Mezo

Mezo is a Bitcoin Layer 2. Before the main product launched, we ran a points program: you deposited assets, locked them for at least 3 months, and earned points we called "mats." (In web3, points usually hint that something else might come later. Wink wink.) How many mats you got depended on the asset, the amount, how long you locked it, and a share of what your referred friends earned.

I was the only product designer, working with a PM and the engineering team. I proposed and prototyped the changes below, and the PM gave the final OK.

Role

Sole product designer

Team

PM

Engineering team

Timeline

~1 month, 2024

As the program grew, people kept asking us the same things. How is my score calculated? What can I do to raise it? How do referrals actually work?

The dashboard didn't make any of that easy to figure out. It had grown one feature at a time since launch, and it showed the program's mechanics: deposits in one spot, referrals and secondary friends in another, mats from each listed separately, and no total anywhere. A couple of our launch assumptions about how people would deposit turned out to be wrong too.

What people actually wanted to know was simpler. How many mats do I have, is that going up, and what can I do to get more? The page didn't answer any of those directly, so they asked us instead.

For launch, I put deposits on the same page as "My mats." I assumed most people would make one deposit, two at most. With a 3-month minimum lock and not much else to do with a deposit, that felt like a safe bet.

My initial approach turned out to be wrong. I'd been working with fintech and crypto people for 9 years and thought I knew this crowd, but Bitcoin users are more careful than I expected:

• They don't just go all in on a new chain. They try it with a small amount first, then deposit more.
• They weren't keen on depositing BTC directly. A lot of them bridged it to tBTC or something similar outside Mezo, and deposited that instead.

At the same time, the deposit feature kept growing: more ways to deposit, more asset types, a card for each deposit, and a few actions on every card. Squeezing all of that next to the mats overview made both harder to read, and a pain to build on.

So I proposed a separate "My deposits" page and prototyped it. It meant one more item in the navigation, and "My mats" was no longer the place where you manage everything. It became the overview.

Despite our best efforts (and a couple of blog posts), referrals got the most questions. People couldn't tell how their friends were connected to their mats, or how to get the full bonus.

Part of that was on us. We added "secondary friends" (friends of your friends) after launch and found a spot for them on the page, but we never stepped back far enough to see how it changed the whole dashboard.

My first instinct was to explain secondary friends better. It didn't really work. Even with the mechanism on screen, people still didn't get what the 9% meant or what to do next.

What started to work was splitting the page into the main content and a sidebar with things you can actually do: how many people you've invited, your current boost, and how far you are from the next goal.

In the final version, the Friends card opens a sidebar with the details, plus an FAQ right where the questions come up. I tried an expandable section first, but it made things jump around on the page.

The bigger change was to stop putting secondary friends front and centre. That was a product mechanism, not something anyone was trying to achieve. People cared about their gains, so that's what the design shows.

I still had open questions after this: should active and inactive friends be split, is the copy right, and is the FAQ enough?

The old page showed mats from deposits and mats from referrals separately, as if they had nothing to do with each other, and never showed the total. People had to add it up themselves.

The goal was simple: one big number (your mats) and how it grows every day. Getting there was quite a ride.

The graph was the obvious choice, and I dropped it. When I ran it through different scenarios, most people would just see a flat or weirdly straight line, because daily earnings don't change that often. That's not just unhelpful. For someone who's already careful about putting money on a new chain, a chart that looks off makes the data feel unreliable, and we definitely didn't want to lose their trust.

I also tried moving the breakdown into the sidebar, but it felt too far away from the big number it was explaining.

In the end I went with patterns people already know: the total, a clear breakdown of what you earn every day, and a simple history. Is it innovative and sexy? No, but it doesn't need to be. It needs to be clear and correct.

The brand was changing at the same time, so I took the chance to update the product's design language to match. An evolution, not a revolution.

BeforeAfter

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All three changes shipped. Afterwards, our community manager told us the questions about how mats work and how people earn them had dropped noticeably. That was what we were going for.

People also went on to deposit more assets, but we never figured out how much of that was down to the redesign.

I came in assuming I knew the audience. Bitcoin users turned out to have their own habits: they test small, move carefully and bring their own bridged assets, and that broke a layout I'd designed around one deposit.

If I could go back, I'd also spend more time on giving Friends its own page, instead of one card on My mats.