PORTFOLIO

by HARVEST
Overview
Harvest is the flagship app from Treehouse Finance, which serves as a primary offering in the form of a desktop website. Its aim is to accompany and assist users throughout every step of their DeFi investment journey. With portfolio being our first product and focusing on the monitoring phase of the user journey, it enables users to effectively analyze their DeFi investments. This includes understanding their past market strategy, evaluating the increase in their portfolio size, and providing clear indications on when to exit a position if the token's value begins to decline.

The objective is to help users achieve their investment goals and witness their money grow through informed decisions based on data and insights. To cater to a new market of users seeking a better understanding of their portfolio positions, Portfolio is dedicated to facilitating comprehensive analysis and providing a clear overview of gains and losses, with a focus on delivering an improved user experience.
My Contributions
As the sole product designer, I led the user experience aspect of Harvest. Given that our team faced the challenge of developing a minimum viable product (MVP) in 2 months for the Beta launch, I worked closely with the product managers and engineers to execute a high-fidelity prototype that could meet user needs while considering feasibility and technical constraints.
Design Processes
In a fast-paced startup environment, we prioritized the launch of our product before conducting research with our Discord community users. Since research was not feasible at that time, I faced the challenge of designing a product from scratch in an area that was unfamiliar to me. To overcome this challenge, I immersed myself in DeFi to gain a better understanding of web 3.0 and empathize with our potential users while ideating.
Problem Statement
As a DeFi user, the complexity and technical jargon associated with DeFi can be overwhelming. Furthermore, with my investment spread across multiple chains and protocols, it is challenging to track the risks and rewards of each investment. As a result, I feel uncertain about the profitability of my portfolio, which hinders my ability to maximize my returns and achieve my investment goals.
Goals
To help users understand how to maximize our user's investment opportunities and managing their exposure across the crypto market. To achieve this, we must identify the features and metrics that our product should support, prioritize them based on their significance to crypto users, and ensure that our solution is distinct from potential competitors.
Research
Processes

Surveys

To understand market segment and types of DeFi users based on net worth

User Interview

Arrange an online discussion with users from our discord community

Usability Testing

Assign 3 tasks to our users and observe how they go through each

Insights
Recognizing the importance of user research in a startup, I prioritized implementing user research frameworks within my company to develop our product. Together with two product managers, I co-led the research process, conducting user interviews and testing after releasing of the Alpha version. These efforts resulted in valuable insights that shed light on user concerns based on their profession and financial status. The following are some of the significant discoveries:
  • Coverage of chains, Harvest could only support 3
  • Loading process of any newly connected and watching wallet
    What Harvest's Portfolio was offering, was not worth the waiting time for users
  • Accuracy of the notional value shown on Harvest, especially Cost and P&L
  • Complexity of data displayed causing cognitive overloading
    Unfamiliar with certain terminologies and unable to understand the significant of P&L Attributes
Persona
Through user interviews and a whiteboarding session with our research team, we have discovered that Crypto to DeFi users typically go through four stages in their customer journey map, as illustrated below.
To provide context, the Harvest Portfolio is a crucial tool for users when it comes to monitoring their portfolio and making decisions on when to increase their position or exit. Based on insights gathered from users within our Discord Community, I have developed a user persona that focuses on the monitoring journey. Here is our primary user persona, a Retail Investor.
Features

Performance Summary

Quick report of my portfolio performances over the last 24 hours

Risk Management

Understand where all their assets are allocated at, which chain, protocol and ratio of tokens

Manage Token Flow

Users can view their transactions made on the blockchain to better manage their in-out flow

In-depth Analytics

Shows how we break down a user's profit and loss (P&L) and how these calculations were derived

