Super You

Overview

Super you is a native app created to help people in Argentina to overcome the hyper inflation crisis that the country is currently facing. Super You allows users to keep their savings in USDC (U.S. Stablecoin Coin) safe from the devaluation while still being able to continue doing their daily spending in Argentinian Pesos (ARS).

My Role: Lead Product Design

Worked closely with other two designers while I was leading the whole design process:

User research, Product Strategy, User experience, Visuals, Interactions, Prototyping and Testing.

Key Terms

USDC: The US Dollar Coin is a stablecoin that claims to have a 1:1 value with the actual US Dollar. Essentially, that means one US Dollar Coin (USDC) should equal one real US Dollar, giving some much-needed stability in the market.

Stablecoin: A stablecoin is a new class of cryptocurrencies that attempts to offer price stability and are backed by a reserve asset. Stablecoins have gained traction as they attempt to offer the best of both worlds—the instant processing and security or privacy of payments of cryptocurrencies, and the volatility-free stable valuations of fiat currencies  (Investopedia)

Project Background

¿Why Argentina?

• In Argentina there has always been a historic tradition of keeping savings in USD due the constant fear of people towards the Peso devaluation. That’s why most people after getting their payroll leave a small amount of their money in Pesos and exchange most of it into USD.

• According to a 2012 Federal Reserve report, Argentina and the former USSR accounted for nearly 100% of all net commercial bank shipments of dollars abroad between 1995-2008 and still a super majority of all net shipments 2008-2011.

• In the last years the Argentinian government has limited the monthly USD exchange possibility to $200, which led to the growth of a parallel black market where people can get more dollars, but of course at a higher cost and also the amount of robberies at the cuevas (places where people go to get black market dollars) has become quite worrying.

¿Why USDC Stablecoin?

• Cryptocurrency exchanges active in Argentina have seen between 500% and 6,000% growth in volumes in 2020

• Ripio (at LatAm cryptocurrency exchange) has over 300K users (85% in Argentina, most of the rest in Brazil).

• Digital assets, such as Stablecoins, are still under a legal void, where people can still buy more USDC than normal U.S. Dollars and still not being tracked by the government.

Understanding the problem

In order to understand deeper the financial painpoints of Argentinians and also to gather insights to draft out our persona, my team and I conducted more than 10 interviews and we took notes of all the relevant information participants gave us. 

The first interviews we did were only conversations to get to know users. Once we had an idea of how the product would look like we shared some initial concepts and analysed their response and feedback in order to keep learning and refining the idea.

The Challenge

The most difficult challenge we faced in this project was finding out how to show to users their «Protected Value». 

Protected value is the difference of the money value compared today vs. X time ago. In other words, is the value that people have secured out from the devaluation. 

It was very difficult to express this idea in our design, since the concept itself seemed  to be quite new for most people.

Me and my team tried for weeks with all type of visual resources and texts to represent this concept, and lastly (as usual) the simplest solution turned out to be the one that worked best.

The Solution