Methods & Tools

Target Users: Current and Prospective Bitcoin Owners

While there are a variety of cryptocurrencies on the market, we are focusing on Bitcoin specifically, as it is the oldest, most well-known, and most established cryptocurrency with the highest market cap, meaning that it is the most dominant cryptocurrency on the market.

Online Survey

• Validate the assumption that users want to keep their Bitcoin in their bank
• Determine the tools Bitcoin owners use to store and manage their Bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies
• Understand Bitcoin owners’ experiences with and perceptions of Bitcoin
• Gauge Bitcoin owners’ attitudes about storing and managing their Bitcoin/other cryptocurrencies through their bank

• Allows us to obtain a large amount of information in a relatively short amount of time with minimal resources required
• Allows anonymity and confidentiality which helped mitigate the concern of leaking sensitive financial data

• Participants: 124 current or prospective Bitcoin holders
• Recruitment: We utilized convenience sampling to gather responses from multiple sources including friends, family, and social media contacts. We also encouraged respondents to further disperse the survey to others, effectively utilizing snowball sampling.
• Analysis: Descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized to evaluate our survey results.

Semi-Structured Interview

• Obtain a more in-depth understanding of Bitcoin owners’ pain points of current management platforms
• Gather Bitcoin holders’ overall attitudes towards Bitcoin in multiple aspects
• Understand users’ motivations for getting involved with the Bitcoin market, their experience, their regular Bitcoin trading habits, platforms they currently use, their expectations for Bitcoin’s future values, and their concerns

• Allows us to get a more in-depth understanding of the perspective from an interviewee through open-ended questions
• Enables us to ask follow-up questions to clarify any queries that we may have during the interview

• Participants: 5 current or prospective Bitcoin holders
• Recruitment: We utilized convenience sampling to recruit from multiple sources including friends, family, and social media contacts.
• Analysis: Affinity diagramming was used to uncover themes and insights from the interviews.

Findings & Insights

"Losing access to a wallet and never recovering it is also a huge concern. People have lost a lot of money since they no longer remember their wallet details or a company shuts down..."

-Participant 3

Utilizing the data gathered from our user needs research, we created two personas and two empathy maps that were used to inform our subsequent research and designs.

Persona 1: Zayden Rodriguez

Persona 2: Aria Malaali

Wireframe Moderated Usability Testing

• Determine the usability of the multiple workflows that we had designed within our application
• Gather the opinions and reactions of our users towards our designs
• Identify factors that we can improve on to better the overall experience for the user

• Enables us to quickly gather feedback on our wireframes so that we can iterate on our designs before upping the fidelity
• Provides a great way to objectively determine if the designs meet the users’ expectations
• Allows us to better understand the thought process of users as they are completing tasks in our application

• Participants: 5 current or prospective Bitcoin holders
  
• Method:
• 1. We asked our participants to complete three tasks while thinking aloud.
• 2. Users then completed a preference test between two different conceptualizations of the app’s notification function.
• 3. General follow-up questions were asked at the end to determine their overall experience and gather their feedback.
• Analysis: Affinity diagramming was used to analyze the notes and quotes that were recorded in the usability tests.

Expert Heuristic Evaluation

• Gather feedback from experts on the various elements that we used in our hi-fi designs
• Uncover any common usability issues in our prototype that we can address
• Obtain a severity score for each of the usability errors present in our interface to assess which aspects we need to prioritize

• HCI professors who are skilled in usability were easily accessible to us, so this method proved convenient
• A new perspective could be introduced to this project, as the usability experts are not necessarily within our target user group

• Heuristics: Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 Usability Heuristics
  
• Participants: 5 current or prospective Bitcoin holders
  
• Method:
• 1. We walked our experts through the four main tasks and explained the functionality of the application.
• 2. The experts were encouraged to stop us at any point to ask questions, provide usability feedback, or comment on any aspect of the design.
• 3. At the end of the walkthrough, the experts went through the 10 heuristics and assigned a severity score to each.

High-Fidelity Moderated Usability Testing

• Identify any aspects of our updated designs that are confusing to users or that do not meet their expectations
• Discover any misinterpretations that users may have regarding the wording and layout of our interface

• Enables us to determine the instinctual actions of our users as they go through each of the tasks assigned
• Allows us to ask questions at any time during the process to better understand the user’s behaviors

• Participants: 4 current or prospective Bitcoin holders
  
• Method:
• 1. Users were asked to think aloud as they completed four assigned tasks within the application.
• 2. The opinions and comments were recorded for each user as they thought aloud, and errors made in the tasks were documented.
• 3. General follow-up questions were asked at the end to determine their overall experience and gather their feedback.
• Analysis: Affinity diagramming was used to analyze the notes and quotes that were recorded in the usability tests.

Key Finding 1

Since the user is setting up a Bitcoin account within their bank, personally-identifying information should be automatically populated since this data is already held by the bank.

Key Finding 2

When connecting an external account, the user felt as though more information needed to be provided as to what they could do with an external account. There was no prominent indication that the connected account would solely be for viewing information only, so users were confused when they weren’t able to complete simple functions within their external account.

Key Finding 3

Within the alerts page, the wording associated with the ‘Portfolio return alert’ was confusing to many users and users suggested adjusting the name to something like ‘Portfolio Value Alerts’.