In early 2025 I interviewed for a job with Newton, a leading Canadian crypto exchange platform that is known for its competitive transaction fees. As part of an interview process, I was tasked with a design challenge of redesigning Newton's dashboard. Due to rapid growth and increasing competition, Newton needed to enhance the user experience of the dashboard and address some key user pain points.
In previous user interviews, usability testing sessions, and surveys that the Newton team had conducted, users identified several pain points with Newton’s current dashboard including, difficulties in quickly interpreting their portfolio data, locating important notifications within the app, and not feeling informed enough to take financial actions.
The primary goal of the design challenge was to evaluate Newton’s current dashboard, assess it using my design expertise, and design improvements that address the pain points identified through user interviews and usability testing.
The main challenge I faced was having only 48 hours from the moment I received the instructions to complete and present my redesign, while balancing my full time job as a Sr. UX Strategist.
Because I had limited time to complete the redesign, I started by determining my process and estimating how many hours each task would take me, and how much time I actually wanted to spend on each task. Although the team was just looking for a redesign, I wanted to make sure I thoroughly understood what's not working about the current experience, as well as how competitors and industry leaders are addressing the same pain points within their own products. I decided to break my process down into 4 phases, and tackle 2 phases each evening after checking out of my 9 - 5 job.
UX Audit:
I began with a UX Audit. I evaluated the existing dashboard and noted any areas where I felt the UX could be improved. These comments were initially based on my own UX expertise and understanding of best practices. Once I completed my initial audit, I did another pass over, adding additional comments to address some of the specific pain points users had identified through user testing.
Competitive Review:
In order to design a good product, its crucial to understand market trends as well as what leading competitors, both direct and indirect, are doing. I researched a number of competitors in the fintech space both within crypto and more traditional finance. Some of these competitors I was very familiar with as I use their products (WealthSimple & Interactive Brokers), while others like Coinbase, an industry leader in the crypto space, were new to me.
I started to identify parallels between these different products, which helped me to better understand some of the patterns and best practices within fintech applications, especially the ones that Newton was missing. Features like allowing users to mask their holding details for increased privacy, and including a performance chart to allow for easy data interpretation were present in all of these competitor apps but missing in Newton's app. I also identified some poor UX within these competitor apps, primarly around use of space and scroll length, which I helped me understand what to stay clear of in my redesign of Newton's dashboard.
Wireframes:
After taking some time to synthesize and reflect on my audit and research findings, I had a rough idea of some of the UX I wanted to enhance as well as new UI I was planning on adding. Before jumping directly into Figma, I started putting those thoughts down on paper and ideating various ways in which these UX improvements could come to life via updated UI.
After some rough wireframing, I jumped into Figma and began creating high-fidelity mockups with updated UX/UI that addressed the user pain-points identified in Newton's discovery research, while also considering best practices and learnings from my competitive review.
Key features include:
Redesigned Dashboard:
Presentation:
Conduct user and stakeholder interviews:
Conduct additional secondary research:
Supplement competitor analysis with additional secondary market research.
Consider A/B usability testing:
Present multiple UI for the same interaction and ask users to determine what resonates most with them.
Design validation with developers:
Meet with developers to ensure all UX/UI I’m suggesting is feasible (I understand features like added search functionality may be a heavier lift for developers).
Explore deeper interactions and additional UI:
Due to time constraints, I decided to focus on the dashboard itself and not the flows linking from the dashboard. (i.e. notifications menu, what it looks like when users interact with the chart). With more time I would build out those flows and explore additional UI options, such as a redesign of the holdings list UI.
My redesign was very well received by the Newton hiring team. We ended up having an exiting conversation that ran 30 minutes over the allotted interview time, and they moved me onto the next and final round of interviews (which have yet to take place)!
