Led 3-person design team
Zero-to-one
Web 3
My role
Led two product designers from full project through post-MVP on Cronos' first on-chain prediction markets protocol.
Owned: user research, IA, primary flows, and final design approval.
Led: design direction, twice-weekly alignment, critique, and work distribution core flows with me; execution and edge cases with the team.
The job wasn't just designing Delphi. It was making sure three designers shipped one coherent product.
Where I pushed back
PM wanted to lift the IA from another product to compress timelines. I argued we couldn't commit to a feature list before we knew who Delphi's users were and what would make them stay. The team agreed to run discovery first. That decision shaped everything that came after.
The challenge
Cronos lacked a native prediction markets product. Users had to go elsewhere to discover markets and place trades friction that was pulling activity outside the ecosystem. We had 10 weeks to ship an MVP that could stand up against established competitors while feeling accessible to first-time traders.
Research approach
User
interviews
Competitive
analysis
Workshop
& IA
Prototyping
& testing
I looked at 12 existing prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold, and others comparing features, design, and real usage data.
Accessibility gap
Half weren't beginner-friendly. We owned accessibility.
Market creation gap
Only 3 of 12 let users create markets. We made it core.
Engagement, not reach
Polymarket: $607M from 437k users. Limitless: $38M from 600. Depth beats reach.
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User research
I ran 7 interviews with a mix of newcomers and experienced users. Instead of asking what they wanted, I had each person pick their favourite protocol Polymarket, Manifold, whatever they actually used and walk me through how they used it, what they looked for, and where they got stuck.
Three patterns kept emerging.
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Key insights
Users need to know what they’ll get before putting money in
People join when the market looks active and trustworthy
Exploring markets and managing positions should feel separate
Design principles
Why it matters: These insights shaped the MVP scope and structure, prioritising clarity, confidence, and early participation over feature depth.
Principle #1
Clarity before power
Make outcomes and next steps clear before introducing advanced controls.
Principle #2
Reveal complexity gradually
Only show advanced detail when users need it.
Principle #3
Keep jobs separate
Treat Discover, Portfolio, and Rewards as distinct tasks
Principle #4
Design for confidence
Use clear states, confirmations, and recovery paths to reduce anxiety.
IA workshop
(how I drove alignment)
Research time was tight, but alignment on product structure had to happen before a single screen was built. I organised a hands-on card sorting workshop with Product and Engineering (10 participants across both disciplines) to map user tasks, group them by intent, and agree the MVP navigation in the room.
The team walked out with shared ownership of the IA not just my recommendation of it.
With architecture and principles locked, I moved into wireframing and early validation to pressure-test the riskiest parts of the flow before visual design making sure users could understand the system, complete key actions, and recover from mistakes without extra explanation.
User test results
6 participants tested Delphi across 6 tasks.
Overall
sentiment
"I really like this UI a lot, very similar to stock trading app, not super crypto, it's very simple." — Participant 5
Design decisions
I worked with the Creative team to define the visual direction, colour palette, and tone making sure the interface felt credible and calm in a category prone to feeling chaotic.
From there, I established the core UI foundations and component patterns, evolving them into a lightweight design system the team could build against in parallel. This let two designers work on different surfaces at the same time without drift, a governance move, not just a design one.
