Lumen · Process
The research, personas and flows behind Lumen. The case study covers the decisions; this is the work underneath them.
02 — User Research
Lumen's users range from DeFi-native engineers who want true key ownership and multi-chain access, to financial professionals seeking non-custodial yield, to crypto-curious newcomers who want to buy their first ETH without a YouTube tutorial.
03 — Business Challenges
Seed phrase generation and backup is the most critical and most failure-prone moment in self-custody onboarding. The UX needed to make it feel manageable without diminishing the actual importance of the backup process.
Supporting 12 chains is a strength and a UX liability simultaneously. Users needed a unified portfolio view that didn't expose the complexity of chain management unless they wanted it.
In-app swaps, yield positions, and protocol access needed to feel like mobile banking features, not DeFi dashboards. The abstraction layer between "I want to earn on my ETH" and the protocol execution was the core design challenge.
Self-custody means Lumen cannot recover lost funds. The product's trust signal is architectural — open source code, verifiable key generation, and security audits — not brand promises. Communicating this distinction without creating anxiety was a nuanced design challenge.
04 — Secondary Research
73% of users who begin a self-custody wallet onboarding process abandon at the seed phrase step — either due to confusion about what it is, fear of losing it, or friction in the backup process. This is the most critical UX problem in Web3. (Source: a16z Crypto State of Crypto 2024)
The total value of assets held in self-custodial wallets exceeded $1.3 trillion in 2024, growing 340% over 3 years — driven by exchange collapses (FTX, Celsius) that made counterparty risk tangible for mainstream crypto holders. (Source: Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report 2024)
67% of crypto-curious users who have not adopted self-custody cite "too complicated" as the primary barrier — above security concerns (42%) and fee complexity (38%). UX is the primary adoption lever, not education. (Source: Galaxy Digital Crypto User Survey 2024)
07 — User Flow
08 — Toolkits
Tools and methods used throughout the Lumen design process — from crypto UX audit and banking app benchmarking through to iridescent visual system execution.
09 — Process
The process for Lumen kept circling back to a single tension: every time we simplified an interaction, we risked hiding information that a user genuinely needed to make a safe decision about their money. Simplification and informed consent are in constant negotiation in Web3 UX. The process below is an honest account of how we resolved that tension, which direction we chose at each decision point, and what we would do differently.