Aside from a continuously changing project scope and tight deadline, the main challenge during this project was making new types of NFTs accessible to the larger audience. Most non-web3 natives are familiar with NFTs as static images that are being bought for large sums by celebrities. However, Vibes was pushing the boundaries and aimed to create a marketplace for all types of NFTs.
This meant I had to create a non-web3 native NFT marketplace that shifted the focus of NFTs from imagery to full experiences, ranging from yoga video courses to personalised podcast-style mindfulness series.

As a start to the project I made an inventory of the existing and missing user flows and visuals. After collaborating closely with the tech lead on this it became clear that the existing designs were missing a substantial number of user flows, feature designs, and states which meant the scope of the project increased instantly.

With the engineering team nearly completing the smart contracts and therefore ready to move to our work I knew our deadline was closing in fast.The design team I led was distributed globally. Therefore, in order to make sufficient progress and meet the deadlines I shifted the team to work the majority asynchronous and scrapped most meetings. This led to the team being able to work more on the product while we used the overlapping hours to stay in sync with each other.

Moving to working async with the team allowed the project to regain momentum and on schedule for meeting the deadlines. This also meant I was able to focus more on the discovery of new features.

Through research provided, as well as conducted (through user testing and one-on-one interviews), I was able to discover, validate, and propose ten new features to stakeholders in a workshop. Seven features were received positively and were approved to be designed. These features evolved around minting NFTs, drops, and the staking portal.

In order to save time I allowed the team to initially rely on their expertise when filling in the missing pieces of the puzzle of the existing visuals. Once that was completed we introduced the prototype to user testers in order to gather feedback and reiterate on the designs.

The new features were validated before presenting them, but did need some polishing still. This was done through further market research and user testing. Despite the changing landscape of blockchain the iterations coming out of the testing allowed me to create future proof solutions that remained scalable too.

In order to benchmark our product against other Theta projects we entered the prototype in Theta hackathon on DevPost. Out of over 700 entries our project achieved a third place in the competition.