Ripio
Crypto's biggest problem was never the technology. It was trust.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Timeline
- Oct 2018 – Mar 2019
- Agency
- Aerolab
Project summary
Team
2 Product Designers · 1 Project Manager
Duration
6 months
Deliverables
Discovery definitions, UX architecture, hi-fi prototypes, motion & illustrations
Project type
Product discovery · Product design
Applied methodologies
Competitive benchmarking, user & product discovery, user interviews, usability testing, low-fi & high-fi prototyping
Not a redesign. A ground-up build.
This didn't start as a redesign brief — it started as a one-month proof of concept: run discovery, prototype a tiny MVP, see what's possible. It didn't stay small for long. We ended up building an entirely new platform from the ground up: the full wallet experience, every transactional flow, the onboarding and identity verification process, the credit flow, and the UI kit and design system it would all run on.
Understanding who we were actually building for
Before touching a single screen, we needed to know exactly who was on the other side of it. Using Jobs to Be Done, we segmented users by crypto knowledge, motivation, and how they already handled money — mapping six proto-personas, from total Newbies just getting familiar, through Curious users on the fence, to Financers and Business negotiators already comfortable investing real money. We focused the MVP on the middle of that spectrum: the people most ready to convert, but most likely to bounce if the product asked too much of them too soon.
What do we know about our users?
Their behaviors speak about their needs, but their actions are limited by their level of knowledge on the subject. The actions they perform are different and increase based on what they know.
Making a stranger feel safe enough to hand over their money
The first real test of trust is the moment someone verifies their identity — hand over personal details to an app they've never used, for a currency they don't fully understand yet. Get this wrong and people abandon before they've even started. We built this as a clean, guided sequence — personal info, then residency, then phone and ID validation — one clear step at a time, instead of a wall of form fields.
Built for people, not just for crypto
Everything after that followed the same principle: make crypto feel like something a regular banking customer could actually use.
New navigation & architecture
Built for logged-in and logged-out users alike, so the product's logic was never a mystery.
A brand-new dashboard
The portal to the crypto world: pesos account, holdings, and key actions, all in one place, greeting you by name.
A unified wallet
Showing pesos, Bitcoin, and Ethereum the way a bank statement should look — clear, at a glance, nothing hidden.
A real, readable investment chart
In place of raw numbers.
Crypto catalog & landings
Built to teach as much as to sell, so no one had to become an expert just to get started.
Credit, built from scratch
A transparent request flow, plus real tools to track and manage active lines.
A marketplace
A first-of-its-kind space to discover, buy, and sell non-fungible collectibles directly in pesos.
The opportunity
Argentina didn't need another app for crypto insiders. It needed a bridge — between millions of people who already trusted (and needed) a currency they could count on, and a technology they'd been taught to fear. That's what we built Ripio into.