Datacy

Product, branding

2018-2022

Datacy is a blockchain data collection service, data management tool, and data marketplace. It allows people to collect, collate and earn from their data, and enables businesses to source richer and more accurate consumer data, directly from the data owners.

Joined the early stage startup as a full stack design consultant to work on identity, web design, and UI/UX of this innovative product. After several iterations, Datacy succeeded in finding investments and developing the final product solution.

Insights and Painpoints

After the launch of Datacy v1 (the working prototype of the project) the company was willing to develop an improved version of the product and deliver the users a final solution of the product. To achieve this goal, my task was to conduct user research, distill useful product insights, upgrade product architecture and feature list according to the feedback, and update the look and feel, and brand message of the product with the help of a team of external designers, being a head of the design team. I started with collecting and unpacking user feedback to define pain points, speculating on causing problems, and reflecting on possible solutions.

User Personas and Targeting

The research helped to define tribes of B2C (Extention and Dashboard) users who sell their data and B2B (Marketplace) users or data buyers. The focus quadrant exercise was made to define primary target groups and extended areas (secondary audience focus).

User Journey and Feature List

To update the feature list the user journey was designed in detailed stages:
- Engage phase, including awareness, research, and homepage
- Product phase, including registration, on-boarding, extension and dashboard
- Continuity phase, including the return, support, and loyalty

The detailed analyses of insights defined during user research stage had helped to formulate pain-points focused feature and polish the user experience.

Competitor Analysis

Deep and detailed competitor analysis was conducted for two major reasons. First, product-focused research, to find best practices or controversy to find easy solutions to avoid such in Datacy products. Second, tone of voice, visual language, and brand messaging, to create a unique, outstanding brand strategy.

The Tone of Voice Mapping

Persona and competitor mapping exercises were held to adjust the proper tone of voice of the brand and visual communication. Persona mapping helped to define the area where target users belong. Competitor mapping helped to match the areas of the user belonging with direct competitors and references from other industries. The idea was to find the free spot in the competitor field, and understand who is the closest reference in the defined area.

Brand Commitment Matrix

Brand Commitment Matrix is a pure branding exercise to define Values, Onlyness, and purpose of the company's existence, based on target user identity, aims, and values. It helps to understand brand narrative: the core mission, vision, message, and tonality of brand communication to spread it both across company identity and user experience.

Narratives

I came up with three brand narrative ideas supported by storytelling, keywords, mood board, and visual references of identity and product. The team felt that Empowering Action is the most striking approach with its overall line: Empower your every move:
'From every action, you take on the internet to the financial gain you receive from sharing your data, Datacy empowers everything you do. It gives you control over what data is collected. It empowers you to work directly with brands and drive innovation. And it empowers you to profit and spend real money on the things you love.'

Identity

The company required some updated identity to look more serious and solid. The solution was to keep the original D-shape fingerprint logo I developed a few years ago, but redesign the typography. The idea was to make it simple and readable and to add some catchy accents, that would make it 'empowered' and data related. It was decided to keep heritage colours and gradients but use new brand fonts.

Extension

The main issue with the original version of an extension was a lack of clarity in the usage of its core functions: pause and unpause collection, withdraw money and restrict particular pages from data collection. The team was also willing to allow linking apps and give easier access to the dashboard.

After several product iterations and user interview rounds we came to this nice solution to offer a time limit on pausing, and block secondary functions if the app is paused. We also organised the extension in four blocks to have the core features accessible straight away. For more advanced users we've added an Insights section with some usage statistics and product features updates.

A little animated mascot was designed by an external illustrator to make the app more friendly and involving.

Dashboard

Dashboard has been designed to deliver detailed statistics and help user to manage restrictions, earnings, data collected and apps linked. It also covered the withdrawal process, including bank account details and withdrawal history. A user could also update their profile details to put on sale more personalised (thus highly valuable) data. The main difficulty was to onboard a user and to help them to make all the initial adjustments necessary. The progress bar was designed to navigate them through the app.

Another nice solution was to link cards on the home page with the subsections of the dashboard, showing some high-level overview and allowing one to dive deeper into details if needed. The data section was challenging to show a mainstream user (who has a lack of experience in data analysis) their behavior in a simple way. So we've invented data bars marking time and behavior type.

Marketplace

Datacy has offered businesses to buy data licences, so they could get detailed insights into user behaviors, and adjust business strategies and marketing presence. It was hard to maintain a user-centric approach, due to a low amount of business users for any UX research, so we picked the on-demand approach instead. We've collected the demands and needs of B2B users to design a universal and useful tool to respond to as many inquiries as possible.
The main challenge here was to find a meaningful way to represent the insights defined from the licenced datasets and make it easy to request a new licence or adjust existing ones. We've designed a data dashboard in a more advanced way to make it easy to search and filter the data.

Homepage

We've made a great redesign of the homepage with AAAmazing accessibility. The animation above-the-fold represents the data collection process with the benefits for users. We also did a step-by-step barrier braking engagement, presenting all the features and profits of the product.

Learning and Findings

Since the very product launch, it has attracted the attention of famous media, like Bloomberg, Business Insider and TechCrunch for the great and promising idea. Datacy was able to prove the test given. Among the pool of initial clients onboarded are such big names as Nike, Porsche and Nestle.

Datacy continues the product development involving the use-driven approach and product solutions validation. The next big goal is to deliver a polished experience for business users.

Kaleb Jordan Wilson

We love working with Stas. When it comes to UI he always brings in a perspective that makes sense for the application, as well as for the user, and helps us manage complicated design scenarios. We were building something brand new, and trying to create a functional interface that served users. It wasn't easy but Stas was able to help us make sense of it.

Datacy Inc.
CEO, Co-founder

Paroma Indilo

Stas is a very talented UI and product designer. He took the time to understand our vision at datacy and worked as part of the team to design our platform and our image. He is always open to suggestions and not afraid to iterate to get to the most perfect version of the product. He is user and feedback focused and always has user experience in mind when designing even the smallest aspect of the products. He is a pleasure to work with and we are very proud to have him as part of our team.

Datacy Inc.
Co-founder