Income Hub: Designing a Passive Yield Suite for LatAm's Leading Crypto Platform

Company Bitso (In-house)
Year 2026
Team I led product design, in collaboration with a product manager, content designer, UX researcher and design leads.

Summary

Bitso is the leading cryptocurrency platform in Latin America, serving over 9 million users on a mission to make crypto useful and expand financial inclusion across the region. Its first passive income product, Earnings, already paid users variable weekly yields simply for holding eligible assets.

As the company's passive income strategy expanded, Earnings would be followed by multiplo products to be launched in the near future. The Income Hub was conceived as the home for this suite, with the objectives of becoming the platform's main driver of retention and growing assets under management by attracting user funds from outside sources.

I led the design end to end: benchmarking the income product market, mapping the user journey and information architecture, and iterating from wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes tested with real users. Testing validated the hub's findability and core flows, and exposed a critical naming ambiguity.

The project concluded with leadership sign off, new components documented in the design system, and a complete, AI-ready development hand off. A hub designed to scale from one product to many, helping users find more ways to make their money grow, through an intuitive and transparent experience.

My role

Working both independently and in collaboration with the team, I was responsible for:

- Discovery: Conducting benchmark research across crypto and traditional finance platforms, and planning usability tests to validate design decisions.

- UX Strategy: Mapping user journey to define entry points, and designing information architecture capable of scaling as new products are released.

- UX and UI Design: Designing from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity prototypes, preparing and documenting new components for the Design System, and organizing AI-ready developer hand off.

- AI-powered workflows: Leveraging AI tools to accelerate, automate, and scale work across research analysis, multiple concept ideation, content generation, interactive code prototyping, and final asset hand off.

- Stakeholder alignment: Facilitating sessions between design, product, engineering and executive leadership teams to gather feedback and validate deliverables for sign off.




Disclaimer: the content shown in this case study has been altered to protect confidential business information. The design process, decisions, and outcomes described remain accurate.

The challenge

Earnings worked well as a single feature: automatic, transparent, and known. However, the roadmap was about to turn one income feature into many more, each with widely different mechanics. The change risked ruining a familiar experience by overwhelming users with complexity while demanding a rebuild with every new product launch.

Our challenge was: how might we make passive income  easy to find inside the journeys users already know, simple enough to make multiple products approachable at a glance, and scalable enough to keep growing without rebuilding the foundation each time?

Discovery & Strategy

Together with the team, I benchmarked eight platforms spanning crypto exchanges and traditional brokerages. The research showed that the market typically segments yield by mechanism rather than by asset, and revealed how much transparency matters: naming the operator or protocol behind each yield, and spelling out the mechanics upfront.

With that foundation, I mapped the user journey to find where the hub could integrate naturally into the existing flow. Two entry points emerged: the Home page, for visibility and acquisition, and the Portfolio, where users already tracked the income generated by Earnings.

I then explored information architecture models for organizing products and assets inside the hub, using low-fidelity wireframes to flesh out the concepts and gather early feedback from stakeholders, followed by iterative cycles of high-fidelity prototyping until the design was ready to put in front of real users.

Implementation

Information architecture

Challenge: Multiple products and dozens of assets overlap in complex ways: for example, while a single stock can generate both Dividends and Stock Lending income, a single stablecoin might sit in Earn and, later, in another product. Users needed one answer to "how much am I earning?" and an easy way to find other opportunities to earn.

My Solution: The hub works across three levels, and users can move freely between them. It starts by aggregating income across all products. From there, drilling into a product screen shows every asset generating income within it. And going one level further, the asset screen shows every product generating income from that asset, alongside other opportunities to earn.

The Income Hub page

Challenge: The hub's main page had to answer "how much is my money making?" at a glance, while creating appetite for products users hadn't activated yet.

My Solution: A page organized by asset class, mirroring the Portfolio, lets users focus on each layer of their yield strategy. At the top, the total income balance gives a holistic view and the distribution graph shows how each product contributes to that total. From there, the active products list their individual balances, a banner highlights contextual earnings opportunities, and the most recent income keeps things up to date. Fixed at the bottom, a CTA opens the full catalog of income products, turning the hub into a discovery surface.

The Income Hub mirrors the Portfolio screen, allowing the user to filter the information by asset class - All, Cash, Crypto and Stocks.

Product and Asset pages

Challenge: Some users think in products, others think in assets. The hub had to serve both mental models without duplicating content, and each product had widely different rules for what could be shown.

My Solution: Every product page follows the same structure: total balance and eligible assets, while still being true to its own mechanics. The asset page mirrors the same structure from the other direction, income by active product, and then inactive products still available to it, so the pattern a user learns on one page carries over to the next.

Asset page with controls and information relevant to each asset type. (Click to enlarge)

Designed for every state

Challenge: Most users would first encounter the hub with only one or zero active products. If the design only accounted for the happy path, an empty screen would be many people's very first impression of the feature.

My Solution: Every screen was designed across its full journey: onboarding, first access, inactive, empty and active. Empty and inactive states were treated as conversion surfaces, and the educational content appears during the first access, and always stays one tap away.

Validation with users

We recruited Bitso users who had generated income from Earnings beyond a minimum amount. The sessions tested their reaction to the product, findability of the entry points, content comprehension, and activation and monitoring flows.

All participants completed activation and monitoring flows, with a few friction points:

- Findability: Despite the Home entry point, most participants reached the hub through the Portfolio, where they had already learned to find Earnings. It confirmed the value of leveraging familiar user flows, and reframed the Home entry as a discovery surface for newer users.

- Naming: "Ingresos adicionales" (for Spanish-speaking users) confused many participants. They weren't sure if it meant passive income generated by their assets, or profit and loss from market movements.

- Core flows: Activation and monitoring were completed successfully across participants, while surfacing small, actionable refinement opportunities.

With the findings in hand, I refined the screens, securing final sign off from leadership.

Outcomes

My time at Bitso ended before the Income Hub went into development, so live adoption data isn't available. What the project delivered at hand off, however, stands on its own:

- Built to scale: An architecture ready to absorb new products without restructuring, so each launch strengthens the hub instead of fragmenting it.

- Validated by real users: Core journeys were completed successfully in testing, and the biggest friction point (the product's name) was caught and corrected.

- Ready for five markets: Designed in Mexican Spanish first with localization considered from the start, prepared for Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and English-speaking users.

- An AI-ready hand off: Documented with variables and components mapped to code tokens, Code Connect mappings, annotated specs, and semantic layer naming, so the file could be seamlessly translated into code by agents, positioning the team to build more efficiently.

Next steps

After development, I'd measure the hub against its north-star goals (retention and assets under management), supported by funnel metrics like entry-point conversion, product activation, and income products per user, to prove its impact.