Voice app visual design
As the Senior Visual Designer at Block.one, I led the visual design of Voice from concept to launch, and shipped web, iOS, and Android apps.
Voice is a blockchain-powered media platform that rewires the formula in users’ favor — eliminating the hidden algorithms and cycling value back into users’ hands in the form of the Voice Token. Voice Tokens are earned by being you, and expressing your voice; they possess the utility of attention, and can be used to elevate content in different ways throughout the ecosystem.
Voice wasn’t meant to look or feel like any other blockchain product on the market. The clean UI, familiar content-creation flow, and tokenized game layer, were designed to appeal to a mainstream audience.
The profile
Voice uses a special authentication system to verify that everyone is an actual person. Authenticity and transparency are core to the Voice experience, and ensure a safe, secure, and respectful community.
No robo-mobs, catfish, or burner accounts allowed.
The feed
The feed of Voice was bright and modern to let the content shine. In the MVP experience, users could easily jump into several categories of content, later to be replaced by a robust search. Users also had quick highlights of article-performance and opportunities to participate in "Voice it" — our in-app engagement game.
From the feed, users had simple access to their rewards wallet, notifications, and people search. Most importantly for iOS and Android, a prominent create content call to action was sticky in the bottom right of the screen to encourage posting with an easy tap of the thumb.
Creating content
Having diverse and thoughtful content on a wide range of topics would be the key to Voice’s growth and success. Though we introduced new concepts and paradigms in other areas of Voice’s functionality, we implemented a simple flow here for easy content creation.
We landed on a content-focused experience, where elements and tools exposed themselves at the time of need, at a natural and organic pace.
The incentive
When others like your post, you earn Voice Tokens and your post gains visibility. The more popular your post, the more tokens you earn.
But what can you do with Voice Tokens? After making a comment on a post — you can Voice it! This means you can use your tokens to move your comment to the top to ensure that your voice is heard. If someone else raises their comment above yours, you get your tokens back (plus some extra).
The Voice It game creates a fun layer of competition around active content and encourages quality content and comment engagement.
Collecting rewards
In addition to earning Voice Tokens by creating content and participating in the Voice It game, everyone also gets a little every day just for showing up. Users can easily access their pending earnings from nearly every screen in the app.
The long-term vision was that Voice Tokens could be exchanged for other tokens, such as Bitcoin, outside of the Voice ecosystem. Ultimately users would profit from creating more and higher quality content, and Voice would profit simply from inflation of the Voice Token. It was core to the vision that Voice would not be supported by ads or any pay-to-play features.
Voice prototype
I created this prototype in Principle to provide an overview of the Voice experience and to illustrate some of the interaction animations that bring the brand and UI to life.