Bitcoin purchases were one of the top revenue drivers across all of Cash App. Despite the bitcoin tab attracting millions of visitors per month, only 2% actually bought bitcoin. The team’s goal was to increase bitcoin conversions and drive adoption by new users.
I partnered with research to explore Cash App’s bitcoin onboarding to understand the first-time customer journey. Cross-functional team members joined in to engage with customers and build empathy. This included interviews, surveys, and prototype testing.
Cash App’s mission is to provide economic empowerment for all, but with a lack of financial education within the app, we were falling short of a key opportunity.
As a product team, we created a strategy to develop an education platform that could exist alongside our robust set of bitcoin features to enable new customers to feel confident investing in bitcoin.
We knew customers wanted educational content, but we didn’t yet know what format would be most effective for this type of content. We planned to run a second round of research to narrow down which design patterns were most compelling and effective for motivating customers to make their first bitcoin purchase.
I led an exercise with research participants to explore different content formats that could be used for educational purposes.
In one research exercise, customers built their own bitcoin applet home screen from their choice of pre-designed modules. Education (colored tiles) was by far the most used and talked about as the most compelling.
Customers preferred micro-learning over longer articles and other formats. It was important to for the content to live on a surface that felt familiar, interactive, and accessible to users. Cards were a nod to traditional studying, but felt too much like rote memorization. Quizzes provided a fun interaction, but made some users worry about getting the answers right. The story format hit the mark.
In partnership with content design, we established a storytelling approach that would achieve clarity and simplicity through both the visual design and language choices.
To de-risk the creative workload, I sourced illustrations from the existing Story of Bitcoin microsite that were emotive, humorous, and non-technical.
I explored different navigation patterns for users to find the educational content. A dedicated education hub could provide the most functionality, but wasn’t as quick to access as showing content on the main bitcoin surface, alongside the other primary functionality.
The previous bitcoin applet home was cluttered with jargon, focused too much on the price of bitcoin, and made customers feel forced into buying before they understood the fundamentals of bitcoin. I redesigned the screen to focus on Cash App’s low-risk, $1 entry-point, and a clear path forward to learning.
These numbers are based on Q1 2024 rollout at 10%
I leveraged Newsroom, powered by Google Amp to build lesson content in a way that made it easy for anyone to update, add to, and integrate into the native Cash App client.
Bitcoin Basics spearheaded a company-wide initiative focused on enhancing financial literacy efforts.