Who’s building ULTIMATE? Design Lead - Louis Currie

With the launch of the ULTIMATE DeFi wallet around the corner, we’d like to highlight our star-studded team, and reveal the experiences that have shaped their design decisions at Ultimate.

Louis Currie — Design Lead
Prev. Lead Product Designer @ TradeRepublic & many others

So you’ve worked at many places, and always on product design?
Yes, always product design, and I’ve tried to work on topics that are very different from each other. I love learning new things from experts, and enjoy the challenge of making complex things easy.

What makes working on Ultimate different from other products?
Ultimate is “your keys, your coins”, not a web2 product with an account and password. That’s new and creates uncertainty in the decisions we make, but that’s also exciting. We’re all trying to figure this out. There will be some similarities between our wallet and others, but that’s design — you need to be aware of what works well, incorporate that and improve on it.

Just like Dev, you were an early employee at TradeRepublic?
Yes, I was the 2nd employee hired by the founders. I was sitting with them in a tiny office in Skalizer Strasse here in Berlin. I had no idea about the stock market, to me it was a shady thing with ugly graphs, definitely outside my comfort zone. I helped with everything around design, from branding and paper letters to the iOS and Android apps. That was a lot of work.

Is designing a crypto app different than designing Trade Republic?
Well, crypto has ugly numbers with lots of decimals. Also the issue of how to trust something that is decentralized, which is a concept that is hard to communicate to the average user. There are different directions you can go in, it’s a cultural thing — it’s no longer just the “degens” who are interested in DeFi and NFTs. We have an assumption of who our audience will be going forward, but we don’t really know. We’ll have to be receptive and see how things develop around the world.

Are there design practices that apply to any app?
You need a solid understanding of best practices and platform guidelines before breaking the grid. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, but we also want to stand out and create delightful experiences. There’s so much you can use: haptic feedback, sound UI, visual UI. Thankfully we have a really cool brand to build on.

Any features you’re particularly proud of?
We’ve worked to simplify the onboarding, to create a new wallet in a couple of taps. The real-time topic is also exciting, making the whole experience less static and more animated lets you feel the power of the app in your hands.

Anything you’re looking forward to in the future?
How we will support being a universal multi chain wallet. Also simplifying things like the secret recovery phrase.

A few of the people around here are coffee fans, are you also a beverage connoisseur? Coffee, beer?
Oh, definitely beer, German beer. I’m from France, and French beer is bad. Coffee is more of a solo thing, while drinking beer you get into some good discussions, it lets people loosen up and get creative, you exchange ideas, maybe even crazy ideas.

Thanks Louis for your time and creativity!