Lava Mobile Wallet

Context

I was tasked at Lava to design their consumer product, a self-custodial mobile crypto wallet. I was the sole designer working on this app alongside the two co-founders and one front-end designer to implement this project. I was responsible for designing the wallet’s UX/UI, its visual design, establishing an initial design system, and understanding its potential users.

Custodial Solutions Failures

2022 was the year in cryptocurrency where custodial solutions was showing its flaws. With the lack of oversight combined with sudden volatility of asset prices, custodial solutions began to fail and become insolvent. An estimated of $40 Billion+ of assets were lost from consumers and investors in 2022. It was clear a need for excellent self-custody solutions were needed.

Custodial Vs. Self Custody: A custodial wallet is a type of cryptocurrency wallet that is managed by a third party, while a self-custodial wallet is one in which the user holds their own private keys, therefore giving the owner full control over their funds.

40$ Billion+ of assets lost in 2022 alone

The Problem: How might we create a safer, simpler, and holistic financial experience where users have full control of their funds with self-custody.

Building a Better Financial Future

Current self-custody solutions are complicated and limited. Lava worked to make self-custody more simple and holistic with a few solutions:

>Lava believed Bitcoin was the best asset to center its financial experience around for its high liquidity, network security, and adoption. Focusing on one asset also helps simplify the experience.
>Lava also understood Bitcoin was harder to spend with due to volatility and vender adoption, therefore pairing Bitcoin with Stablecoins functionality to better able to use your Bitcoin with ease.
>Bring Defi to Bitcoin with Lava’s Borrowing Protocol which uses discrete log contracts (invisible smart contracts) and gasless relayers making it easy to borrow off your Bitcoin without losing access.

Target Users

The strategy was to focus on connecting with users that most believed in holding Bitcoin. Lava wanted its users to take actions similarly to those saving in a traditional bank account, but with Bitcoin. Based on conversations with users in the ecosystem, this user behavior was exhibited from three groups that Lava wanted to capture:

Bitcoiners

Crypto familiar users that highly value Bitcoin or deeply believe in Bitcoin as an ideology.

Miners

Crypto miners who are looking for ways to keep their Bitcoin rewards while paying off expenses.

Third World Users

Users living in countries in which their national currency is heavily devalued or lack of access to financial resources.

Understanding The Ecosystem

Before starting to design in medium fidelity, I did a comprehensive analysis of multiple crypto wallets and neo-bank apps.

Mapping Out The Main Features

There was three main features that were to be built out for Lava mobile wallet version 1 release. Before starting to design medium fidelity wireframes, user flow maps were made.

Basic Wallet Features: Receiving and Sending Crypto
Loan Features: Creating a new loan contract and paying off a loan
Onboarding: Manual Recovery of an existing wallet or creating a new seed phrase.

New Loan Creation User Flow

Repaying a Loan User Flow

Design

The goal was to make this crypto wallet as familiar and simple as possible. A lot of time was spent iterating on how to use traditional banking experiences in a crypto setting. How can we make crypto less foreign and less complicated to newcomers. Some ways we did this was:

Using familiar language used in banking
Only showing necessary information
Adding info toggles explaining new terms

Focusing on experimenting with the asset homepage and Bitcoin asset page after sketching out in medium fidelity

Design iteration of the Bitcoin asset page

Finalizations

Iteration of the active loan page. Moving to a cleaner design by condensing loan boxes and allowing a swipe gesture for repayment flow.

Reflection

There was a lot of lessons learned while working on this product. I was very content with the end result of this project. I learned how to balance a lot of variables, establish my very first design system, and working with very tight engineering bandwidths. If I could do anything different, I would’ve tried to push further on simplifying the new loan creation experience and do usability tests with the prototype I made.