Role: Sole & Founding Lead Product Designer, managed strategizing with business side/stakeholders and building hand-in-hand with the engineering team.

Duration: 6 Months (June 2022 - December 2022)

YaaS (Yield as a Service) is a next-generation, bank-grade digital asset yield analytics and products platform. It is one of a list of new and innovative products available to Stablecorp customers.

YaaS provides investors with compliant access to multi-currency, multi-chain CeFi and DeFi yield opportunities. YaaS provides a seamless connection to early-entrant yield opportunities in the crypto-asset space while maintaining bank-grade risk mitigation, collateralization, and insurance.

YaaS is one of the leaders in Canada’s CeFI & DeFi space, transacting over millions in CAD for Canadian investors per month.

Around July 2022, YaaS Digital approached us with the idea for improving their product’s experience. They wanted to achieve two main goals, ditch the current use of excel sheets and create a better user experience for their banking analysts to be able to work with, the second was they were looking into creating a web application for investors to be able to log in and view their holdings & investments verse rather than getting a statement over mail or email on a monthly basis.

To begin, we were given a PRD that contained information about the product and their objective, desired features, mini mockup and goals they were looking to get out of this newly worked product. We also had a meeting to discuss the timeline and to fill out any gaps or questions with the project given in hand.

I started off by getting access to the system and analyzing how it’s current user experience, I wanted to familiar with the product before asking any stakeholders questions, conducting any interviews and getting feedback from the initial users of the products so there’s no gaps in knowledge when we hear insight about the current pain points the users plead.

We do this by running a workshop, the goals were to first go through the entire product freely for 5-10 minutes, then we try to accomplish set of timed tasks given on a word document I had wrote previously before conducting this workshop. This was to give us a brief understanding of the current user flows.

Once that was done I took 1-2 hours to complete perform a heuristic evaluation of the whole application and document the following; screenshots of the issue, heuristic trait, severity rating, notes and recommendations for improvement. This was done to help us understand the issues without spoiling our findings with personal opinions rather to the standards given (Jakob Nielsen's Heuristic Evaluation system).

Now that we had a grasp of the product, I started to run interviews & surveys with current users to get insight into the goods and pain points of the current product, we conducted these interviews through a process, we first created a document, discussed and built a interview script that would help us efficiently gain as much insight as possible.

The interviews were done through a recorded zoom call, the users were asked non bias open ended questions with no restrictions to gain true insight on the core issues these users were being affected with. They freely spoke as much as they liked to about the ups and downs of the product throughout the questions, later wewould review the recording and separate all the goods and pain points.

One last thing before we leave discovery, I wanted to view the current markets products to see how they compare to us, goods and pain points. I went ahead and started to analyze the similar products in this niche, conducted a mini evaluation and documented the finding we were looking to receive.

All this information was gathered and put into a doc to now help us to make our design decisions and strategy.

All the findings above were then presented to the PM and stakeholders at our next sprint meeting. We wanted to showcase the pain points from the current product stand point so everyone understood where we established our upcoming design decisions and strategy.

Now we start. With all the all that we have discovered, the next objective was to use the core issues and find all the possible opportunities on where we can improve the product. We first created epics and user stories based off our discovery doc, from there we used that information to then transition each epic/user story into several user flows built in sketch/lo-fi wireframe format. That’s where the recreation of the product starts.

Our process was quite straight forward, it was to create 1-5 user flow wireframe prototypes per sprint, review them at our reoccurring sprint meetings with the PM & Stakeholders, make iterations if needed, repeat then finalize to mid-fi wireframes. This was the most efficient process to create a great end product to conduct user testing on. This was version 1.0 of our product, still in early stages.

Now was the most important step, user testing with our initial users. The goal here was to find out if we have fixed the outstanding issues in the current product and any other outlying flaws. We created multiple user interview scripts with the use of our previously made epics/user stories and had the users perform the tasks over recorded zoom call for us to analyze after.
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We repeated this testing for 5 rounds with the scripts randomized again and new set of user testers as well till we were happy with the outcome.

It was time to make the product perfect, while creating and testing the wireframes we were also starting the design system, creating any necessary documentation, making everything pixel perfect, responsive and ready to be handed off to developers.

Before doing so we showcase our final iterations one more time to the PM & stakeholders to get final approval and also run 2 more rounds of user testing more focused on accessibility purposes with a third party user testing pool.

Final steps! Here I try to make the developers lives as easy as possible and to not cause any blockers or hiccups for them due to neglect from a designer to hand off incorrectly, I come from a software background so I have a soft spot for developers (I understand the frustrations!!!)

YaaS Digital is now a fully functioning product that doesn’t receive much updates (benefits from testing early). The client and users are very happy with the outcome since the product does everything they were hoping for. Since then YaaS Digital has raised more capital and continues to assist hundreds of clients and other businesses.