I went though a few feedback sessions with the product and dev team I made a fed adjustments based on our product and engineering feedback. Such as shipping options were too complex to include in the MVP, all payment options would be hard to implement, and CC payment getaway would have a UI that we would use instead of our own, stepper isn’t the most preferred option for our stakeholders, no editing is feasible at the order summary screen.

Design: High fidelity

I then moved into higher fidelity, using components that I was designing and documenting in the design system and also creating new ones based on the product needs.

I have been working in 3 main viewports: mobile, tablet and desktop. Reworking and iterating based on the feedback from our team until we landed on something that made or stakeholders and developers happy. At this stage the components and their behavior was determined and I was mainly focused on UI.

There were some changes at this point:
• we de-prioritized mobile design (I have started designing with mobile first approach). We understood from talking to our users that mobile device is very unlikely to be used for shopping by designers, it may be used to browse products, but designers will always need a bigger context of the design project for which they shop as well as bigger screen to make a final decision.

• shipping was reduced to approximate estimate with requirement to get in touch with the vendor for final details and cost. As we talked with ur vendors and designers we realized that many f these unique and custom items take long to produce, they are heavy and require special delivery methods, as well as assembly. So it higly depends on the availability, distance and level of customizations to determine shipping cost and time. Designers do not mind to be taking an extra step (for the MVP version), since this is an industry standard currently.

• we pivoted from sticky shopping panel to the pop up panel, that disappears after a few seconds. as we learned that our shoppers aren’t the regular e-com impulsive shopper, and they don’t appreciate the guidance toward the check out, which is a standard in e-commerce. Instead they will add many items and think them over, share with their client before they make the final purchase.

• reduced all item details per item added in the panel to confirmation that the item was successfully added to cart. We realized that since our shoppers will be thinking and carefully considering all item aspects before making a final purchase there is no much value in providing extensive item details in the pop up cart. Our shoppers will have the option to review the cart and examine item details before they make the purchase a few times any way.

Our engineers were estimating stories for each components, back end data architecture, research on Woo Commerce and payment gateways. I was preparing for user testing to see if we got these foundational flows right. This was when our whole marketplace team was laid off. Unfortunately investors estimated that we wont have enough funds to build this marketplace platform, and the company made a difficult decision to pivot and focus all resources on their design tool vs marketplace. So unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to build this out.

This was a shock and a surprise for the whole company. Non the less we created a great MVP product roadmap, with design and initial implementation that could be picked up when the company is ready. The Design System would serve as a solid foundation on which any new designers can build upon.