COINBASE NFT

Staff / Lead Product Designer
Jul 2021 – June 2022

Projects include App Architecture, Home, Shop, Profile, Explore, Search, Comments, and Signup. Outside of project work, I grew the team from 1 to 6 designers, along with hiring a design manager for our team.

In the middle of 2021, I joined Coinbase as the sole designer for Coinbase NFT. A new initiative within the company to explore NFTs.

At the beginning on 2021, OpenSea and Rarible had immense success with NFTs. Many people in the crypto space were buying, selling, and trading on their platforms. But these applications were primarily focused on crypto and lacked the resources for the communities behind NFT projects to communicate and strategize.

Through research, we found that NFT Creators didn’t have a place, that was on-chain, to connect with people investing in their projects. In parallel, NFT collectors didn’t have a reliable, trustworthy place to research and explore new tokens.

We saw this as a massive opportunity to combine the marketplace aspects with the social side of NFTs.

Coinbase NFT Architecture

With any 0-1 project, we started with the building blocks.

We knew that a social network of any kind needed a social graph. The start of that was a following feed, a profile, a collections page, and a comment feature to allow people to follow and engage with each other.

Additionally, since this is still a marketplace, so we needed to enable a simple way for people to find and buy any NFT they want.

Over 6 months, we worked to develop a set of Key Screens to test with users. We also designed in the eyes of the community on Twitter and ended up setting a vision of Coinbase NFT that is still prominent in the product today.

I led the design work for these Key Screens and created our CB NFT Design System that we called “fren.” These screens served as our guide for features later on.

Additionally, we had a designer transfer teams to lead the marketplace effort to expedite our timeline and ship date.

Profile

The Coinbase NFT profile was designed for everyone. Creators, collectors, newbies, whales, etc. We wanted to make sure that the profile was viewed the same way from the owner’s eyes as the vistor’s — a level of curation.

It’s a place to showoff. People are proud of their collections or creations. We aimed to have the artwork remain prominent. We did this by minimizing clutter and making the items a large focal point.

Curation and filtering. Whether you’re visiting your own profile or visiting someone else’s, we wanted you to be able to filter and find what you were looking for. We added default filters (and later search) to accomplish this.

Home

Home is designed to be a landing page for all things NFTs. Upcoming drops, trending collections, and popular creators. This is place where people can find new artists or collectors to follow.

Search

People get into the NFT space by hearing about a certain project or creator. This is a marketplace, so we wanted to create a really powerful search for people to find and shop for their favorite NFTs, along with exploring new ones they may not have heard of before.

That started with a really good typeahead.

Collections

Bored Ape, Doodles, CryptoPunks. These are all massively popular NFT Collections. Similar to profiles, but a numbered series randomly generated.

PFP (Profile Pic) Collections are a big reason why people come to the NFT space. Because of this, we wanted a great landing page for collections to showcase their artwork, resale their mints, and allow visitors to get accurate / trusted information about a collection.

Following Feed

One of the most powerful parts of having a product live on the chain, is the openness of on-chain data. We tried to utilize this within CB NFT as much as possible.

For example, when you follow someone on Coinbase NFT you immediately are able to get a rich feed of items they’ve purchased or people they’ve followed.

This helps generate content when you follow someone — along with creating a compelling feed to constantly return to.