PolkaFantasy
NFT Marketplace Beta
Web3 Marketplace
Role: UX Design / Project Manager
Team: Design Manager, 2 In-house designers, 1 Senior developer & 3 outsource developers.
Duration: 6 months
Product Background
The purpose of the NFT marketplace was to provide a unique space for creators and collectors of NFTs with an appreciation for Japanese anime, comics, and gaming culture (JACG). PolkaFantasy NFT Marketplace Beta was the first iteration of the product which would allow users to create, sell and purchase NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
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My Role
Responsible for conducting research, refining the sitemap, user flows, creating lo-fi designs, and prototyping.
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Research
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As the main UX designer for the project, I tried to endorse a design thinking approach for the development of this product. Although time was extremely limited I insisted on spending some time to try and understand our target audience. Broad personas were created with the intention of updating them throughout the project as we gained information to help focus my design efforts toward anime and gaming enthusiasts. Competitive analysis was also carried out to understand more about existing products in the space, as well as the fast-emerging NFT industry as a whole circa 2021.
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From the research conducted, we could only conclude that the majority of our users could be described as ‘collectors’. My competitive analysis would also help us in deciding what core features were expected and which ones we should prioritise for our own design.
Ideate
With the limited resources available to the project we jumped straight to drafting a sitemap and mapping out the user flows. We went through several iterations with input and feedback from members of the team. Discussions around limitations and confirming flows from a technical perspective were also considered, before being developed further into a lo-fi design and then prototyped.
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Prototype & Test
With user flows confirmed I finalised a prototype for all team members to test and provide feedback. I noted down all comments and prioritised any changes if they made sense from a UX perspective. After a couple of rounds of iteration, the hi-fi design was applied, which was designed by a colleague.
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Partway through the project, I was also assigned with managing the project due to some team restructuring. This consisted of driving weekly meetings with an outsource vendor team and ensuring that the project would be completed within a tight schedule.
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Outcomes & Lessons
In December 2021, PolkaFantasy NFT Marketplace Beta was launched. Over 50k USD in sales was generated on the first day of launch. This was achieved in conjunction with an artist collaboration campaign as well as releasing our own commemorative PolkaFantasy NFT.
The main challenges for this project were not having sufficient time for thorough research and being able to gather more detailed information for creating our personas. This meant that although we managed to curate a lot of authentic Japanese anime and gaming-related artwork, the marketplace itself remained relatively generic in terms of features. Without a specific feature to help solve our target group's needs a lot of the success would ride on marketing campaigns.
Another big challenge was taking the reigns of a project manager role part way through production and juggling the workload of 2 roles.