Utopia Labs
I helped lead product design at Utopia Labs, a startup building DAO-native tooling to streamline operations & standardize treasury transparency
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Company Mission
My first initiative after joining Utopia Labs was to lead the company in exercises to develop and articulate mission, vision, and strategy statements. At that time, our users consisted primarily of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Such organizations used onchain governance for group decision-making, but often struggled with day-to-day operations. At Utopia, we envisioned a world where decentralized organizations became as effective as centralized ones without compromising on transparency, equity, and integrity. Our mission became to enable higher-quality decision making and more efficient operations for decentralized organizations. More specifically, Utopia captures financial activity, and pairs it with meaningful context to generate actionable insights that result in better decisions and, ultimately, better outcomes.
Product Strategy
Having refined our mission, vision, and strategy statements, I began to research our holistic user journey. The most successful DAOs were striving to implement a periodic budgeting process akin to that of modern companies and governments. By defining the high-level stages of this process, we were able to better understand user problems at each stage. This also helped us refine our strategy to arm organizations with contextual insights for better decision-making as we began to understand the need to address the holistic process. We utilized this framework to map new features and user stories to the stages of our customer journey, and it became foundational to our product planning and design process.
Design System
I developed a comprehensive design system to define reusable components and clear standards for user experience across all of our offerings. This included complete documentation for style, UI componentry, and brand, and became the foundation from which all of our products were built.
App Architecture
Defining shared patterns and interaction models across every page and experience ensured the product would feel intuitive, even as we introduced new functionality and new surfaces. This also enabled us to better define "objects" (payments, members, transactions) that could re-surface across the application. In this architecture, each page shares the same commanding model but displays different object types. I encouraged our team to use this architecture to think of our product as a cohesive experience rather than separate pages with disparate functionality.
Members Page
The first of these pages– the members page– displays a table of payment recipients and their associated metadata. The detail pane on the right-side of the screen provides a more in-depth view of any selected member and enables individual object editing and commanding.
Payments page
The payments page displays outstanding payments and payment requests, and enables operators to group these payments together into a single transaction. This "staging area" solved an important problem for our users: a surface where payments could be reasoned-about in the draft stage, rather than requiring every new payment be created immediately as an onchain transaction. In this way, we enabled users to coordinate around individual payments before moving them to a more formal signing process.
Signing
Our research found that existing Project users often worked across projects concurrently. The existing product lacked a strong navigational model and did not have a clear home. The product had no single place users could return to at any time to begin a new task or get re-oriented. We designed Project Home to be the go-to space to browse and create projects.
Transactions
The transactions page visualizes all past payments and safe operations. In order to preserve payment-level metadata, transactions are conceptualized as groups of payments– this way users are still interacting with the same abstraction-level object they've used at the draft-stage in Utopia.
Analytics
Finally, payment data is visualized from the Analytics page, which operates like a live financial statement for any onchain organization.
Create Payments
We added a board view as part of our larger objective to incorporate elements of agile. The board view allows for a highly visual representation of your tasks in various grouping options, such as progress, by buckets or assignees.
