A marketing site for a crypto analytics platform. The product already existed. My job was to help a first-time visitor understand a complex technical workspace.
Secondmate is a crypto analytics platform. Traders use it to track markets, portfolios, and on-chain data from one workspace. The workspace runs as its own application.
That workspace already existed. I did not design it. I designed the website that has to explain it. The website has to help a first-time visitor understand a complex technical product, so they can decide whether to join the beta.
Crypto analytics tools compete on depth. The Secondmate workspace is modular. A trader can open as many live panels as they want at the same time, and arrange them however they like. Research, portfolio, sell ladders, token rankings, charts, swap and staking all run together. Traders pay for that amount of information. A first-time visitor can also find it too much and leave.
The site had to work for two kinds of visitor in the same page. An active trader wants to see the depth right away. If they do not, they think it is just another dashboard. A newer visitor needs to know what the product is before that depth appears.
There was a second problem. This audience often assumes a new platform is a scam until it proves otherwise. Secondmate had no launch numbers to point at. So the site could not simply claim it was credible. It had to show it.
Crypto users ignore surveys and recruitment posts. So I went to the places where they already talk about their tools. For two weeks I read how traders discussed software in four Discord servers and several Reddit threads. I also had seven informal one-to-one conversations with active users. And I looked at how three competing platforms introduce themselves to a first-time visitor.
This is lightweight research, not a usability study. It showed three common ways people decide on a tool. Those three ways shaped the words, the navigation and the order of the page. The profiles below are composites built from repeated patterns. They are not real people.
Started investing in cryptocurrency recently. Researches a platform carefully before joining it, and wants simple, open products that explain what they do without technical jargon.
Trades on several exchanges and often tries new tools that could improve the way they work. Expects a website to say what it offers quickly, and to make features easy to compare.
Looks at SaaS and Web3 products, both to invest in them and to use them. Before trying a platform, checks how credible it looks, how it is branded, where the product is going, and how good the experience is.
This is a design analysis, not a usability study. I looked at how three established platforms introduce themselves to a first-time visitor. I looked at what they show first, how they handle complexity, and when they ask the visitor to sign up. I chose these three because each one answers a different worry.
TradingView shows a live chart before it explains anything. You understand the value by using the chart, not by reading paragraphs.
The same features that prove the depth also confuse a new visitor after the first screen.
Someone judging an analytics tool needs to see it working. Start with real previews, not descriptions of them.
Glassnode builds authority with depth. The research and the tone show that serious people work there. A visitor sees that as credibility before they reach a single feature.
Depth is hard to learn. A visitor who does not know what a metric means cannot tell if it matters to them.
Complex products should reveal detail in steps. Answer what it is and why it matters before showing advanced functions.
Nansen sells the result instead of the data. It describes what you will find out, not how many rows you can search. That makes analytics feel like help with a decision.
It expects you to know the subject. A newer visitor may never understand why smart-money tracking matters to them.
People do not want more data. They want to feel sure about a decision. Talk about results before you talk about how it works.
The site answers questions in the order a doubtful visitor asks them. Each section answers one question before the next one starts.
The hero. One plain sentence over a picture of the live product.
The whole workspace on one screen. No feature list instead of it.
The features, grouped so they are easy to scan.
Pricing before we ask for anything, not after.
Facts about the product first: uptime, token coverage, refresh speed. Then what users say.
The FAQ answers the questions that are left.
Trial and waitlist.
The navigation stayed flat: Home, Blog, Changelog, Waitlist, Contact. Changelog is there to build trust. A public changelog on a product before launch shows a careful audience that the team keeps working.
Every screen started as a low-fidelity wireframe. Each one asked the same question: can a lot of crypto information still be easy to read the first time you see it? The wireframes tested the reading order, not the styling.
Two screens mattered most. The hero has to make a technical product understandable in seconds. The workspace section has to prove the product does what the hero says. Both kept their structure in the final build.
The wireframe set the order early: one claim, one supporting line, two buttons, and real market panels around the text. The build kept that order. The placeholder panels were replaced with the live interface.
Every module was placed and sized before any styling existed. The question was whether a screen full of live panels could still work, or whether it would just look like noise. If it did not work at this stage, styling it later would not fix it.
