CELO
Banking Flow
The exchange of value and gifts is crucial to building a strong community. Celo is a platform for the unbanked community, where people can send value to one another without relying on a centralized banking system.
In addition to being an open platform, Celo provides resources for its community to transition into full autonomy from Celo’s makers, cLabs.
I was brought on as a Lead Product Designer with one main goal: elevate the design & experience of Celo’s mobile app, Valora.
This manifested in three main ways:
1. Leading design with a talented team of Designers, Managers, Developers and Content Writers.
2. Contributing expertise as the key Product Designer on multiple new product features
3. Organizing internal buy-in to push for the necessary design solutions
The examples below represent solutions and improvements to the product, UI, and design system for Celo’s native mobile app, Valora.
To give some more context, two of Valora's brand pillars are:
1. To challenge the assumption that users need to understand the workings of crypto to use it to trade value.
2. Making the experience so approachable, that a completely tech-naive user could send and receive value on their mobile device.
What this means: make it super easy to use, think Venmo.
Below you will see the first time experience for adding funds into a Valora wallet. There was an emphasis on reducing cognitive load by distributing the questions across multiple screens.
As the project continued, it became clear that the challenge would be to create an experience that would align with the pillars mentioned above while considering these factors below:
—Maintain the ethos that Celo cryptocurrencies will be analogs to real-world currencies. For example, the cUSD (Celo USD) is the Celo analog to the US dollar.
—Reach a key milestone to introduce several other Celo-analogs of other real-world currencies.
—Navigate around the lack of in-house currency exchange, which necessitates a reliance on third-party payment providers for the hundreds of banking flows.
The challenge: making a complex set of flows as easy to understand as possible; there were several payment types, each with dozens of providers with different, unique user flows.
Above you will see two separate flows. One being adding funds to an existing wallet, and the other being cashing out of an existing wallet via a third-party payment provider (including a how-to guide).
