Jones DAO

Jones DAO’s products were built for a demanding audience and a fast-moving market. Its vaults packaged institutional-grade options and leverage strategies into one-click products, but behind that simplicity sat complex mechanics: vaults borrowing from each other, leveraged positions, auto-compounding, receipt tokens and yields paid in different assets. As lead designer, my challenge was to make all of that understandable without hiding the risk, because in DeFi, users who don’t understand a product either won’t use it or will use it in ways they regret. The audience made this harder. Experienced DeFi traders wanted dense data, fast actions and no hand-holding, while newer users needed to understand what a vault did, where the yield came from and what could go wrong before they deposited. Every dashboard, number and label had to work for both, and there were few established patterns to follow for presenting options strategies on-chain. The pace of the work added its own pressure. Over three years, Jones launched and evolved multiple vaults and strategies, often reacting to changes in the wider DeFi market and the protocols it built on. Each new product had to ship quickly while still fitting into a consistent experience, so the design system had to be flexible enough to absorb new products without the interface fragmenting. All of this happened in a fully remote, global team, working across time zones with engineers, strategists and the DAO community. As lead designer, I had to set clear design direction and standards that others could follow without waiting on me, balance the needs of users, builders and the community, and keep quality high through constant change.