Designing ownership people can understand, on the blockchain and in their health data.

Problem

Registering and transferring ownership on a blockchain is a foreign idea to most people.

Bitmark let users turn digital assets and personal data into registered property on an independent blockchain. Powerful, but abstract: users had to grasp issuance, ownership, transfer, recovery phrases, and consent before they would trust the product with something valuable. If those ideas stayed technical, people stalled.

Constraints

• Blockchain mechanics (issuance, transfer, keys, recovery phrases) had to stay accurate while reading as everyday actions.
• Personal health data demanded explicit consent, clear permissions, and a trustworthy tone at every step.
• As an early-stage startup we shipped lean MVPs on short cycles, often a couple of weeks, and learned in market.
• Everything had to stay consistent with the Bitmark brand across two products and two platforms.

My Role

I owned UI/UX for both products from the beginning, covering flows, high-fidelity screens, and interaction detail, working closely with the business and engineering teams. I built alternate prototypes to make unfamiliar concepts concrete and kept both products aligned to the brand as they grew.

Digital Property

Turning issuance, transfer, and ownership into a flow people could follow.

The web app let users register digital properties, issue limited assets, and trade them on a secure independent blockchain. I structured each blockchain action as a step with a clear recipient, price, and confirmation, so transferring ownership read like a transaction, not a cryptographic operation.

On mobile, the same model had to fit a wallet. Onboarding explained ownership in plain language, registration pulled from sources people recognised, and the recovery phrase, usually the scariest part of any crypto product, was designed as a guided, checkable step.

Bitmark Health

Helping people own their health data, and choose when to share it.

Bitmark Health let people register their health data as property on a public registry, so no one could access it without explicit permission, and optionally donate it to medical research. I led the iOS design end to end, framing onboarding around the new mental model of "creating property around your data" and making consent legible at every step.

The record-adding flow was built as two clickable variants so the team could compare the interaction sequence. I no longer have a recorded test result, so the prototypes are shown here as exploration evidence rather than proof of validation.

For data donation, I reframed the onboarding into a clear, illustrated sequence covering what a study is, how data is used, and what consent means, so a genuinely new idea felt approachable rather than alarming.

Key Decisions

Outcome

Across both products, the design work gave issuance, transfer, recovery, consent, and donation a consistent interaction language the team could keep building on as features shipped. Bitmark Health shipped with real research partners: the donation flow connected users to public-health studies run by UC Berkeley researchers.

Reflection

This was early proof of what still drives my work: when a product is built on an unfamiliar system, the real design problem is comprehension. Structure and language do more to earn trust than visual polish.