Taconomics

Freelance UX/UI design and branding for an NFT marketplace.

Role: Freelance UX/UI designer: requirements with the founder, user flows, UI and branding.
Outcome: Designs and a brand (logo, type, colors, illustrations) for an NFT marketplace for Latino artists.
Key decision: Buying $TACO and staking $Salsa on one page with a switch, since collectors need both to buy art.

Figma Designs

The product

Taconomics is a decentralized app (DApp): a launchpad where Latino artists can make their digital art known. In practice, it's an NFT gallery where every piece is related to tacos, and $TACO is the platform's cryptocurrency.

Requirements

I started by listing the product's functional and non-functional requirements with the founder. Collectors needed to:

Explore and buy digital art.
See the pieces they bought.
Buy $TACO.
Stake $Salsa, a second currency, to earn Lemons, the main currency for buying art.
Learn about the project and its smart contracts.
Contact the team to apply as an artist.

Artists needed to:

Create collections.
Post their art.
Claim their earnings from NFTs sold.

Who it's for

Three user profiles came out of the requirements:

Collectors: people who buy digital art.
Artists: people who publish and sell their art.
Administrators: people who edit the site's content.

All three connect an Ethereum wallet through Metamask. Visitors without a wallet can only browse.

User flow and wireframes

From the profiles and requirements, I mapped the platform's general user flow, then wireframed the main screens.

The platform's user flow

Wireframes, part 1 Wireframes, part 2 Wireframes, part 3 Wireframes, part 4

Key decisions

A slider for the two main actions

I first proposed a simple hero: heading, image and a call to action. The founder suggested a slider with the platform's main actions instead, and it was the better idea. It has two slides: one for buying art, one for selling it, each with custom illustrations.

The home slider for buying and selling art

Cards that reveal the artist

On hover, an art card shows a description of the artist and a link to their full collection.

An art card and its hover state

Buy $TACO and stake $Salsa on one page

Collectors can't buy art without $TACO and $Salsa, so the founder and I put both on the same page, with a switch between them.

Buy $TACO is a standard swap, like most crypto sites.
Stake $Salsa is more complex. Salsa can be made two ways: multi-asset, with $TACO and WETH together, or single-asset, with either one.

A select chooses between multi-asset and single-asset, so the switch isn't overloaded. In single-asset mode, the choice between $TACO and WETH uses option buttons designed not to look like option buttons: the selected token sits in a card.

Buy $TACO and make $Salsa, with the multi-asset and single-asset modes Make $Salsa in single-asset mode, final design