← WorkPhuture

An incomprehensible financial mechanism, reduced to one switch

The Phuture mark rendered as a three-dimensional object on a plinth
Role
Head of Design
Period
2021 — 2023
Owned
Product, design system, research and brand — one designer, five engineers
Outcome
$8M+ held on the platform, reached in a bear market, at 211-day average retention.
01

Diversification you had to do by hand

In 2021 this market was the wild west. Index investing did not exist. If you wanted a diversified position you held it piece by piece: ten or more assets, a separate contract approval for each, rebalancing by hand every time the weights drifted.

The product collapsed all of that into a single position. One purchase, automatic rebalancing. The design problem was how far I could simplify without losing what made it useful.

The Phuture site open on a laptop, showing the company page and its three principles
Site and product were one continuous surface. Someone who arrived interested never had to start again on a separate app to buy.
02

One switch

Underneath, buying one unit fired a basket of swaps and contract interactions. I showed none of it. One product, one action.

The index product page — one buy panel, performance and returns below
One panel, one action. Performance and returns sit below the fold until you ask for them.

We refined the widget over months, stripping it back. Slippage tolerance, the funding asset, fee breakdowns went behind a settings cog. The controls stayed one layer down, designed properly, because a product you can't see into asks for trust this audience was not handing out.

A sequence of panels: buy, settings with slippage tolerance, and the asset selector, in light and dark
Slippage tolerance and the funding asset stay accessible one layer down for anyone who wants to verify what they're buying.
Held on the platform, post-launch, in a bear market
$8M+Held on the platform, post-launch, in a bear market
Approvals to hold a diversified position
10+ → 1Approvals to hold a diversified position
The same product page on mobile, in dark and light themes
The same hierarchy at phone width and in both themes.
03

Hide the mechanism, expose the data

Hiding the plumbing creates a risk: if users can't see in, they have to take it on faith, and this audience had been burned by exactly that. The rule was simple. Hide the mechanics, show the data. Composition, weights and fees sat on the surface, not behind a link to a document.

The website was minimal and professional: Space Grotesk, whites and blues. It read closer to a bank than a game, and that distance from the gamified set did the positioning before anyone read a word.

A wall of Phuture social posts, campaign stickers and announcement graphics
The same system going outside. Community growth ran on explanation: whitepapers, research threads, accelerator announcements. Slower, but it produces holders who are still there 200 days later.

I designed the analytics to show long-term movement, not micro-volatility. Candlesticks make a five-minute move look like an event, and people act on events. Smoothing the chart was the single biggest factor in the retention number, because the behaviour it suppressed was panic selling.

Average retention, well above the category
211 daysAverage retention, well above the category