Today I focused on designing mobile app UI cards—these are design components for presenting key information in an elegant way.
The idea is you ask Lightswap for a price and it shows it to you in one of these. We could just present the same information as plain text, but I’m experimenting with graphics to make it more engaging and memorable.
Maybe it’s overkill, but working through the process of creating, reviewing, and then refining or scrapping designs is a valuable part of product development.
The UI cards borrow from skeuomorphic design—where digital elements mimic real-world objects. Here, they take cues from the look of credit cards you’d swipe, making the interface feel familiar while also giving a subtle nod to their real-world origins. I learned about this from Apple in the years after the iPhone came out.
Below are some samples I’ve been working on for balance snapshots for Kraken, Binance, and Trezor. These aren’t finished yet, just something I’m playing around with. Curious what you think.
Do you have another preview of this in btc?
I just mocked this one up now.
I've been following the recent debate on sats vs bitcoin UI... I don't have a strong opinion on it yet but I'm working on it.
Which of these makes most sense to you?
B50,900,000 looks a little silly to me. But I'm partial to sats mostly because they are a funkiness of bitcoin that makes me happy.
Also, if this is something you expect to be used primarily by people with significant balances like half a bitcoin, then the traditional decimal points might make the most sense anyway.
Agreed, 50,900,000 does look silly. Never really been a sat guy tbh but I see the need for it.
₿0.509 feels right to me — if someone has around $1,000 in bitcoin that’s about ₿0.01, which still looks reasonable.
I think giving users a choice between sats and bitcoin makes sense, or making the UI contextual based on balance. For example, default to sats for $50, but switch to bitcoin around $1,000 — with a brief explanation to the user.
Best UI is imo ₿0.50900000
Then you have bitcoin, sats and symbol in one display
@Car, Francesco from Yopaki showed me this. Do you know which app he mentioned as the example?
It think it was Bitkit, right @BitcoinErrorLog? Take a different approach?
The problem with these examples is that they truncate as a matter of convenience, but you can't really do that, so you should just delete the fake decimal: BIP 177
Yes, Bitkit allows this view, with no useless leading zeroes or fake decimal places.
🤝 this gets my vote so far
Another way to go around this is to change the display unit according to the value. And bridge the gap between a satoshi and a whole btc by appending popular SI units, like kilo, mega, centi, milli…
I like the idea of changing the display unit depending on the amount, but layering on other units such as kilo mega centi feels like over-engineering… cool for us nerds but for anyone else it may seem too much
far left or middle makes sense, far right looks deceitful
🤝💯
I have some ideas:
Looks nice and clean
Thank you sir!
They look pretty. I'm usually a just-give-it-to-me-in-text kind of person, but these are nice. It doesn't feel overdone.
Thanks for the feedback!
BTW: Day 1 is here: #1142435