Colin Spence
Product Designer
Open for hire

Designing a decentralizedexchange in one week

    Summary

    In a single-week design sprint, I led the redesign of ZigZag's onboarding, account setup, and core trading flows, delivering a testable prototype, refreshed identity, and user-validated direction for a decentralized exchange built on ZK Rollups.
    Just here for the results?

  • Client

    ZigZag

  • Role

    Lead Product Designer
    ui/ux design
    visual design

  • Timeline

    2022
    1 week design sprint

  • Category

    dex
    zk rollups
    web3 app

The Challenge

A one-week sprint left no margin for misalignment. The team surfaced real risks: users didn't trust bridging from L1, fees were opaque, onboarding confused newer users, and ZigZag struggled to communicate its value vs CEXs. The challenge was aligning on which problems mattered most, then turning that into a testable prototype—validated with users before the sprint concluded.

    Discovery Process

  • Framing problems as a team

    Facilitated How Might We exercises across the full team. Voting surfaced bridging clarity, fee transparency, onboarding, and trading view customization as the highest-impact priorities.

  • Mapping the user journey

    Mapped the full journey from discovery through first trade across multiple user types, from experienced DeFi traders to crypto beginners. This revealed where confusion and drop-off were most likely.

  • Competitive research and pattern analysis

    Audited onboarding, bridging, and trading flows across competing DEXs and CEXs to identify patterns users already understood and expectations ZigZag needed to meet.

  • From sprint questions to testable prototype

    Distilled the team's risks into three sprint questions: Can we make onboarding frictionless? Can we clearly express ZigZag's benefits? Can we match CEX-level trading experience?

Like to see the messy bits of discovery?

    Design Approach

  • Design for trust at high-stakes moments

    Surfaced fee breakdowns, confirmation states, and clear consequences before any money moved. Testing confirmed users felt reassured throughout.

  • Reduce onboarding drop-off

    Simplified setup into a guided, linear flow. Testing showed users across all experience levels could start trading without confusion.

  • Make ZigZag's value proposition immediately clear

    Redesigned the landing page so users could immediately grasp ZigZag's advantages of zero-knowledge security, decentralization, fast withdrawals, low fees. Users were intrigued from first interaction.

  • Give traders control over their environment

    Designed a familiar baseline trading view with room for customization by hiding panels, moving modules, resizing components for power users.

  • Figma variables didn't exist at this time, so I used the Token Studio plugin to manage my design tokens.

  • Initial Figma component system for the ZigZag app

Results & Impact

Prototype to validation in 5 days
Went from kickoff to user-tested, high-fidelity prototype within a single sprint week.
3/3 sprint questions validated
User testing confirmed all three core hypotheses: onboarding clarity, value communication, and trading experience quality.
5 users, zero major usability blockers
From beginner crypto traders to seasoned DeFi users, no critical usability issues were identified.

Resources