them were:

• Users did not have enough direct information about the authors of the posts or users in discussion. As a solution to this, we decided to create a popover window shown on each mention of the user on the web. Popover window contains more metadata about the user.
• Users expressed their wish to see real time moves on the main world markets all the time. We solved this wish by adding a dynamic top-level overview bar available on each page in contrasting color scheme to be properly visible and visually distinguished from the rest of the product.
• To proper show the value of the product, we decided to add dynamic featured stocks on the most used page of the product. This provided users with tips to interesting stocks as well as shown reactions to the movements of the market.
• We encountered a pain point with the longer sign up process which affected the adoption rate. We solved this by removing unnecessary fields from the registration form and by adding quick sign up options using the Google, Facebook and Seznam (local company) features.
• We noticed that when users interacted with the product, they wanted to access their favorite stocks and users from centralized place. For this reason, we added the option to create personalized stock portfolios and added a more robust Follow functionality to the backlog.

There were more of the smaller changes that we were able to identify and rectify quite soon thanks to the chosen approach to the development. We also did multiple iterations of this feature hunting and ended up with the updated MVP version of the product ready to launch.

Continuous cooperation

I stayed as an outside part of the team to provide a design perspective when new and interesting feedback from users is gathered or when new features for the project are needed.

I enjoy the quick cooperation with the team and very agile (and sometimes slightly punk-ish) approach to the development of the fresh and highly specific project.

We are currently planning on adding quite a few new features regarding better overview of the markets, aforementioned following functionality and social groups for users with similar interests. Thanks to the quick start, we now have a bit more time to figure out the new features.

Outcome and takeaways

Outcome of this project is a quickly developed application that is used by  more than 100 000 enthusiastic users on different platforms. Application is in active development. Stakeholders of the project understand the value of the user feedback and the role of UX in product development which is a great start to a successful cooperation.

However, quick development often comes with the drawbacks. One of the biggest drawbacks of the approach on this project is the lack of polish in the details. Many of the small things considered during the design phase did not get into the final product due to time constraints. Some of these issues are mostly visual but there are those that affect the usability more directly. My goal during the continued cooperation is to try and push to fix these issues as well as deliver new and interesting features to the users.