DeFi product suite

Objectives & outcomes

Key objectives

• Consolidate disparate outsourced products into a coherent ecosystem
• Identify and ship high-impact UX fixes without risky rewrites
• Establish a North Star direction teams could migrate toward incrementally
• Reduce friction for non-crypto users entering DeFi for the first time

Outcomes

• DeFi ecosystem launched and reached real user volume
• Incremental redesign trajectory established across products
• North Star direction aligned teams, even where delivery remained incomplete
• AI-accelerated workflows compressed design-to-delivery cycles
  

From fragmented to coherent

What happens when you build an ecosystem by outsourcing pieces to different contractors, without coordination? You get Gala DeFi, a wallet, a DEX, a launchpad, each built separately, each with its own patterns, its own debt, its own problems. Users felt it immediately. The challenge was to make something broken feel whole.

Key contributions

Contributing product designer across strategy, UX, and execution, supporting the core DeFi team with design direction, audits, and front-end delivery.

• Audit & direction
  Mapped critical friction points across inherited products. Identified high-impact fixes shippable within existing constraints, alongside a North Star for teams to migrate toward.
• Design & execution
  Designed wallet onboarding, swap flows, and Easy Mode, a plain-language DeFi entry point for non-crypto users. Produced concepts and UI patterns across multiple products under tight timelines.
• Front-end contributions
  Used AI-assisted workflows to move from design to production-ready front-end faster. Contributed directly to delivery alongside engineering rather than handing off.

Shipping code, not just mockups

"He contributed directly to our repos, shipping production front-end code alongside the engineering team. He brought AI workflows into our design-to-dev process in ways that genuinely sped things up"

Jonathan Burk
Lead Engineer at Gala

Progressive platform update

The inherited outsourced platform was progressively transformed toward a North Star, guiding every tactical design decision along the way. Not everything reached production. Some of it is still in progress. But the direction was set and the platform moved.

• Legacy platform
  Outsourced platforms were poorly delivered with unclear ownership and user friction.
• North star
  Section by section, the platform started to converge — cleaner patterns, more consistent interactions, improvements landing alongside new features. A direction, not a destination.

One product, different users

I was designing for users at opposite ends of the spectrum, first-timers intimidated by DeFi jargon, and experienced traders who need speed and control. Making one experience work for both meant structuring around progressive complexity: simple, guided entry points that don't get in the way of power users who know where they're going.

Wallet onboarding

I structured onboarding around progressive complexity, revealing only what's needed at each step, explaining security at the moment it's relevant rather than burying it in documentation, and offering multiple authentication paths so users could start at whatever comfort level felt right to them.

Mapping out end-to-end flow

I mapped out the existing flow end to end, every step, every decision point, every place a user had to stop and think.

Identifying opportunities

From there, the opportunities became clear. Some were structural, others were surprisingly small, copy and microcopy turned out to be some of the biggest wins. The right label, the right helper text at the right moment, transformed how the whole flow felt without changing a single interaction.

Microcopy

Optimizing microcopy and timing to surface critical security messaging at the moment users needed it, rather than burying it in documentation or overwhelming them with it all at once upfront.