The section does not list features. It shows the whole workspace at once. The wireframe placed every module — chat and signals rail, portfolio, sell ladders, token rankings, charts, swap, staking — to check that the screen was still readable before anything was styled.
The proof points shown in the concept panel below are illustrative content from the design exploration, not independently measured project results.
Each decision below answers one of the three ways of deciding that the research showed.
Users could not judge the platform from marketing text alone.
The hero starts with realistic product mockups and interface previews, not abstract images.
Seeing the product early made people less unsure. It also made the value of Secondmate easier to understand in the first few seconds.
The early content showed too many features at once. The page felt heavy.
I grouped the features into a simpler order. The most important benefits come first. The details come later on the page.
This made the page easier to scan. Visitors understand the main value before they reach the signup button.
“The AI insights and clean interface make researching crypto assets much faster.”
Users did not want to act without enough proof that the platform was reliable and useful.
The page uses monochrome branding, regular spacing, images of the product, and copy about benefits before the final button.
The page builds confidence first. It asks people to sign up only after they understand the value.
The structure, the content and the visuals all do the same job. They reduce doubt, explain the value quickly, and lead people to the waitlist without pressure.
A crypto dashboard puts a ticker next to a label next to a six-figure number. The type has to work at 72px in a headline and still be readable at 12px inside a data panel. Inter Tight does both. It was drawn for screens, and its narrow letters let a headline stay large without filling the screen.
The tight version matters. At large sizes, standard Inter looks loose, and loose looks like every other SaaS site. The narrower letters make headlines feel as compact as the product below them.
The product screen already has a lot of color. Charts are red and green, tokens use their own brand colors, and the swap panel is pink. Any accent color on the site would fight with the product it is there to sell. So the palette stays out of the way. The dashboard is the only colored thing on the page.
The second reason is the founder-investor profile. Crypto sites often use neon gradients to look energetic, and that is the look they have learned not to trust. A quieter site looks like a team that does not need to shout. The page gets its rhythm from levels instead of color: black for the page, carbon for surfaces, graphite lines to separate them.
There is one more benefit. Pure White on Absolute Black has a contrast ratio of 21:1, and the requirement is 4.5:1. So contrast was never a problem to fix later. Graphite is used for borders and dividers, never for text.
Backgrounds and elevated surfaces - depth and focus.
Surface color for cards, navigation, and UI.
Borders, dividers, and subtle UI elements.
Primary text on dark and key highlights.
The Secondmate logo has to stay readable everywhere it is used. It has a simple icon, fixed spacing, and rules for how to use it. Those rules keep the brand the same on the website and in future digital products.
The “X” unit sets the minimum space around the logo. No text, graphics or other elements should enter this area.
Use the reversed logo on dark backgrounds. It keeps the logo visible and consistent.
The symbol can be used on its own in small spaces, such as app icons, avatars and favicons.
The site opens with a plain sentence over a working product. A visitor sees the live portfolio, calculator and swap panels before they read a single feature name. Then they choose between watching a demo and starting. The workspace section answers the first question the hero raises. The rest of the page answers the other questions in the order a doubtful visitor asks them.
Facts about the product build the trust, in the place where traction numbers would normally go. The page explains a complex technical product without a sales call. It also looks like the team who built the dashboard built the site too.
The figures below are reported project figures, not independently verified analytics.
The project materials reported more than a thousand whitelist sign-ups, more than three hundred testers, more than twenty partner conversations, and more than 80% positive feedback on the match between the product and the website.
That last number is the one I care about. The whole idea of the site was that showing the workspace works better than describing it. Testers found a product that matched what they expected. That is the closest thing I have to proof that the idea worked.
In my competitive review I decided that Nansen wins because it sells results instead of data. I wrote that Secondmate should talk about results before it explains how the product works. The page I built does not fully do that. Unified Market View, Modular Layouts, Instant Execution and Adaptive Alerts are names of features, not decisions a trader makes. I applied the lesson in the hero, but not in the feature grid. That is the first thing I would rewrite.
Designing a site for a product I did not design taught me something new. I could not make the workspace simpler. I could only choose when a visitor sees it. So most of the work was about order, not styling.
Here is what I still do not know. The reported whitelist and tester feedback suggest that the site set the right expectations, but they do not show which part of the page did the work. I have no analytics, funnel data or live accessibility audit, so I cannot say whether the hero earns the sign-up or the workspace section does.