Every collector we interviewed said the same thing: buying secondhand means risking a scalper or a fake. Our team cut the app in half to focus on trust, and I designed the flows where that trust is won or lost.
Blind boxes pulled collecting into the mainstream and the resale market never caught up. Our team of five designed a platform for buying, selling, and trading collectibles.
I worked the sprint end to end, from interviews through the final presentation, and designed the home and offer flows in hi-fi.
Collectors didn’t need another feed. They needed to trust the seller.
Community was solved. ✈ Trust was not.
Everything fit on the nav bar. That was the problem.
Our first architecture tried to hold four products at once. Every idea we liked got a slot, and the lo-fi screens came back unreadable.
Collectors already had communities on X and Instagram, and told us they were happy with them.
A second content product hiding inside a marketplace. Nothing in the research asked for it.
Every interview came back to price, authenticity, and trust. That was the whole job.
Cutting the nav from four competing sections to one focused marketplace forced a rewrite of the brief:
How might we design a marketplace where collectors can buy, sell, and trade with confidence, without inflated prices, scalpers, or fakes?
The best thing we did ✈ was build less.
We ran four tasks on the mid-fi prototype. Everyone finished. Nobody could tell our features apart.
One page handled both, so users thought they had to do both. We split it in two.
Pages felt overwhelming. The fix was spacing, not fewer features.
So many actions that users stopped navigating. We kept what testers reached for.
The moment where trust either holds or breaks. Cash or trade, with the market price in view.
Sits beside the input, so a lowball or an overpay is visible before sending.
Offers get built from what the seller already said they want.
Puts something at stake on both sides. That was the trust gap.
An explore view, not a feed. Listings and nearby events in one place.
Categories stay on the surface instead of hiding in a menu.
A recommended row, so a first listing is not invisible.
Local trades and reveals sit next to listings, the one community piece we kept.
We went in expecting to build community features. The interviews said collectors already had those, and half the roadmap came off the board.
Testers did not struggle with our concepts, they struggled to read them. Spacing fixed more than any feature change.
The judges’ notes were both things we had rationalized internally. Weeks that close to the work make you stop seeing them.
One prototype, five people, and a group I was glad to build it with.
