makes secure, verifiable data sharing simple for enterprises

Timeline
Nov 2021 -Present

Tools
Figma, JIRA, Respondent

Type
Enterprise SaaS, Blockchain Infrastructure

Team
CEO, CTO, Product Designer, 3 Software Engineers, 2 UX Researchers

My Role (Product Designer)
Lead research teams, prioritize feature development, wireframe & prototype application, deliver to & iterate with Engineering Team, mockup demos

TLDR

🤔 Enterprises need an efficient, secure way to share or monetize verifiable, live data without migrations to avoid:

💸 Wasting resources to manage updates & duplicates
🦹 Risking receipt of unverified, possibly fraudulent data
⚖️ Violating privacy laws with permanent data storage
🔓 Exposing sensitive information to privacy breaches
🐌 Slow, inefficient payment systems

💡Integrating existing DBs with blockchain anchoring enables solutions to problems by offering:

🔄 Real-time sync of a single source of truth
🔏 Immutable data lineage
#️⃣ Hashes on-chain, not data itself
🔑 RBAC permissions incl. Confidential Compute
⚡️Automated Web3 payments

…but how did we get here?

✨ Making Discovery Magical

I led the initiative to reduce our overhead by using generative AI for sourcing and doing quick diligence on competitors, generating lists of role titles & industries to flesh out our target personas, create drafts of screener & interview questions, & transcribe/summarize/pull insights from interviews.

When using AI, I took measures to ensure confidential information was never uploaded and that all deliverables were diligently fact-checked & (heavily) edited to reach our standards. AI is a great brainstorming buddy, but keeping these two principles in mind has been essential to our successful use.

📑 Surveying the Landscape

We conducted SWOT & UX Analysis on >20 data products focused on:

  • Sharing & Storage

  • Monetization

  • Integrity & Lineage

  • Confidential Computing & Zero Knowledge Proofs

  • Private, enterprise blockchains

We gained insights into strengths and weaknesses of these products to identify market gaps. There was a clear lack of solutions offering immutable, verifiable, real-time data sharing and easy, automated monetization without data ever leaving secure company servers.

Immutable, verifiable data solutions existed on public and private blockchains, but data had to be put directly on-chain — no other solutions allowed for data to remain on-prem in secure company servers, which we believed to be a significant edge for security, agility, and cost-effectiveness of an integrated rather than rip-and-replace solution.

This gap in the market presented a significant opportunity, so we brainstormed use cases and set out to validate our hypotheses by talking with potential users…

🗣 Understanding Customer Needs

We ran >100 customer interviews with professionals working in some hypothesized target markets including Cybersecurity, Finance, Scientific Research, & Healthcare:

  • Auditors & Finance professionals who need to ensure data integrity

  • Cybersecurity professionals who can use tamper-proof logs to quickly identify threats

  • Data consumers responsible for purchasing datasets for business needs

  • Academics & scientists who need modern sharing solutions for raw & anonymized data

  • Blockchain developers working with sensitive data that can’t be put on chains directly

While gathering insights into potential customer pain points, we also narrowed the focus to ensure our roadmap prioritized solutions to the most pressing top-level needs.

🎯 Data-Driven Features to Spec & Prioritize

  • Real-time Sync & Integration

    Over 50% of interviewees expressed a strong desire for real-time synchronization of data across multiple databases, allowing each party to use its own established systems without migration. They highlighted the challenges of clunky .csv transfers, inconsistencies, and delays in updating information across systems.

  • Secure, Immutable Data Lineage

    Lineage Immutable records of data lineage proved to be a strong desire for those already working in the blockchain space as well as data purchasers. Over 65% had concerns about data security and the need for a reliable audit trail to ensure data integrity.

  • Hashing so Raw Data Stays Off-Chain

    Interviewees expressed that the permanence of blockchain solutions presented an obstacle to their adoption, especially considering data-privacy law evolution like GDPR’s “right to be forgotten”

  • Robust Permissioning incl. Confidential Computing

    Our interviews revealed that granular, customizable access control is necessary for any data-sharing tool to be considered. The need for roles with confidential computing access only was especially important in Finance and Healthcare sectors.

  • Automated, Efficient Web3 Payments

    Over 40% of interviewees were looking to enter Web3 markets and expressed frustration with existing payment systems as well as a need to streamline financial transactions.

“Time isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Miles.

Without a clear MVP tied to a roadmap & schedule, we’d be doomed so we set to work with simple, agile, systems for plotting our path forward. I’ll spare you the nitty gritty but our process developed to look something like this:*

⚖️ Discuss timeline + the dream product vs. how to put the minimum in MVP

🧠 Come up with awesome ideas for later & put them in a prioritized backlog

✏️ Create & review detailed design MVP specs as structured data

🧑‍💻 Talk w/ engineering: “How long will this take? What would make it even simpler?”

