ARTISANRY
Connecting local artisans with customers through a simple, trusted mobile marketplace, making it easy to sell handmade products and discover them.
Clients
Portfolio Project
Timeline
6 Weeks
Service
Mobile app
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Project Overview
Artisanry is a mobile-first marketplace designed to connect customers with unique handmade products while helping independent artisans showcase their craftsmanship and grow sustainable businesses.
Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms that prioritize massive product catalogs and transactional efficiency, Artisanry was designed around a different question:
How might we make discovering handmade products feel as meaningful as purchasing them?
The goal wasn't simply to build another shopping application. It was to create a marketplace where authenticity, trust, and storytelling become part of the buying experience, allowing artisans to stand out while giving buyers confidence in every purchase.
I independently led the product design process from discovery through validation, owning every stage of the experience, including:
Product Strategy
User Research
Competitive Analysis
Information Architecture
User Flows
Wireframing
UI Design
Interactive Prototyping
Usability Testing
Design Iteration
Beyond creating interfaces, my responsibility was to identify the marketplace's biggest usability and business challenges, translate research into product decisions, and validate that the proposed solution addressed the needs of both buyers and artisans.
Early research revealed that the problem extended far beyond online shopping.
Customers looking for handmade products often discovered artisans through Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, or word-of-mouth recommendations. While these channels allowed artisans to showcase their work, they created fragmented buying experiences where products were difficult to compare, trust was difficult to establish, and discovering new creators relied heavily on chance.
At the same time, artisans faced an entirely different challenge.
Many produced exceptional handcrafted products but struggled to reach audiences outside their existing followers. Without a dedicated storefront or marketplace designed specifically for handmade commerce, gaining visibility depended largely on unpredictable social media algorithms rather than product quality.
This created a two-sided marketplace problem:
Buyers struggled to confidently discover authentic handmade products.
Artisans struggled to consistently reach new customers.
Solving only one side wouldn't create a successful marketplace.
The experience needed to build value for both.
Most e-commerce platforms are designed around speed, volume, and endless product catalogs.
That approach works well for commodity products but creates friction for handmade commerce.
Unlike mass-produced products, handmade goods often carry emotional value. Buyers want to understand who created the product, what makes it unique, and whether they can trust the person behind it before making a purchase.
Rather than competing with large marketplaces on inventory size, I identified an opportunity to differentiate Artisanry by focusing on three core principles:
Better product discovery
Stronger artisan credibility
Meaningful storytelling
These principles became the foundation for every design decision throughout the project.
To understand both sides of the marketplace, I conducted qualitative interviews, validated recurring patterns through quantitative research, and analyzed existing marketplace experiences.
While participants appreciated the convenience of purchasing through social media, several frustrations consistently emerged.
Buyers wanted to:
Discover handmade products more easily.
Compare products without switching between multiple platforms.
Learn about the artisans behind each product.
Feel confident before purchasing.
Artisans wanted to:
Showcase their craftsmanship professionally.
Reach audiences beyond their existing followers.
Build long-term customer trust.
Spend less time relying on social media for visibility.
One insight stood out more than any other:
People weren't only buying handmade products, they were buying the story behind them.
That insight fundamentally changed how I approached the product experience.
Instead of designing around transactions, I began designing around trust.
I evaluated platforms including Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, and Folksy to understand how existing marketplaces approached product discovery, navigation, and trust.
Although these platforms successfully connected buyers with handmade products, they frequently emphasized catalog size over emotional connection.
Products often competed for attention within crowded listings, making it difficult for buyers to discover new artisans naturally.
Rather than replicating these experiences, I identified an opportunity to create a marketplace that felt more curated, mobile-first, and intentionally designed around exploration instead of endless scrolling.
Research generated valuable insights, but the real challenge was deciding how those insights should shape the product.
Instead of immediately moving into interface design, I evaluated multiple approaches before settling on the final experience.
One of the earliest decisions involved navigation.
Initially, I considered placing search at the center of the experience, similar to traditional marketplaces.
However, interview participants rarely searched for a specific product.
Instead, they described browsing for inspiration.
To support this natural behavior, I prioritized curated categories and featured collections on the home screen while keeping search easily accessible for users with a clear purchase intent.
This shifted the experience from simply finding products to discovering them.
Research consistently showed that buyers wanted to know who created each product before deciding whether to purchase it.
Instead of hiding artisan information within secondary screens, I made artisan profiles a central component of every product page.
Product imagery, creator stories, reviews, and concise descriptions worked together to establish credibility before asking users to commit to a purchase.
This decision strengthened trust while giving artisans greater visibility.
Marketplace interfaces can easily become overwhelming.
I intentionally simplified the information hierarchy by prioritizing the content users cared about most during their first few seconds on a product page.
High-quality imagery, pricing, artisan credibility, and essential product details appeared first, while supporting information remained accessible without competing for attention.
This created a cleaner browsing experience while reducing unnecessary cognitive load.
Like many early-stage products, Artisanry required balancing ambitious ideas with realistic implementation.
Several constraints influenced the final solution:
Most users primarily shop on mobile devices and make quick purchasing decisions.
Many artisans have varying levels of digital literacy, requiring simple product management workflows.
The primary objective was validating the marketplace concept rather than building every possible feature.
These constraints influenced several trade-offs.
Rather than introducing live messaging, personalized recommendations, advanced seller analytics, or complex verification systems, I intentionally focused on solving the marketplace's most critical problems first:
Helping buyers discover products with confidence while helping artisans become more visible.
To evaluate whether the product addressed the original problem, I conducted usability testing focused on three key tasks:
Discovering products
Exploring artisan profiles
Completing a purchase
Participants successfully navigated the marketplace with minimal guidance and consistently described the experience as intuitive and trustworthy.
However, testing also surfaced valuable opportunities for improvement.
Some participants expected richer product details earlier within the product page, while others overlooked artisan information until later in the purchase journey.
Based on these observations, I refined category labels, strengthened the visual hierarchy, increased the prominence of artisan profiles, and improved supporting product information.
Rather than validating assumptions, usability testing became an opportunity to iterate based on real user behavior.
Every product decision involved trade-offs.
Features such as AI-powered recommendations, and personalized shopping experiences could provide additional value.
However, introducing them during the initial product phase would have increased complexity before validating the marketplace's core value proposition.
I chose to prioritize trust, discoverability, and usability first, ensuring the product solved its most important problems before expanding its feature set.
Although Artisanry remains a conceptual product, usability testing demonstrated meaningful improvements across the experience.
Participants completed key tasks more efficiently after design iterations, navigated categories confidently, and consistently expressed greater trust when artisan stories and profiles were integrated directly into product pages.
The resulting marketplace is positioned to:
Improve product discoverability.
Increase buyer confidence.
Strengthen artisan visibility.
Create a more engaging marketplace built around authenticity rather than product volume.
One of the biggest lessons from this project was recognizing that successful marketplaces don't simply connect buyers and sellers, they create trust between them.
Every design decision needed to balance business goals with the needs of two entirely different user groups.
If I continued developing Artisanry, I would validate the experience with active artisans over a longer period, measure seller retention and repeat purchases, and explore additional trust-building mechanisms such as verified artisan badges, richer reviews, and community-driven recommendations.
Ultimately, this project strengthened my ability to transform user research into product strategy, make deliberate design trade-offs, and design marketplace experiences that create value for both businesses and their users.
Thank you for your time :)
Open to full-time roles, freelance projects, and meaningful collaborations. Contact me.