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Fortmatic: a familiar way to log in

Building a user-friendly authentication and wallet solution for decentralized apps.

Date
July 2018
Role
  • UX design
  • UI design
  • Motion design
  • Frontend dev
Collaborators
CEO, Visual Designer
Tools
Figma, React
Fortmatic login interface

Overview

Fortmatic was a tool for Ethereum developers that let them easily add a signup method and wallet to their decentralized apps (dApps) that non-crypto users were already familiar with.

Problem

In 2018, MetaMask was the main wallet and way users accessed dApps. To use MetaMask, you'd have to install it as a Chrome extension, write down a "seed phrase" (and hope you don't lose it) and learn a bunch of other crypto-jargon. That's a lot of work to just signup for a website on the internet!

With Fortmatic, we wanted to provide a familiar way users signup for apps: email or phone.

Design process

I hired a visual designer contractor to work with me and the CEO on the marketing landing page designs. This way, I could focus on the product designs.

(I ended up building the marketing site since we only had 1 frontend engineer at the time - who was busy building out my product design.)

For the product, I designed all the flows E2E, working closely with the CEO and testing on users.

CEO designed v0 vs my redesign

CEO designed v0 (left). I redesigned it (right).

UX designs

Developers' experience

We provided a simple dashboard, interactive demos, and documentation.

Developer dashboard

Challenges

QA'ing with various devices - online QA tools didn't catch native quirks, so we had to test on actual devices.

Learnings

Timing the market (or lack thereof) was critical for our success and eventual pivot into Magic.