🧪️ Create quick low-fi wireframes, prototype, & test basic functionality is served

🗣 Review w/ team, iron out any issues, & remove unnecessary complexity

👩‍🎨 Upgrade to hi-fi, limiting components (reusable design system = consistency & speed)

🎯 Deliver to engineers in granular detail to be able to provide targeted feedback

🤝 Test Implementation & ensure team/stakeholder expectations are met

⏭ Move on to the next critical feature

This process repeats with the minimum changing depending on customer needs.

*this system, like any design, can & should be adapted & improved continuously!

Sample Process

Below you’ll find a sample of the product requirements, flow, wireframing, mockups, testing, & improvements cycle for syncing & paying for data.

Weavechain’s core product currently includes 112 JTBDs of which 62 are in production, 8 are mocked, 9 are on deck, and 23 are in the backlog.

JTBDs & Flows

When I want to sync a data collection to my local DB, I need quick options to fund my wallet for payments, so I can start syncing quickly.
When I want to sync a data collection to my local DB, I need to see the progress, so I know how long the process will take.

🛠 JTBDs like the ones below are mapped out in flow diagrams & entered into a spreadsheet of structured data so we can:

  1. Calculate RICE scores to prioritize

  2. Keep track of design/engineering status

  3. Input feature requirements of each screen & interaction in granular detail

1 | Pinning Header & Footer
Breadcrumbs, Data Collection title, Tabs, User Details, CTAs stay visible at all times

5 | Shortcut to fund wallet
Added shortcut to fund wallet from the paywall when users need it

2 | Display TPS in addition to % complete
Displaying transactions per second gives. user better understanding of sync speed

6 | Shortcut to avoid popups every time
Simple option to avoid repeated popups if user syncs with data collections regularly

3 | Visibility of System Status
Added “last updated” to system of status for clear understanding of data freshness

7 | Context for decision-making
Added more context to in-app & Metamask balances

4 | Full Context of Fee Details
Exposws all fees w/ amount & type details to prevent charge misunderstandings

8 | Switch view with icons
Bridge funds in or out of the in-app wallets using arrows to change cash flow direction

Delivery to Engineering, Testing, & Improvements

📦 We delivered design & interaction specs to Engineering in structured JIRA cards where each spec was clearly laid out in a way that we could test & provide specific feedback to developers to increase efficiency.

🧪️ While testing functionality & flow, we almost always discovered areas where more clarity would support users. In addition to tooltip guidance for uncommon or novel features, we worked on making the following annotated points more convenient & clear:

Learnings

Every cycle brings learning opportunities I take to heart to improve future cycles.

Here are a few salient learnings from designing Weavechain’s core interface thru July 2023:

  • Remaining flexible has been critical.

    Designing with limited components that can be interchanged & rapidly updated has been essential to quick feature iteration as we test.

    Staying on super positive terms with the dev team is also critical to avoid burnout or stress when ideas change and we need to make changes.

    We were able to overhaul foundational elements (like navigation/hierarchy in a week!) to better support users because of our flexibility and positivity 🌞

  • Weavechain is complicated. It takes a bit of time and energy to explain its basic functionality, so making an interface that feels friendly for what is essentially a complex backend infrastructure tool hasn’t been the easiest feat 🙃

    That said, we pride ourselves on including both intuitive solutions and complex “power user” features throughout the app. Users can select with checkboxes or use a RegEx to filter in some parts of the app — both options are easily accessible so every user has the experience they are most comfortable with.

  • It was fun to dream about exciting features that ultimately weren’t essential to our MVP. Discouraging creativity for the sake of efficiency is a surefire way to destroy the best team energy & lose out on the benefits of creativity, so our prioritized backlog was essential to remain focused without ruining the vibe.

    We worked hard to keep the minimum in MVP that gives users just enough to work with so we can continue to test, understand our users’ experience better, & prioritize accordingly.

What’s next for Weavechain?

We’re supporting several customers in the Decentralized Science space, where secure, verifiable, privacy-preserving, live data sharing with simple Web3 payments is driving initiatives to study climate change, understand genomic insights, help users monetize personal health data, & much more 🧬️

We’ve also leveraged Weavechain’s core technology, design flows, components, & interactions above to build Verifiable & Prompt3, two AI-blockchain projects that won the Augment Decentralized AI & EthParis 2023 Hackathons in July of 2023 🏆👾

Visit www.weavechain.com to learn more