Stallet

Context

Akorede — the founder behind Stallet — brought me in as product designer to help turn a rough idea into a real product. Both of us were already in the Stacks ecosystem as users. We knew the problem firsthand: doing anything meaningful meant juggling five different apps. Send on one, swap on another, buy NFTs somewhere else, stake somewhere else entirely.

The vision was an all-in-one wallet — DeFi, cross-chain exchange, NFTs, stacking, and an in-app browser — that could do everything without context switching. And critically: built for people who had never touched web3.

The Problem

Web3 in 2022 was built by crypto people, for crypto people. The onboarding flows assumed you already knew what a seed phrase was. Terminology went unexplained. Mental models were foreign to anyone whose reference point was a bank app or PayPal.

Research backed this up: a user test by Chokablock found that the biggest barrier for new blockchain users was clarity and poor information architecture. Only 0.71% of the world's population used blockchain at all. The opportunity wasn't in serving existing users better — it was in getting the other 99.29% in the door.

Research

We built three user personas: non-savvy users who bring only web2 mental models, mid-savvy users who've dabbled but don't understand the full ecosystem, and crypto-savvy users who want power and speed. Our primary audience was the first group — designing for them meant the other two would follow.

Charlotte, our non-savvy persona, was introduced to blockchain by a friend and had zero knowledge of how it works. She wanted to invest and learn. She was the person we were building for. That lens shaped every copy decision, every modal, every empty state.

Competitive Analysis

We ran competitive analysis across seven dApps in the Stacks ecosystem, focusing on onboarding and wallet security flows. The pattern was consistent across all of them: every product front-loaded the friction. Mandatory decisions, unexplained terminology, no scaffolding for first-timers.

The key observation was that none of them explained anything. Seed phrases, private keys, emergency kits — terms that would stop a new user dead — were used without definition. That became our first opportunity: build inline explainers so users never had to leave the app to understand what they were doing.

View full competitive analysis ↗

UX Direction

The principle we grounded our UX direction in was Jakob's Law — users spend most of their time on other products. That meant borrowing patterns they already knew. Tab navigation. Modal sheets. Confirmation flows that felt like a bank transfer, not a blockchain transaction.

Instead of traditional user flows, we structured the app around five tabs: a home dashboard, a stacking screen, a transaction hub, an in-app browser for other dApps, and settings. Every major action was reachable in two taps from anywhere.

Design System

Before touching a single screen, we built the foundation. A full design system using Shipfaster's framework: colour tokens, typography, icons, buttons, cards. It ended up at 1,034 components and 166 styles. We tokenized everything so that design decisions would translate cleanly to engineers — and so the system could scale beyond the two of us.

One thing we learned late: colours that looked great on our monitors didn't hold up on mobile. We made a last-minute brand colour change after testing on real devices. It's the kind of thing you only catch if you actually test on hardware — and it reshaped how I think about device-first validation.

Interaction Design

Onboarding

Web3 onboarding is full of mandatory decisions — seed phrases, passwords, backup confirmations. We didn't remove any of that, but we restructured it to give users a sense of control rather than obligation. Where every other wallet forced a decision, we gave users a choice.

PIN or password. Backup now or skip and do it later. Both paths were safe; one was just less intimidating for someone doing this for the first time.

Home Screen

The home screen had one goal: ten seconds to understand your position. Total balance, portfolio gains, quick access to Stallet Learn, and a token/network/NFT tab for your assets. Everything else lived a tap deeper.

We also surfaced the Stallet Learn card on the home screen so it wasn't buried in settings — education as a first-class feature, not an afterthought.

Stallet Learn

Most wallets assume knowledge. We decided to build it in. Stallet Learn was an in-app education layer covering web3 fundamentals — what seed phrases are, how stacking works, how to bridge tokens — and how to use the product itself.

We positioned it against Binance Academy and Coinbase Learn, but with one key advantage: it was already inside the app, on mobile, in context. No tab-switching to figure out what you're looking at.

Send, Receive, Swap & Bridge

The transaction hub covered every move a user might want to make: send, receive, buy, swap, and bridge — all accessible from one central button. Each flow was designed to feel like a familiar payments experience, not a blockchain transaction. Clear amounts, plain-English confirmations, no unexplained fields.

Stacking

Stacking lets STX holders earn Bitcoin by locking their tokens. The concept is powerful but the mechanics are opaque — minimum balances, reward cycles, delegated pooling. We made the screen lead with the reward, not the process: "Stack and Earn Bitcoin" as the primary frame, with the technical detail available but not upfront.

In-App Browser

The fifth tab was a full in-app browser for accessing other dApps without leaving Stallet. Connect your wallet on Uniswap, check Gamma, browse any dApp — without switching apps and re-authenticating. It closed the last gap in the all-in-one promise.

Brand Identity

I owned the full brand — logo, colour system, typography, and all physical expressions. The goal was a brand that felt premium and trustworthy without being cold. Something you'd actually want on a t-shirt.

Takeaways

Stallet was the most research-heavy project I'd worked on up to that point. It taught me that competitive analysis isn't a one-time exercise — we kept returning to what other dApps were doing at each stage of the design. The gaps were clearest when I was deep in a specific flow, not at the start.

Building a design system at scale — 1,034 components — showed me how much a strong foundation buys you in speed and consistency. Every new screen was faster because the decisions were already made. And the system kept the two of us aligned across weeks of iteration.

The brand colour incident is something I still think about: no matter how confident you are in the design, you don't actually know until it's in someone's hand on a device they own. We caught it before launch. That was luck — now it's a habit.