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BNC Pro – Building a window to the crypto ecosystem

For crypto to succeed, the user experience must improve. Here, Yve Bourke (Head of BNC Pro) and George Rosier (Product & UX Manager) discuss the crypto user experience and how they’ve optimized this in the new BNC Pro portfolio management platform.

There is a perception that crypto applications suffer from a user experience issue. For example, many wallets are intimidating for new users, and decentralized exchanges are notoriously clunky and difficult to navigate. What is the macro view here?

Yve Bourke: UX is only a problem when you get it wrong. UX is at the heart of a great product and mass adoption of any product is dependant on an intuitive, seamless user experience. The crypto industry is competing with traditional financial industries where great UX standards have been set over long periods. This is challenging in crypto as the level of complexity is greater and the inputs are less developed, standardized or regulated. Despite this, the customer expectation of seamless UX is the same. Making the complex simple is a challenging but necessary outcome for success.

George Rosier: One of crypto’s strengths is privacy – untraceable, anonymous, transactions. That can jar against good UX, which often relies on personalization and the ability to ‘remember’ a user. The crypto sphere itself can be esoteric which tends to attract a particular mindset, and that is amplified when trying to build something. That’s why so many of the early crypto applications were command line based and not user friendly at all. They were built by developers for technical users. To scale a product you need a customer-focused, creatively aligned approach – two good qualities of a UX practitioner.

BNC Pro is an ‘all-in-one’ portfolio solution for crypto traders and investors. How did you approach the challenge of creating an interface that needs to present a multitude of data views?

YB: The concept of a ‘market place’ has been around for some time now, so we looked at the wider market and took learnings from these. Early on in the development process, we had UX input from people in the organization that had previous experience building a marketplace/all-in-one platform, which proved helpful. We recognize we have some evolution to do in this space, particularly with pricing, cross-app integration and developing more flexibility for our users. We want to build a base of quality apps, essential for investment decision making and build on these with requirements driven by the needs of our customers.

GR: It is a challenge – a single-page website for a cafe will have different requirements that could never be accommodated in a product like ours. With BNC Pro – both the customer and the product are technical and in-depth. We are early in the journey, so we’re at the stage of using in-house knowledge and insight to build what we think is right, and then test/learn/iterate. To that end, there aren’t hard and fast UX rules, it’s more about applying the right principles.

How important has feedback in the Alpha and Beta stages been to the evolution of the BNC Pro user interface?

YB: This feedback has been crucial. In the Alpha phase, it was clear that we had one aspect of our solution wrong. We wanted to allow the user to group assets within their portfolios, but the UX turned out to be sub-optimal. Our users told us that they “didn’t get it” and those that did found it hard to navigate. We used the feedback and ran a Hackathon to revisit the feature in a way that would make sense to our users. We implemented our tagging feature as a result and have had a great response to this.

GR: Super important. And the feedback loop never stops: after Alpha and Beta we’ll be developing a customer community group to continue testing new ideas. One example was how our first pass at the ‘top-up’ function (the ability to buy BNC Pro tokens) works. Turns out we got it the wrong way around, so we altered it shortly after receiving the feedback.

What experiences from other applications you have developed have you been able to apply to BNC Pro?

YB: My number one rule is ‘be your own customer.’ I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who work in Development, Product, UX/UI, and Marketing that don’t use the products they’re building. The simple act of taking on your target persona and walking the customer journey reaps huge benefits. The other learning is to listen to your gut. If it doesn’t feel right, it usually isn’t. When I first started in crypto it was a steep learning curve and I was reluctant to call out bad product development, but I look back and recognize that my first thoughts were very much in line with what our users thought – it’s just common sense.

GR: Because every product is different, it’s the principles that are important. Having a customer mindset, and being happy to be wrong or not know the answer. In this industry, a lot of what we’re doing hasn’t been done before, so there are no direct examples to draw from. So we researched other industries, came up with some ideas put them through our feedback loop to see what worked and what didn’t.

What are some of the weaknesses in other portfolio platforms that BNC Pro addresses?

YB: It’s the quality of the data. In time it will also be the ability to get everything you need in one place. Currently crypto is a small but massively competitive industry. There are lots of great apps out there, but very few offer everything with the level of accuracy that the traditional markets enjoy. The time that Brave New Coin has invested in building its crypto taxonomy gives us visibility of the attributes that can drive pricing and decisions around investment. We are using this knowledge to build out on-chain metrics, social metrics, and greater pricing depth, allowing our users to look at the trends and triggers that drive market movement and utilize this to maximize their strategy.

GR: The biggest one is the access to comprehensive, robust data. Without this, Brave New Coin would not even be building BNC Pro. Brave New Coin’s BLX and ELX indices are market-leading, institutional-grade data, and surfacing this quality into the BNC Pro app via Screener, Charting and so on is the differentiator. Add to that the curated Newsfeed, and the capabilities of some of our partners – such as Into The Block (a blockchain analysis company) – and you have a product that’s extremely powerful.

Is there anything unique about the crypto that impacts the user experience? For example, security issues such as password and key management?

YB: The biggest challenge we face is the standardization of data from exchanges. It makes it difficult to integrate with exchanges with a high degree of accuracy and given the data is open source there’s no ability to demand a higher standard. In the traditional financial industry data is paid for and with this comes a greater quality. Input = Output.

GR: Timeliness of transactions is an interesting challenge as blockchains sometimes take up to 10 mins to register a transaction. We’ve had to be very mindful of how customers expect instant responses and so have built some features that mimic ‘instant’ but actually are waiting for confirmations on-chain in the background.

From the perspective of the users – what do you think is the main UX UI problem that has been solved in BNC Pro? What are you most proud of in that regard?

YB: Something we’ve tried a new approach with is our payment model. We’ve tried to do two things differently; 1. Allow users to pay with crypto, our own BNC token, Ether, BTC or credit card and 2. A ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. This will allow users to pay for pro features as they use them but doesn’t tie them to ongoing payments for features they don’t use.

GR: An awesome macro view of user portfolios, with clear P&L.

BNC Pro is a cryptocurrency management platform that integrates a user’s portfolio and trading data with a customizable suite of institutional-grade analysis and research applications. The platform is free to use – with access to premium features unlocked via the BNC utility token. The BNC token is the world’s first digitized transferable software license enabling micro-transactions.


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