Q1 2024
MarketSquare
Designing trust for high-value peer-to-peer commerce
MarketSquare
Designing trust for high-value peer-to-peer commerce
Q1 2024
Overview
The Situation
Buying and selling high-value goods online introduces inherent risk. While peer-to-peer marketplaces provide accessibility and reach, they often struggle with fraud, unclear seller credibility, and transaction anxiety. MarketSquare aimed to create an environment where users felt confident completing meaningful transactions rather than hesitating at critical moments.
Early signals showed users abandoning onboarding and exiting transactions before payment completion. Trust wasn’t failing at a single interaction — it was breaking down across the entire experience.
My Role
As the UX designer, I led the experience from discovery through delivery during an eight-week engagement. I partnered closely with product managers and engineers to translate marketplace risks into scalable design solutions across mobile and web platforms, owning research synthesis, interaction design, system definition, prototyping, and usability validation.
Results
A/B testing against the previous design uncovered key metrics:
Usability validation showed onboarding completion improving by 26%
Transaction drop-off decreased by 17%.
Task success rates increased to 32%.
User trust perception scores improved by 100%.
Listing activation increased by 79%.
Discovery
Understanding the Problem
Through competitive analysis, journey mapping, and usability evaluation, a consistent behavioral pattern emerged: users were willing to accept additional steps when those steps increased confidence, but quickly abandoned flows when uncertainty appeared without explanation.
This reframed the problem. Speed was not the primary goal — reassurance was. Users needed clarity throughout the transaction lifecycle to feel safe completing high-value exchanges.
Define
The Challenge
Unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, P2P marketplaces must balance the needs of buyers and sellers while maintaining marketplace liquidity. Improvements that reduce friction for sellers can introduce risk for buyers, and vice versa.
The core challenge became defining trust as a measurable product problem. Verification signals were inconsistent, listing expectations unclear, and payment flows introduced anxiety at decisive moments. The team aligned around designing a system that communicated confidence continuously rather than relying on isolated safety features.
Understanding and Analyzing
Before diving into design I wanted to gather a firm understanding about our product. This required a look into past and current research.
The core challenge became defining trust as a measurable product problem. Verification signals were inconsistent, listing expectations unclear, and payment flows introduced anxiety at decisive moments. The team aligned around designing a system that communicated confidence continuously rather than relying on isolated safety features.
Market Research
Every year people lose about $3.3 billion using peer to peer marketplace platforms (2020). By 2025 that amount will rise by 11x to $33 billion.
Competitors
The top most used P2P marketplace apps commonly used today (depending on niche) are Ebay, Esty, FB marketplace and Amazon. Almost all of them use 3rd party payment transactions and have not yet adopted AI into their designs.
Users
To understand known pain points I reached out to the customer experience and docs team to gather information on users. I used that information to form user a journey map, empathy maps, and personas from both a buyer and seller point of view.
Design Audit
Before moving into solutions, I conducted a deeper audit of the existing product to clarify what should remain and what needed refinement in the V1 adaptation. This review revealed several opportunities:
Sellers were unable to edit list items after creation,
Filtering options needed to be expanded to better support search behavior.
Button and input field designs lacked consistency.
The information architecture required restructuring
The main user flow could be condensed to reduce friction.
With these insights, research findings, and personas in mind — I facilitated a collaborative brainstorming session, encouraging the team to generate a wide range of ideas without considering feasibility in order to unlock bold, high-impact solutions.
Ideate
Designing Trust As a System
Design exploration focused on how trust could be embedded across the entire marketplace journey rather than added as a standalone feature. Concepts explored progressive onboarding, earlier visibility of verification signals, transparent pricing communication, reassurance patterns during transactions, and AI implementation.
These explorations helped establish guiding principles centered on visibility, transparency, and intentional friction where confidence mattered most.
How might we mitigate scams and increase engagement between buyers and sellers?
How might we successfully include AI in the product’s design?
Use AI to generate description/category tags
Introduce and expand on pay to talk feature
Wallet
MVP Features:
Listing
Direct messaging
User Flow
To understand how the product would function I recreated an end-to-end user flow to operationalize research insights into a scalable product structure. By mapping user intentions, system responses, and edge cases, the flow exposed complexity and trust breakdowns early, allowing cross-functional partners to align on experience logic before investing in UI execution.
Design
Designing Trust as a System (Continued)
Based on the data we accumulated I built out a design system, wireframes and 2 prototypes (light and dark modes) to showcase the new direction of both seller and buyer user flows.
WCAG Accessibilty & Brand Identity
Question for the stakeholder: What does the brand represent and what does it colors scheme say about it?
High value/Sophisticated
Luxury/Royalty
Clean/Elegance
Bringing The Design to Life
Sign Up
Sign In
Onboarding
Search
Home
Product View (Buyer)
Listing an Item (Seller)
Wallet
Tradeoffs
To ensure the UI maintained a visual identity that aligned with current design standards, we introduced targeted tradeoffs that balanced aesthetics with functionality. The idea was to maintain a modern feel and user flow that carefully evaluated against usability and product goals.
Additionally, working within a compressed timeline and limited engineering bandwidth required prioritizing foundational marketplace stability over feature expansion. Advanced personalization and seller analytics were intentionally deferred in favor of strengthening transaction confidence.
In several cases, deliberate friction was introduced instead of removed, prioritizing certainty over speed during high-risk interactions.
Results
What Changed and What Improved?
Throughout the course of this project the initial design and user flow were modified to improve user trust throughout the experience.
Outcomes (A/B Testing)
When testing the previous design against the redesign with 19 of the previous users, key analytics were discovered. Usability validation showed onboarding completion improving by 26%, while transaction drop-off decreased by 17%. Task success rates increased to 32%, and user trust perception scores improved by 100%. Listing activation increased by 79%.
As time progressed, I checked back with the analytics team and learned fraud-related support requests decreased by 18% after implementation.
Beyond individual metrics, the work established a scalable trust framework capable of supporting future marketplace growth.
Why Does This Matter to The Business?
With increased trust the amount of users interactions skyrocketed and also increased customer retention.
Takeways
Reflection
Designing with empathy in mind. Or to be more direct, focus on the people just as much as the numbers. Pushing product and being profitable is important, but making sure your users feel heard, and improving user trust is arguable just as impactful. MarketSquare reinforced that in two-sided marketplaces, trust is the primary product experience. Designing for high-value transactions requires balancing usability with confidence while aligning user behavior with marketplace health.
What I Learned
Trust the data. Combing through the prior research and doing my own help me gather a better understanding of the direction stakeholders wanted to take this project. Meeting those needs while also keeping the user first sometimes proved challenging, but was ultimately worth it in the end.
What I Would Do Next?
Although I’m no longer apart of the team, I’d recommend continuing to iterate on the flows. Some suggestion that come to mind would be the addition of MFA password protection for the wallet flow and adding new forms of payment.