NFT Discount
Integrating NFT utilities to enhance platform engagement.
2023 | Nansen
Time frame: 1,5 month
My roles: Researcher, UX, and UI designer
Disclaimer: The visual language could not be changed completely as we had to stay as much within the company's design system as possible and maintain visual coherence with other platform jobs.
Contextualizing
Opportunity
Nansen partnered with NFTs collections where proven ownership will unlock certain utility tied to the Nansen platform.
Goal
Establish potentially long term relationships with NFT collections, and other tokenized groups/communities that allows Nansen direct access to a captive user group already engrained in the space in exchange for real world utility to their community members in the form of access to Nansen’s platform (such as a 20% or 50% discount on a subscription).
Constraints and Limitations
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Community members who would be new Nansen users can easily leverage the discount
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Community members who are current Nansen users are still able to redeem a discount, however, that would entail forfeiting their current subscription.
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Access to a discount is only redeemable if you have an NFT that is part of the collection. However, access is not tied to the NFT. This means that a user can hold an NFT, redeem the associated discount, sell the NFT, and still retain the discounted subscription. The buyer of the sold NFT can now also redeem the discount.
Success Metrics
Pre Deployment
Goal: Identify 3-5 NFT’s or DAO’s to partner with
Tracking: - LobsterDao - Sneaky Vampire Syndicate - Mochi Moshi - Doge Pound
Post Deployment
Goal: 500 new users as a result of NFT based discount partnerships within 1.5 months of release
Metric: - will need to leverage metabase for this.
- update as of 7/27: Using big query and code
Research
This initial research was broad. My main goal was to better understand the market, the users' wishes and possibilities. It served as the basis for starting to structure the project.
Web2 vs Web3
The first stage of my research was to understand the difference between web2 and web3.
Web2: We are currently living in the Web 2.0 era. Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter control this version of the internet. Most of these platforms are free, but internet users pay them with their personal information.
Web3: Web 3.0 wants to take power away from big tech companies and give it back to the people. It promotes decentralized networks based on blockchain technology.
Since this is a platform for people who are immersed in the blockchain universe, adding this possibility was very important. For this reason this was the most requested by users (93% of users said they wanted to login using their wallets)
NFT discount
Before starting the project, I did some research to see if other platforms were offering discounts through NFTs. I also asked around internally in the company, since the vast majority of employees are crypto native and use several related products.
At the time I did this research I could not find any platform that offered this.
In a user survey, this was one of the comments regarding the possibility of gaining a discount with NFTs:
"This option is unique and new to me and I would love to see it actually happen as it will bring a whole new dimension to NFT utilities."
otterbeer | 22 - Male (Familiar and owns NFTs)
Flows
Based on the use cases, I created two flows, one for existing users and one for new users.
The first use case is the sign up process and the second one, the interaction would be done in the settings page.
Lo-fi wireframes
After creating and understanding the flow and realizing the steps that would be added to the current flow, I made lo-fi wireframes. The goal was to start to get an idea of the positioning of the elements and to test this first flow with users to see if it was easy to navigate.
Note: For strategic reasons, it was decided that we would focus only on the sing up flow. The other flow ended up not being developed due to changes in priorities of the company. So, from this point on, I will only show the development of use case 1.
Validation
For the validation I created a prototype with lo-fi wireframes and did unmoderated user testing. For this I used a platform called User Testing.
The users had to perform tasks in the prototype. They were also asked to narrate out loud what they were doing and their impressions.
Visual studies
Once I had figured out what changes had to be made, which pages were to be designed and redesigned, I began the visual studies stage.
The goal here was to look for references and understand the layout of the elements for the final version.
The UI that I studied and designed at this stage was only the NFT discount one. The others were either finished by other quads or I used already existing components from the design system, which did not require in-depth studies.
Mockups
I made the mockups based on the wireframes and previous studies. The new pages that were not studied in depth either used components that already existed in our design system or were small adaptations of existing pages.
After making the mocks, they were shared with the entire quad, so Q&As and developers could provide Feedback. In green are the points raised that were worked on in the iterations.
Iterations
I made the mockups based on the wireframes and previous studies. The new pages that were not studied in depth either used components that already existed in our design system or were small adaptations of existing pages.
After making the mocks, they were shared with the entire quad, so Q&As and developers could provide Feedback. In green are the points raised that were worked on in the iterations.
Learnings
Though we didn't achieve our target as quickly as hoped, the outcome was a cause for celebration within the company, particularly since we fell short of our initial NFT and DAO objectives. At my departure, we were in the process of establishing new partnerships, paving the way for future success.
This project was a significant learning curve. With no existing benchmarks, we crafted a workflow from scratch, a task both fascinating and daunting. The lack of industry precedents meant learning on the fly, delving into unfamiliar territory, and quickly scaling the steep learning curve to gain the necessary confidence and expertise.