My time at Coinbase
01 - 24
Joining Coinbase
At the end of 2022, I left my position at Google Cloud Retail AI to find a new role in the consumer space. Designing for enterprise has its merits, but I wasn't satisfied with my visual output. I also desired to design in a space that I could relate to as an everyday user. While interviewing for consumer roles, I noticed a shortage of companies willing to take a chance on someone with an enterprise design background.
After some discouraging interviews, my best friend at Coinbase referred me for a position, recognizing my interest in Web3 (I was investing in internet coins and watching Crypto YouTube to bed 🤓). Luckily, I passed the interviews and got the job!
Coinbase initially wanted to assign me to their Cloud team, but my potential managers could sense my lack of excitement — evidently, I'm not skilled at hiding my emotions.
Thankfully, my soon-to-be manager decided to take a chance on me. I was given the opportunity to join the Growth team, focusing on attracting users to the Wallet app.
Growth at Coinbase
The impact of working on something you're passionate about is significant; I was completely immersed in my new job, genuinely invested in what we were building, and driven to create something meaningful.
(Speaking of creating, while working at Coinbase, I was inspired to create my own character NFTs.)
Working in Growth provided me with a unique perspective on design. In the past, my decision-making heavily relied on qualitative insights from user research. However, adopting a quantitative lens — analyzing the app's performance and user funnel — introduced a new dimension to my design approach. This allowed for a deeper consideration for the business impact of design.
My first project examined the awareness stage of the growth funnel. Specifically, I focused on designing upsells to encourage more users on our Coinbase Retail app to download our Wallet app. The design process for these upsells included choosing the right imagery, crafting compelling value propositions (content that resonates with users), and creating effective call-to-actions. Achieving an impactful upsell required the coordination of all these elements.
Although the project had a simple design, it involved teamwork from different talents such as content/visual/motion design, marketing, product management, developers, and the legal team. Together, we launched the final experiments (interesting fact: 'self-custody for your crypto' produced the best results!).
Motion details above designed by Chris Jung.
For activating users, we explored how to get users to deposit money into their Wallet, understanding that users with funds in their Wallet were more likely to continue their journey in the app.
To engage users to revisit the Wallet app, I designed the first Notifications system for Wallet in collaboration with our Retail Notifications designer, June Punkasem.
In the referrals stage of the growth funnel, our focus was on inviting new users effectively to download the Wallet, with the aim of boosting our revenue (NFT collaboration with Jaquelyn Wang).
While there are additional projects not listed above, I've had the opportunity to design for every part of the growth funnel.
Trade at Coinbase
My first project on the trade team involved designing a feature that allows users to swap crypto on different networks. While I can't claim full credit, as the core patterns were established by a designer on Wallet (Houston Harpp), there were numerous design considerations and discussions to adapt this for Retail. In the end, the final design output remained largely unchanged. The primary differences are in the network picker design, content design for selecting crypto in the desired network, and typography.
My final project at Coinbase involved giving users access to 300+ more cryptocurrency.
EDIT: Shoutout to my manager who informed me that they have launched 🚀 the feature, so I can talk about it! The project is called the Magic Experience. It’s a fancy project name for enabling users to obtain assets from decentralized exchanges. The goal was to integrate the ordering experience seamlessly into the purchase flow. I considered what contextual information to communicate and how Coinbase obtains the asset for the user.