Meet our new Prototype
VIEW DEMO
Performance Summary
Quick Snapshot
Suppose you had just under 5 minutes during your commute to assess the performance of your investment portfolio as a retail investor in a decentralized exchange (Dex). Which key metrics would you prioritize and review initially to determine if any adjustments are necessary?
I have designed features to show a user's portfolio net worth based on individual or summed up wallets, and indicates the performance over the past 24 hours to 1 month. It breaks down the portfolio to show the user investment strategy, including wallet and productive assets, liabilities, and claimable rewards from various protocols. Additionally, it shows the profit and loss since inception date.
Desktop Design
Mobile Design
Historical Charts
After getting a quick overview, it's time to examine the past performance over the last 7 days. Net Asset Value (NAV) gives an insight into your total net worth, which can be segmented by chain. In addition, P&L provides a preview of your past profits and losses, categorized by different attributing factors used to sum up your profit.
I've used a line graph to display the overall trend of a user's net worth over time, and a bar-stacked graph to visually show gains, delta, and impermanent loss. This helps users identify which attribute is causing profit movements. For instance, if a user sees an increasing delta in a positive direction, it could indicate a recovering market condition resulting in profit.
DESIGN VALIDATION
After multiple iterations, we conducted at least two rounds of user testing to confirm how retail DeFi users would interpret their portfolios using our product. We wanted to ensure that we didn't miss any key information that would be helpful to them.
User testing validated the quick overview section, but it also pointed out that separating Overview and DeFi into two pages with minor differences seemed redundant. This made it difficult for users to get a quick overview, particularly because they rarely revisit the DeFi page after their first view.
Initially, the decision to have 2 separated pages called Overview and DeFi, were insisted upon by management. However, with the insights from usability testing, our team managed to convince the founders to merge both pages. Furthermore, metrics such as daily interest and rewards that provided no value to the user were removed. This led to a more condensed view, providing only key metrics for users.
First Design: Where risk and performance are separated into 2 pages
Latest Design: Where all key metrics for risk and performance are condense onto the this top quick overview section.
Risk Management
PORTFOLIO COMPOSITION
Investors would like to see the distribution of my assets across different chains and protocols, as well as the tokens they hold most. This information would help them make informed decisions about reducing risk by investing in other chains or holding more assets in their wallet during bearer conditions. To aid with this, I decided on a pie chart is used to show their asset ratio, allowing users to perform different strategies based on their own research and latest events in the crypto market.
Manage Token Flow
Transaction history
In the web 3.0 space, keeping track of transactions is fundamental for DeFi users. This involves having a record of every transaction that has interacted with a block. Users' main interest lies in understanding both the destination and quantity of their outgoing tokens, as well as the quantity of incoming tokens and the contracts they originated from. Based on users' preferred methods of reading their transaction history, I have developed three site flows:
  1. On the asset level, where have I invested my tokens?
    When did I transfer them from a centralized exchange (CEX) to my wallet?
  2. From a positional perspective, what activities have I previously performed within this specific protocol?
  3. From an overall perspective, is it possible to view all of my transactions on a single page?
indicators for pricing charts
Users have provided feedback that they would like to map out their token flow in relation to market conditions. To address this, a visualization feature in the form of indicators has been integrated into the wallet pricing chart. Along with creating a transaction table below the token pricing chart, this allows users to better understand the correlation between their exit and buying strategies against the pricing movement.
tagging and NOTES

An insight that was discovered during a retail investors' journey was on the multiple transactions they made over a long period of time. They can benefit from labeling their transactions to help them stand out and provide context. This is especially important when there are dozens to hundreds of transactions, making it difficult to recall specific details or do retrospectives. By labeling transactions, investors can better inform their past, current, and future transactions. Hence, I have included the ability for users to add notes and tags to their transactions, such as sending 10 USDC to a friend for lunch or transferring 0.05 BTC to their cold storage.
In-depth Analytics
OVERVIEW
Like any retail investor, user would spend sometime a week to monitor their portfolio more in detail. This usually happens during their monitoring stage of their user journey, after the have made a transaction from a protocol they have interacted with.
In my design, I have categorized tokens into two groups: wallet assets and productive assets, to distinguish between those that are actively being utilized in a pool and those that are not. For wallet assets, our company has prioritized metrics that our competitors do not offer, such as Unrealized P&L and Cost Basis, in order to differentiate ourselves and offer a unique value proposition. Similarly, for productive assets, the focus has been on highlighting Unrealized P&L and offering a more extensive range of metrics that are available on the deep dive page to illustrate the attributes of the P&L. Since Harvest supports over 20 different asset types, ranging from Staking to Governance LP Farming, each position and deep dive page has to be tailored to accommodate the unique characteristics and metrics associated with each asset type.
DEEP DIVE
For this particular page, my goal was to create a design that highlights the breakdown of our calculation for the position's P&L and Current Position Value, with a specific emphasis on the underlying assets for Liquidity Pool-related asset types. Users have the option to analyze their historical P&L on a positional level, providing them with more detailed insights into the overall performance of their position.
First Design: Management-down approach
Latest Design: Where all key metrics are condensed onto the top section of the deep dive page.
DESIGN VALIDATION
Due to users spending a significant amount of time scrolling through this page, it has been difficult for them to obtain a comprehensive summary of their position metrics. To address this issue, I have condensed the information in order to increase the amount of information that can be displayed within a single screen, as can be seen in both designs above.
to features
Results
Improvements in SUS 
(System Usability Score)
77%
from 72%
Increase in clicks into
level 2 pages
10 out of 10
from 7/10 users
Increase retention rate
since Beta by
6 times
3 months after launch
What's Next?
Harvest has been discontinued due to the high cost of maintaining its technology infrastructure in relation to the number of users it attracted. Additionally, the company has shifted its focus towards developing a business-to-business (B2B) product aimed at serving institutional clients.
As a Product Designer, I feel there are several areas for improvement that I was unable to implement in Harvest. However, with the emergence of Web 3.0, I believe there are more opportunities for me to enhance the user experience by simplifying technical terms and reducing barriers to entry for individuals interested in learning more about Web 3.0 and DeFi.
Brian ng | Product designer
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