Metal Developer Tools
Metal is a collaborative smart contract developer tool for visualizing and deploying contracts.
I led design end-to-end for the Metal product and brand for web and mobile alongside the PM and the engineering team.
As the lead product designer for Metal,
- I defined product strategy through synthesized qualitative research and early prototypes
alongside our founder and product lead
- I designed a spatial visualization system from 0 to 1, building states, interaction, and motion, working closely with our front end dev and the React Flow library
- I built out the look and feel of the Metal brand and translated to the app, partnering closely with our growth lead
For smart contract developers, verifying dependencies and working collaboratively with front end devs is laborious and inefficient. Metal solves this by integrated directly with dev team workflows and providing visualization and artifacts directly from the command line.
Building this tool required deep technical knowledge of the developer workflow through shadowing and design research. Devs that were adopting this tool had to feel that it was lightweight and integrate seamlessly into their workflow to really stick. I collaborated closely with our smart contract developers and with multiple crypto teams who were in the process of deploying contracts.
Each contract or onchain entity has a specific visual language that makes it easy for developers to discern and verify dependencies.
To bring developers onto the platform, I designed the landing page to highlight prominent developers in the Ethereum space who use Metal. Selecting a developer takes the user on a quick path to showing the value of Metal by visualizing the developer’s contracts.
And here’s a sampling of the Metal visualization in action. Check it out here.
In addition to the verification tool, Metal is also a deployment tool that gives developers the ability to easily deploy a set of contracts on any network.
