Business Problem

The process of creating a blockchain community was a very manual process, requiring users to speak directly with a member of the Common team. To achieve the company’s growth objectives, we needed a self-service method for users to navigate this somewhat technical process.

Persona Building

As part of the research for this project, I constructed new user personas to define the audience for this feature. Using insights from the business development team, I was able to determine that most community admins have a relatively sophisticated understanding of crypto terminology and technology. This reduced the amount of education resources necessary to help users achieve their goals.

Competitive Analysis

Blockchain technology introduces unique opportunities and challenges for a social media platform. Common, as a product, is at the intersection of social media, SaaS, and fintech. This makes it difficult to draw a direct analogue to existing products. I analyzed competitive products along a spectrum of social to financial in the web2.0 and web3.0 space. This helped me set expectations and resolve discrepancies around messaging and core terminology.

Technical Constraints

Users must select a specific blockchain to build the community on top of. This choice must be made clear as it is immutable. All members of the community must have a wallet (account) that is compatible with the host blockchain of the community.

Solution

I determined that the process could be broken into three core steps. First, we would need users to choose a blockchain to build on. This first selection is fundamental to the experience and requires clear communication to help the user make the right choice.

Next, users would tell us about their project/community. This basic details form is the simplest step in the process.
The last step is the most complex. In this step, we allow communities to launch a token that has certain benefits within the community. This product is called Community Stake and has most direct impact on the way the community can be structured.

Finally, after a successful community launch I introduced an admin onboarding module to guide users toward high value activities to transition from conversion to activation.

Testing

To test our UX solution, we sourced a sample of users who had not previously created a community on the platform. This ensured that they weren’t simply comparing the flow to the previous process. We then loaded a Figma prototype into the testing platform Great Question to observe their behaviors and collect feedback.
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In our testing, we found that the first two steps were very low friction. As expected, we ran into more trouble in the final step and we continued to refine our language to be more clear.

Implementation and Results

After refinements from user testing were made, we launched into development. Because of the planning work that went into this project, the development was completed ahead of schedule. This broke a nearly year-long cycle of undelivered product and was seen as a major win for the team. Additionally, the product met the lofty goals that were set for it and resulted in hundreds of new communities being launched on Common.