Lightning Labs

Overview

Lightning Labs is building the infrastructure for instant, high-volume Bitcoin transactions through the Lightning Network. I joined as Product Designer to humanize deeply technical protocols — making the Lightning Network accessible to developers and end-users who had never interacted with layer-2 Bitcoin technology.

Challenge

The Lightning Network is incredibly powerful but notoriously complex. Developer documentation was sparse, tooling was fragmented, and the end-user experience of sending payments over Lightning felt like navigating a command line. We needed to lower the barrier to entry for both developers building on the protocol and consumers using Lightning-powered applications.

Approach

Working at the intersection of protocol design and user experience, I focused on making the invisible visible:

• Developer experience audit — Mapped the complete developer journey from discovery to production deployment, identifying 12 critical friction points
• Visual language creation — Designed a visual system for representing abstract network concepts like channels, liquidity, and routing in intuitive ways
• End-to-end payment flows — Redesigned the payment experience to feel as simple as Venmo while maintaining the security properties of Bitcoin
• Brand evolution — Evolved the Lightning Labs brand to feel more approachable without losing its technical credibility

Results

• Reduced developer onboarding time from days to hours through improved documentation design and interactive guides
• Payment flow redesign increased successful first-time transaction completion by 60%
• Brand refresh contributed to a significant increase in developer community engagement
• Design patterns established during this period have been adopted across the broader Lightning ecosystem