De Beers Diamond Blockchain Venture
De Beers worked with Boston Consulting Group - Digital Ventures (BCGDV) to launch their new diamond provenance and rough diamond buying venture; GemFair. The goal of GemFair is to track diamonds from ethical, artisanal mines, then buy these tracked diamonds. GemFair created a set of standards that each mine would adhere to in order to participate in the program.
I was the lead UX on the project, seeing it from initial concept to friendly user trials, to the MVP stage which launched a diamond buying office in Sierra Leone. As well as leading the UX across multiple apps, I also conducted the research in Sierra Leone, designed large parts of the buying service and took on many responsibilities typically associated with the product owner.
The GemFair applications utilise a blockchain that creates an immutable and trustworthy history for each diamond in order to guarantee provenance in an otherwise opaque market.
My roles - design
- Lead UX on the project
- Service design
- Design of multiple applications across the start-up
- Design for emerging markets and semi-literate audiences
- Design of an internal facing diamond buying app
- Design considerate of blockchain integration
- Creating prototypes, clickable and interaction design
- Creation of design principles
- Briefing and oversight of build
My roles - research
- Lead research on the project
- Travelling to Sierra Leone to conduct research
- Designing remote user research
- Coaching third parties on how to conduct research
My roles - product, strategy and project
- Facilitating feature creation workshops
- Feature creation and prioritisation based on research
- A sensible MVP approach to features design
- Advising on an MVP approach to operations
- Facilitating workshops to generate ideas and problem solve across the team
- Interviewing, briefing and managing output of copywriter
- Selection of platforms and devices for our products
- Presenting to senior clients, at times the De Beers board and CEO
Research led design
Card sorting
We engaged the miners in order to understand their motivations to use a diamond provenance application. In this image, two senior miners are card sorting features of our service in order to give us an indication of their priorities. The research revealed that although the driving motivation was to sell their diamonds to De Beers, there was also value in tracking their current production and previous sales to remove conflict amongst the miners.
Usability testing
Given the bespoke needs of the audience, usability testing was essential in developing the design language. We tested several iterations of the application in person and remotely, training the NGO we partnered with in how to run a usability study.
Development of design language
Before travelling to Sierra Leone we read up on research papers regarding how to design for users in developing countries where education and access to digital products is limited. Much of the research proposed several elements that we would integrate into our design, however our audience proved to be more literate than the original research suggested, about 1 in 5 having smartphones themselves. The design approach that we adopted included:
- The use of third person illustrations
- Removing language where possible and instead relying on audio instructions
- The use of 3D buttons
- Animation to guide the user
Read English speak Krio
Our research trip revealed that our audience, although the majority could read the national language of English, it wasn't their native tongue. Sierra Leoneans prefer to speak Krio, a native form of English. So every time we included an instruction we would support it with Krio audio.
Design considerate of context
Buying and exporting service design
In order to design the application our buyers would use to check and purchase diamonds from the miners, there were considerable challenges left unanswered in the process of buying, cleaning, storing and exporting diamonds. These unknowns lead us to engage with several key stakeholders including government customs officials, De Beers buyers and auditors in order to change their process to accommodate our diamond identification process and software.
Buying diamonds user journey excerpt
In order for the buyer to have the confidence that they are not purchasing laundered diamonds, a legitimate concern that arose when we interviewed diamond buyers, they need to see the relevant information for each diamond at the point of purchase. We worked with the diamond buyers to devise a quick and simple way to run automated checks for diamonds. We designed the checks that the buyer would need to perform in this new system to weed out the contentious diamonds. Our process would highlight red flags where necessary and allow the buyer to have access to each suspicious diamond's timeline.
