BACKSTORY
Initial context
CoinGecko is the world’s largest independent cryptocurrency data aggregator with over 14,000+ different cryptoassets tracked across more than 1,000+ exchanges worldwide. I joined the team in 2024, as the lead in design team organization.
In my first 6 months at CoinGecko, I was embedded directly in one of our key product verticals – Product Growth, that’s responsible for driving user signups and activation rates of our cryptocurrency portfolio feature. We currently define “activation rate” as the number of new users who add 1+ coins to their portfolio. This acts as an important indicator for the business in affirming the belief that we are retaining users and providing long-term stored value.
"Looking into our data revealed that the number of new monthly activated users was trailing behind our signups and app installs."
We aimed to tackle the problem by first defining which areas of the user journey we needed to improve. Design (me), product and engineering brainstormed on a weekly basis to consistently identify areas where we could connect users to the value of CoinGecko.
MY ROLE
In Product Growth
For my first 6 months at CoinGecko, I was the sole designer in Product Growth, a newly established product vertical. The role responsibilities encompassed the entire spectrum of typical product design work – from UX Research (UXR), product strategy, contributing towards our design system, creating Figma mockups and prototypes, assisting with QA, collaborating with engineers for handoff, reviewing post deployment analytics, and working on further iterations.
Bigger picture
As the lead on the Design team, I knew that my time with Product Growth would be limited. After 6 months, I shifted into a fully managerial role to focus on improving the design team function. Alongside Product Growth work, I've been concurrently initiating a variety of efforts such as:
Improving our UXR workflow
Building our brand guidelines
Improving our UI/UX bug severity schema
Establishing metrics to guide Design Team OKRs
PROBLEM
Why are users not adding more coins?
Our analytics were pointing us towards a key problem –
Why are a majority of users only adding 1 coin to their portfolio?
This was an area of concern for the business as it indicated that users were not realizing the full value of our portfolio feature. If people aren’t tracking or adding coins in their portfolio they’re less likely to be retained considering they have low stored value on our platform. To improve this we came up with a few hypotheses (A, B, C) through our weekly brainstorming efforts:
A: Too much friction
Users aren’t adding more coins because it isn’t easy enough. We aimed to reduce friction by making key features to add coins or engage with our portfolio more obvious. Additionally, considering the requirement to signup to add coins, we also felt that our signup and login modals were too cluttered and needed to be tidied up.
B: Exploration drop-off
Users, especially new users, are not exploring more coins they may be interested in. We surmised that by surfacing prompts & recommendations at the right time we could minimize the drop-ff in exploration. For instance, we know that crypto markets are largely driven by narratives. If users are interested in coin X, they are likely interested in coins of a similar category.
C: Users don't understand the "theoretical" value of portfolio
Our existing onboarding was informative but didn't encourage action. We needed to improve the onboarding to ensure that even with minimal user adoption, portfolios are able to deliver some value to a user so they can experience the value add or "magic moment" of our portfolio feature as early as possible.
We weren't entirely convinced as a team on how to narrow down our solution space for hypothesis B: exploration drop-off. Giving users recommendations of any kind is often something that can be both very valueable when done well, or extremely annoying if executed poorly.
"We needed to identify what factors users cared about most when getting recommendations."
GOALS
Our objectives
Make signup frictionless
Validate factors for coin recommendations with UXR
Activate portfolio adoption during the onboarding
Make adding coins a more obvious action
Give users a way to "re-connect" with their portfolio
PROCESS
Make signup frictionless
For this objective, we reviewed our current signup modal and felt it was way too cluttered. Lots of unnecessary marketing copy had made its way onto the modal over time. From a UX perspective, I knew this was unnecessary considering that users who click the signup button have already expressed intent and needed no further convincing to signup.
Image: Old signup modal
I tidied up the modal by removing the unnecessary bits of text and opted to hide the email login fields based on our data that showed users primarily login in with social accounts. This had no impact on the ability of users to login with email, as it would still take a single click to reveal the email fields.
Image: New signup modal
Validate factors for coin recommendations with UXR
I worked on a quick turnaround research plan, conducting 5 user interviews & running a poll with participants in our UXR chat group to help identify the areas users cared about most for when receiving recommendations. Through the interviews, I discovered that some of the most important features were Category and Chain filters to narrow down their recommendations.
After analysing the feedback from the interviews, I worked on a "Get Recommendations" flow for users to help them find the right coins they may be interested to add to their portfolio.
Image: Get Recommendations Flow
Activate portfolio adoption during the onboarding
To activate portfolio adoption, we introduced our "Add Coins" flow and added the new "Get Recommendations" flow into our onboarding and rearranged the sequence of the other onboarding screens. By doing this we're allowing users to get a taste of portfolios early on and extract immediate value once they finished creating their account.
Image: Updated mobile onboarding flow
A critical component to getting users to realise the value of our portfolio feature was to bring our enable notifications screen up-front in the flow. We then added copy & visuals to communicate the value add users would gain from enabling notifications. Next up, the flow selector allowed us to create separate user journeys for new users versus experienced users. New users would typically prefer to get recommendations, while experienced crypto users were more likely to add their favourite coins manually.
Make adding coins more obvious
I introduced a sticky CTA and sticky coin info section in our coin detail pages to increase the likelihood of users adding a coin of interest to their portfolio. I additionally allowed for the sticky CTA section to be collapsible for users who prefer having more vertical screen real estate when browsing through coin details.
Image: Sticky CTA and coin info
Give users a way to "re-connect" with their portfolio
Given that our coin detail pages typically generate the highest traffic from returning users, we felt it a missed opportunity to introduce more portfolio related data into our these pages. I introduced a portfolio summary card to help users:
Find their portfolio holdings
Switch between portfolios holding the same coin
Add transactions to specific portfolios
With these features on the coin details page users can take action and make informed decisions more efficiently. This naturally helps users see the value of our portfolio more frequently, instead of having all that info only accessible in their portfolio page.
Image: Portfolio Summary Card
I included the ability to hide exact holdings values considering that many users often share screenshots of the coin details pages and may want to keep their exact holding amounts confidential.
IMPACT
The results so far
Since implementing the improvements, we've seen an increase of more than 2x in mobile app activation rates (% of users who add 5+ coins)
More importantly, across both mobile and app, we see that our current activation rates are noticeably higher than the previous months, and this despite the slower/bearish market. This suggests that our activation rates may continue to improve when market sentiment improves. This is a big win for the business in affirming our belief that we're serving our users jobs-to-be-done and by doing so are more likely to retain users.
Additionally, our UXR efforts provided valuable insights that helped to shape a first version of the "Get Recommendations" feature. By building features like "Get Recommendations" that are primarily catered for the new user segment, we've already seen an additional improvement in our activation rates of +3%.
Giving new users an option to get recommendations further improved activation rates by 3%
Building for multiple user segments drive returns
Now that we know users are finding this useful, we're setting up subsequent A/B tests with iterations of this feature to optimize it further and give users even better recommendations tailored specifically for new users.
REFLECTIONS
Final thoughts
I thoroughly enjoyed my first 6 months at CoinGecko. I've learnt a ton about how to drive meaningful product impact by working with really bright and experienced people. I'd summarize my learnings as follows:
Always go back to first principles, and validate with real users.
If an idea doesn't make sense to you, push back. Hard.
More collaboration = more conviction.
Believe that you're onto something, even if its a little something.
A little research goes a long way.
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