Exploring the Yoroi Wallet Creative Process

A Behind-the-Scenes with Dima Kuznets, Product Designer for Yoroi Wallet

Join us for an interview with our UX/UI designer Dima Kuznets for a glimpse into how the Yoroi Wallet came to be and learn about some of its unique features.

What is your background before joining EMURGO?

Dima: I have been working in product design for more than 5 years. I’ve created various custom large-scale interface solutions for companies including Big Four accounting firms, WPP – the world’s #1 multinational ad company, several Fortune 500 companies, and several leading automotive brands. I’m passionate about public initiatives, volunteering, and education. My volunteering efforts include assisting in the creation of the Kyiv Map of Renovation (a platform that helps preserve the historical heritage of Ukraine’s capital city), supporting charitable funds, and mentoring students in design school.

Describe your role at EMURGO and describe your role in building the Yoroi Wallet.

Dima: I’m a Product Designer at EMURGO. When it comes to the Yoroi Wallet, my responsibilities include:

- Organizing, facilitating, and amplifying the design processes

- Leading design research and building design and implementation strategies

- Driving internal team initiatives and workshops

- Helping to develop and test the product vision and prototyping and testing design ideas, UI and UX, and interaction design

- Participating in intensive collaborative communication and joint work with the product stakeholders and tech team

What purpose does the Yoroi Wallet play in the larger Cardano ecosystem?

Dima: Yoroi is the first light wallet in the ecosystem to demonstrate to the entire community that the crypto experience can be much faster and easier than the status quo. Instead of installing and maintaining complex full-node wallets like Daedalus, users can add, send, receive, and stake ADA with significantly less effort and immediate results.

Because Yoroi is being created in the open by EMURGO, one of the founding entities of Cardano, it plays a significant role in the ecosystem by providing a safe transparent place for users’ funds following the highest blockchain standards. Additionally, our open-source wallet has been a reference point for other project owners building wallet-adjacent products and infrastructure. Our product design team continues to work diligently to provide a top-notch user experience transparently.

What kind of research did you/the team conduct before building the wallet? Did you identify any features you liked or that you felt were missing that you wanted to bring to the user experience for Cardano users?

Dima: Light wallets are great because they can run on many types of devices, notably smartphones. Users can experience all the advantages of the Cardano network without their device slowing them down or adding any extra complications. The EMURGO product, design, and tech teams performed market, user, and financial research before building Yoroi. We spent hundreds of hours in collaborative workshops for ideation, alignment, and synthesis. We also held regular retrospective sessions to understand what we were missing and what we could improve as a team. I strongly believe that a well-organized team is a key driver for success.

At a time when the Cardano network is rapidly developing, new DeFi solutions are quickly appearing, and customer needs are swiftly growing, Yoroi is poised to completely revise the wallet experience from tech-oriented to user-oriented. We are focusing on the integration of highly demanded features, such as an NFT gallery, native swap functions, and more advanced staking. Yoroi will continue to evolve as the team continues to predict and respond to the community’s wants and needs. We’ll also ensure to keep all the things that make Yoroi compliant with the highest web3 security standards.

What features have you added to make Yoroi more approachable for new users?

Dima: Most noticeably, we have simplified the interface, shifting from the typical tech-oriented error-based interface to one that is user-oriented. Every feature – both standard wallet features that have been redesigned for Yoroi, and new features unique to the wallet – is provided with well-thought-out design solutions based on market best practices and community feedback. User testing sessions and surveys encourage users to get involved in the process of creating a perfect tool for their daily crypto operations.

Right now, Yoroi provides most of the required functions in the main navigation screen, making them always visible to the user, and each specific feature has its own unique and consistent internal navigation and structure. The ability to quickly hide your balance everywhere makes it safer to use Yoroi in public places. The color design, calm grayscale colors combined with the blue Yoroi brand, makes the wallet unique and memorable.

How will Yoroi save users time?

Dima: Our key design goal was to help users perform tasks with fewer actions, less interface load, and more personalization. We want our users to access and use their wallets more efficiently. With Yoroi, creating, restoring, and connecting wallets, as well as transaction speed, will become super fast and even more intuitive. Users will also enjoy a more personalized experience, which will include additional settings, contextual hints, and a certain level of customization.

Was Yoroi designed for Web3 newcomers, hardcore DeFi traders, NFT collectors, or someone else? What balance did you strike between simplicity and capability?

Dima: Right now, Yoroi is designed primarily for power users, but we want to make Yoroi 2.0 accessible to everyone. Customization is important to us. While some extra settings might help hardcore DeFi traders and NFT collectors fulfill their needs faster, they can also be a real burden for Web3 newcomers. So we are striving to make the interface adjustable, as per users’ needs, and make Yoroi an iconic crypto wallet for everyone – even those who don’t know what crypto is. Designing Yoroi 2.0 to be inclusive will help us to grow the community and give users the ability to grow from using the basics to leveraging advanced DeFi features.

Are there any unique UX features introduced by Yoroi that you’d like to highlight?

Dima: Although we are just at the beginning of Yoroi 2.0, features such as the wallet dashboard on Yoroi mobile and the NFT gallery provide faster and simpler navigation, more approachable key functions, and great value to our users. Yoroi also stands out by automating the collateral process (a process that ensures transactions execute successfully). Rather than requiring users to manually lock up the necessary amount of ADA, Yoroi will automatically take the amount required for collateral from existing UTXOs. This feature enhances our user experience when interacting with Cardano dApps.

The new staking dashboard, which includes separated sections on the web, helps users better navigate the staking process. We also made the wallet restoration process extremely fast and easy. When entering a phrase, users can use traditional keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process. This is just the start of our revamp journey and we’ll be releasing dozens of cool updates pretty soon.

How will EMURGO leverage its native wallet to provide a more seamless experience for the Cardano community? Tell us about some of the synergies between Yoroi and other EMURGO offerings.

Dima: EMURGO Fintech’s solutions are built to increase connectivity across the blockchain and traditional financial services ecosystems, beginning with the Cardano network. These financial services products will harness the value and full potential of the Cardano blockchain for our community.

EMURGO’s Yoroi Wallet is working on integrating with many well-known DApps and DEXes, which will help consolidate all DeFi activities in one place with the top level of security. Our users already enjoy interaction with some of Cardano’s popular DEXs and dApps like Minswap, Muesliswap, NMKR and Taptools, and so on. In the meantime, EMURGO’s USDA stablecoin & Yoroi Wallet integration will help to bridge the gap between the fiat and crypto worlds, allowing people to exchange their native coins for fiat and vice versa in minutes and with the lowest fees.