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Designing a new application platform to optimize operations management for a cryptocurrency exchange.
Poloniex is a cryptocurrency exchange with a worldwide customer base, offering access to over 500 cryptocurrency trading pairs and a host of other cryptocurrency products. As part of a company-wide infrastructure project, we began planning for a necessary overhaul to Axis, our internal operations management web-based application platform.
Over the course of Poloniex's 8 year history, a suite of web-based tools had been built to manage the product settings and customer information for the cryptocurrency exchange platform. The organic growth of the applications resulted in a poor user experience that was not optimized for the current needs of the various teams that used the applications.
In February 2022 I started working with our tools team product manager and tech lead to redesign the platform and optimize the UX for critical applications of the platform. Speed and simplicity of implementation were important factors due to other priorities and a general lack of resources.
My role during the project:
I met early on with our product manager and technical lead to establish the goals of the project. At the time the entire company was focused on launching our new trade engine, and there were no development resources available to implement the new internal application. We new the new trade engine would need support, and we didn't want to add functionality to the existing application which needed to be sunsetted. We decided to move forward with the general goals of:
Our tools team product manager first reached out to the key user groups within the organization to identify the most common pages and tasks they were performing. We followed up with user interviews that I conducted to understand how different groups were using the current application and discuss ways that we could optimize the user experience. Once we identified and prioritized key functionality for each of our main user types, I began to think through the navigation structure.
Heat map created for one of user types after discussing the most frequently used information on the key customer profile page.
Example of one of many user flows I created for core tasks performed by the key user roles. I used these user flows to help identify opportunities to improve efficiency.
With our discovery phase complete we prioritized fixing the top 3 issues with the navigation.
Existing primary and secondary navigation.
New navigation with dropdown menus and navigation items optimized by user priority.
Based on our conversations with our users I knew we could make the most impact by improving our most visited page, the customer profile. The current vertically split layout was meant to allow our CX agents to reference important customer information in the top panel (e.g. withdrawal freeze or other exceptions) while they were looking through customer records in the bottom panel (e.g. balances).
However, the split view left very little space for table content and the information, and all of the content in the top panel wasn't needed for reference. Key improvements I made to the page included:
User profile page on our legacy application was not optimized to our users' needs.
New user profile with optimized navigation, prioritized content layout, and highlighting functionality for easy-to-use inline editing components.
Often overlooked, most companies do not ensure brand consistency for internal applications. Maintaining brand consistency throughout your entire digital ecosystem helps employees understand the voice and vision of the company and help them maintain that consistency in communications with customers.
With that in mind, we set about creating a logo for the new internal application. Our consumer facing referral program was focusing on a space theme, so we settled on the name "Polaris" since our operations application was the "North Star" to our platform. I oversaw and directed my brand designer in the creation of the new logo and the application of our branding to the operations application.
Style instructions included with component specifications that I created for the development team.
Over the course of a couple months I worked with various stakeholders to design different parts of the operations platform. Eventually resources freed up and we prioritized building the new platform. As we added new functionality (e.g. new margin trading engine). I worked with internal teams to design the pages and flows needed to support the new customer functionality.
I worked with our wallets team that used dealt with setting up new and managing existing cryptocurrencies to optimize the UX of the cryptocurrency profile page (a key page they used daily).
We launched Polaris along with the critical new margin trading product 6 months later, in August 2022. For a period of several months the existing Axis operations application remained in parallel while we built out the additional functionality in the new application (Polaris). Eventually, our old application was sunset once we had replaced all critical functionality.
Our internal teams were excited to use the new platform and feedback was positive. We took the feedback and improved functionality as we built out new pages and new components to support the growing needs of the organization.
A subset of the design framework and page layouts I created that were eventually implemented.
