Overview
Bitkub Chain Explorer lets people look up blocks, transactions and addresses on Bitkub Chain. It started as the default template of an explorer engine called Blockscout, with only the colours changed to match our brand.
The template interface was hard to use, and this is one of our core products, so I took on redesigning the interface and reworking the layout of key pages.
The timeline was very short: five days of design, in parallel with front-end development.
Challenge
- Because the product came from a template, there was no existing design to work from, no defined colours or components.
- Some pages and sections were highly technical, so I relied on developers to explain them.
- Five days.
01 - Map every page
I explored the product and captured every page, so I knew the full scope of what needed redesigning.
02 - Research other explorers
I compared layouts across other blockchain explorers to find what we could do better than the current version.
03 - First UI concept
The reference from our C-level team was a competitor’s product, which was quite complex and colourful.
I designed concepts for the two main pages and discussed them with the team. The feedback was that they felt too flashy, and the product should be simple and minimal. I agreed. A clean design was what I wanted too.
04 - Second UI concept
I redesigned with a focus on minimalism and brought three versions to the team: a very colourful one, a very clean and minimal one, and one in between.
After discussing with the team and the C-level, we chose the one in between for the whole product.
05 - Finalise the design
With the concept agreed, I built the components and worked through every detail. I also changed the layout of several pages to make them easier to use.
The result
A completely redesigned product with a dark mode and a fully responsive layout for mobile.
The new design went live at bkcscan.com.
What I learned
I learned a lot about how blockchain explorers work, and it was a genuinely fun product to redesign. It also showed the limits of building on a template: we could solve the specific problems we targeted, but some things the template simply would not let us fix.
