UX Challenge: design a browsing and listing experience that lets buyers judge a second-hand or local product's real condition and get a sense of the seller behind it, while keeping listing effortless enough for casual, non-professional sellers.
Current State: existing marketplaces relied on static photos and generic listing templates, which gave buyers little confidence in item condition or seller trustworthiness, and gave small local sellers no way to stand out against mass-market listings — a gap that widened as more shopping moved online.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Discovery research revealed 3 core friction points across buyers and sellers:
1. Buyer Uncertainty: High hesitation to buy second-hand goods due to hidden flaws in static, retouched, or stock photos.
2. Seller Disadvantage: Small, local, non-professional creators struggle to stand out against high-volume commercial sellers on conventional platforms.
3. Transaction Anxiety: Uncertainty surrounding peer-to-peer delivery or in-person pickup logistics post-checkout.
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DESIGN APPROACH
Design approach: I applied user-centered design methods, observing sellers in their real environment and talking with prospective buyers and local sellers, including the small stores who would later onboard as sellers.
The layout prioritizes immediate visual engagement while keeping transactional steps deliberately low-friction.
Design rationale: each friction point mapped to a concrete decision. Buyer uncertainty drove the shift to video-first listings. Seller disadvantage shaped a listing flow simple enough for non-professional sellers. Transaction anxiety led to in-app messaging and QR-code handoff confirmation after checkout.
Video-first concept and team alignment: proposed replacing static photos with short, seller-recorded video as the core listing format, then worked with product and engineering to align on feasibility for upload, storage, and playback.
Technical constraints and trade-offs: partnered with engineers on video streaming and upload performance limits, which shaped decisions like keeping checkout and account flows deliberately minimal rather than adding features that would compete with video performance.
DESIGN SYSTEM & COMPONENTS
The interface pairs a bold Inter headline type with Arial for body copy, keeping listings legible at small sizes. Buttons, cards, and form fields were built with clear default, hover, active, and disabled states, so the same components stay predictable across the listing flow, checkout, and account screens.
account
The profile card became the primary trust signal in Circled: surfacing a seller's rating, follower count, and sold/selling history so buyers can gauge credibility before messaging or buying — directly addressing the lack of connection between buyer and seller identified during research.
Shown here: the seller's own profile view alongside how that same profile appears to a buyer browsing a listing.
ShIpping details
Checkout was intentionally minimal: saved addresses, saved cards, and one-tap wallet options reduce the steps between deciding to buy and completing a purchase, since payment friction wasn't the real barrier — trust in the seller was.
The flow moves from a saved shipping address, to a saved payment method, to a final confirmation screen showing price, shipping, and total — three short steps with no new information to enter unless the buyer chooses to add it.
Purchased
After checkout, the relationship with the seller stays active rather than ending at payment: buyers can message the seller directly, track order status from selling through delivery, and scan a QR code to confirm handoff details in person.
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The brand identity carries the same video-first, community-driven feel from the app into every marketing touchpoint: the landing page, mobile web views, and printable flyers with a QR code for local storefronts to display in person.
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IMPACT & OUTCOMES
Circled reached approximately 50 local stores who onboarded as sellers on the platform, validating that the video-first listing concept resonated enough for real businesses to set up shop. Day-to-day engagement from those stores stayed low, which pointed to a gap between onboarding and habitual use rather than a flaw in the core concept: getting a store to create a first listing was easier than getting them to return and post consistently. That's the clearest open question the project surfaced, and the logical next step would be a structured study into seller retention, comparing onboarding friction, notification design, and the Offers feature's role in bringing sellers back, using return-visit rate and repeat-listing rate as the metrics to track. This is also where a dedicated UX Research partner would have added the most value: running that comparative study before committing to the video-first direction, not after.
