Sustainable Trades
Designed membership dashboard experiences to help sustainable traders manage inventory, exchanges, and orders within a bartering-based marketplace MVP.
Background
Sustainable traders & local farmers, artisans, and eco-conscious entrepreneurs lacked eCommerce platforms that fully supported their unique needs. Existing marketplaces like Shopify or Etsy focused on standard buy/sell transactions, offering limited options for barter, trading, or connecting with local communities. This creates an opportunity to design a platform where small businesses can manage listings, track exchanges, and access a membership-based system that helps them grow and thrive.
Project Overview
This project was part of building a greenfield eCommerce marketplace MVP focused on sustainable traders, including local farmers, artists, and eco-conscious entrepreneurs.
My contribution was to design the membership dashboards as my primary focus while also contributing to the landing page and onboarding flows.
Product flow · Dashboard is the primary focus
Design Approach
To address the opportnity for sustainable traders and businesses, I focused on understanding their core workflows and designing a platform that made managing inventory, orders, shipments, conversations, and exchanges intuitive.
With limited access to users and no existing design system, I relied on competitor analysis (Shopify, Etsy, Grove, & Square Space) and mental modeling to guide early design decisions.
I created site maps, user flows, and wireframes to define key workflows, iterating with the client to balance usability, business priorities, and membership tier functionality.
Key Experience: Dashboard Foundations
Due to timeline constraints and evolving product direction, the dashboard work focused on establishing a strong operational foundation for small businesses rather than fully defining every downstream flow.
The designs prioritized membership-dashboards and inventory management, creating a scalable structure that future teams could build upon as order, exchange, and communication flows became clearer.
Key experiences included:
- Basic vs Pro dashboards that reflected feature access and business needs
- Inventory management for tracking listings
- A clear dashboard structure that anticipated future order, exchange, and messaging functionality.
Basic & Pro Membership Dashboards
Sustainable Trades offered both Basic & Pro memberships, each designed to support businesses at different stages of growth. The dashboard experience reflected these tiers by adjusting visibility, access, and emphasis rather than introducing entirely separate interfaces.
For Basic members, the dashboard focused on essential operational needs, such as managing listings and viewing high-level activity. Pro Members were given expanded functionality into additional back end admin features and additional tools to suport more active sellers and deeper business insights.
Inventory Management
Inventory management was a core experience within the business dashboard, designed to help sellers efficiently manage and maintain their listings.
The experience focused on providing a clear overview of active items while making it easy to add, edit, or update listings without disrupting daily operations. Given the absence of a design system and limited time for user validation, the interface prioritized familiar patterns commomly found in e-commerce admin tools to reduce cognitive load for users.
Supporting Experiences
In addition to the business dashboard, I contributed to several supporting experiences that helped shape the overall product direction and onboarding journey.
Landing Page Exploration
I collaborated with the other designer on my team to draft multiple UI explorations for the landing page, which were shared with the client to align on visual direction and product positioning. While the final direction follow one primary iteration, elements from the second explorationg were intentionall incorporated to enhance interactivity and content clarity.
This collaborative approach allowed the team to balance the client's vision with usability considerations while maintaing a cohesive visual direction across the product.
Onboarding Flow
I also contributed to the onboarding experience by designing membership details and the payment flow for Basic and Pro plans. This work focused on clearly communicating plan differences while minimizing friction during account setup, helping users understand the value of each membership before entering the dashboard experience.
Outcome
The project resulted in a foundational set of designs that established the core structure for the platform's business experience. The Basic and Pro dashboards and inventory management flows provided a clear starting point for implementation and future feature development.
While user testing and post-launch validation were limited, the work helped align the client around a shared vision for how small businesses could manage their operations within a sustainability-focused marketplace.
Reflection
What Worked Well
- Maintained strong MVP focus by prioritizing core dashboard experiences for business members.
- Collaborated closely with other designer and client, enabling quick alignment and iterations.
- Designed flexible, reusable components that scaled across dashboards, discovery, and inventory experiences.
What I'd Do Differently
- Partner more closely with engineering earlier and post-handoff to validate feasiblity and plan phased releases.
- Invest additional time in user research upfront to better understand small business workflows and operational needs.
- Develop more comprehensive design system documentations to support future teams and iterations.