Article - NFT Process | Lazarev.
How to design a smooth NFT creation process: Metastaq experience 🔥
How to create a smooth user experience 📩
When Web3 products popped up years ago, companies used to gloss over the user experience, skip the UX research, and somehow complete UI/UX design. Because those services mainly targeted techie users and focused on low fees, unique features, and better proposals. 💼
But those times are gone. The Web3 consumer profile has widened, shifting from blockchain geeks to separate individuals and brands that are strangers to NFTs, DeFi, crypto wallets, and DAOs. 🗃️
So now, blockchain companies can’t just ask their clients to have a technical background and ignore the user experience. Instead, they should take UX research and user flow creation seriously. How to handle those two crucial product development steps and enhance usability — read on in the upcoming sections. That’s our next stop here. 🚥
Full-cycle UX research: a crucial part of product development 📈
After pointing up the importance of intuitive user experience for Web3 products, let's explore how to reach that by analyzing the Lazarev.agency real-life case — Metastaq. It's an end-to-end platform to design NFTs, manage, collaborate on, and distribute them with little or no effort on your side. Metastaq is intuitive and easy to use for newbies, and at the same time, it provides customizable features and advanced functionality for power users. 🎈
But it wasn't always like that. The Metastaq creators asked us to turn their idea into an MVP of a unique B2B product. And we approached it like we always do — relying on our product design methodology that encompasses UX research, UX design, and UI design. 🎊
Let's see how we managed the UX research, the first and foremost stage of every product creation process.Preliminary analysis and synthesis. We started UX research by interviewing stakeholders to agree on product vision and expectations. The client gave us a hint that businesses can't effectively develop digital assets and experiences. Heck yeah! NFT creation is challenging, especially when there is a lack of understanding of how the industry and the crypto market work. 🎃
We analyzed the existing information and gathered new data to determine customers' motivations and pain points. And here is the conclusion – many brands require a solution to replace engineers, designers, and companies that build and integrate NFT stores into their websites. They also need convenient tools to analyze token sales and as much automation as possible. The preliminary analysis helped us set the project in the right direction and lay the robust foundation for future processes. So then we moved on to our next step. ✨
Minting technologies research 💼
The beauty of UX research is its consistency, but you can always adjust it to your product’s needs. For Metastaq, we had to conduct additional technical analysis to define optimal minting technologies and recommend the most suitable blockchain networks for the platform.
We looked closely at Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Polkadot. After an in-depth examination, we settled on Ethereum and Solana. The former is the 2nd most decentralized cryptocurrency and has a high level of interoperability that allows connecting the app to hundreds of existing protocols in a snap. While the latter is easier to program, so it can deploy apps faster. Besides, it doesn’t have a mempool problem when a processed transaction waits before the blockchain accepts it.
Market research & Competitor analysis 🔽
User data collection 🧓
After the market research, we investigated our target audience to better understand people’s main barriers when working with NFTs and their product expectations. To collect the required data, we conducted quantitative and qualitative studies, including in-depth interviews, surveys, field studies, experiments, and observations. The research helped us make a list of features necessary for teams to work comfortably on NFT creation and distribution.
User flow as an extremely valuable UX design tool 🔽
