ONE BISON
TURNING A BUSINESS DIRECTORY INTO A MARKETPLACE
I designed the full transaction lifecycle — seller onboarding, product discovery, cart, checkout, and post-purchase order tracking — as One Bison evolved from a directory of 800+ vetted businesses into a two-sided marketplace.
ROLE:
UX/ UI Designer
SCOPE:
E-commerce & payments UX,
seller onboarding,
IA, design system
STATUS:
V3 — ongoing
Onboarding shipped,
Checkout in build
Challenge
One Bison's previous experience made it hard for both shoppers and business owners to understand what the platform offered and what to do next. Key pain points included:
Unclear value proposition
Understanding your challenge, your audience, and what success looks like for you.
Complex navigation and IA
Overlapping labels and deep menus made discovery frustrating.
Low conversion for business signups
Business owners weren't sure which plan was right or what they would receive.
No path to purchase on platform
Users had to leave the site to buy, limiting trust and conversion potential.
My Approach
I took a user-centered approach focused on clarity, trust, and conversion. My work spanned discovery, definition, design, and iteration in close collaboration with the team.
01.
Discover
Heuristic audit, analytics review, stakeholder interviews, and competitive analysis.
02.
Define
Synthesized insights, clarified user needs, and prioritized problems with impact.
03.
Design
Explored concepts, created responsive UI, and built a scalable design system.
04.
Validate
Tested with users, iterated based on feedback, and refined before launch.
Key Design Decisions
Three decisions that had the biggest impact on the experience.
A clearer front door
I simplified the homepage and navigation to focus on one primary action—discovering businesses—while keeping business signup visible and accessible.
A dedicated path for business owners
I redesigned the onboarding and pricing experience to clearly communicate value, build confidence, and increase plan selection.
Building trust and moving toward transactions
We introduced buyer protection messaging and a foundation for in-platform purchases to increase trust and keep users on platform.
The Solution
A simplified, trustworthy, and conversion-focused marketplace experience for shoppers and business owners.
For Shoppers
Easier discovery, better search, and a more relevant experience rooted in values.
For Business Owners
A clear onboarding experience, transparent plans, and tools to help businesses grow and get discovered.
Outcomes
Impact since the redesign and ongoing improvements.
↑0X
↑0X
Increase in business signups
↑0%
↑0%
Increase in engaged sessions
↑0%
↑0%
Increase in search usage
Stronger trust and satisfaction
from users and business owners
Marketplace transactions (Buy on One Bison) are in development and planned to launch after the first vendor cohort and buyer protection program are in place.
Looking Ahead
With a strong foundation in place, we're building the next wave of features.
Reviews
Building trust with verified reviews and ratings.
AI Search
Natural language search to discover faster.
Personalised Feed
A tailored experience based on interests and activity.
Local Discovery
Find value-aligned businesses in your area.
Services Directory
Dedicated experience for service-based businesses.
Seller Tools
Insights and tools to help businesses succeed.
My Role
I owned the end-to-end design process for key shopper and seller experiences.
• Led UX/UI design from research to high-fidelity across web and mobile.
• Designed information architecture, user flows, and responsive interfaces.
• Built and maintained a scalable design system.
• Collaborated closely with product, engineering, data, and legal.
THE TRANSACTION LIFECYCLE
The marketplace isn't one screen — it's a chain, and trust has to survive every link. I designed each step to answer the question a first-time buyer is actually asking at that moment.
CART
Who am I buying from?
Seller named above the line items, with a plain statement that the order ships directly from them.
CHECKOUT
Is this safe, and what's the real total?
Guest checkout with an account-found prompt, itemized costs, Stripe and buyer protection under the button.
CONFIRM
Did it work, and what now?
Order number, ship-from seller, and a route into order history so the purchase creates an account relationship.
POST-PURCHASE
Where is it, and who helps if it's wrong?
Delivery stepper, tracking, confirm-delivery, and an explicit “Report a problem” path — the backbone of buyer protection.
DESIGNING FOR WHAT COMES NEXT
AI features are probabilistic, and probabilistic systems need different UX than deterministic ones — confidence signals, graceful failure, and human override. On a platform whose differentiator is human verification, that principle isn't optional. Three opportunities I scoped for the roadmap:
AI-assisted product listing
The heaviest part of seller onboarding is entering products. A seller pastes their store URL; the system drafts titles, descriptions, categories, and value tags as editable pre-filled fields.
Trust rule: AI reduces typing, never makes claims on the seller's behalf. Nothing goes live unreviewed.
Values-aware discovery
“Something for my dad who hunts, from a veteran-owned business” is intent, not a query string. Results return with stated reasons — Veteran-owned · American-made · matches “hunting gear.”
Trust rule: explainability is the product promise. Filters stay visible and always override.
Post-purchase assist
A first-response layer for order questions, scoped to status only, with confidence visible in the design and human escalation one tap away.
Trust rule: anything involving money, refunds, or a dispute hands off to a person.
What I'd do differently
I designed the funnel before I could measure it
No analytics existed on the signup flow when I started. I mapped failures qualitatively with the founder and QA, but I should have pushed for basic event tracking in week one — it would have made every prioritization argument evidence-based instead of persuasive.
I under-designed the multi-seller cart
My first checkout assumed one seller per order because that's the common case today. It won't be for long, and retrofitting split shipping, payouts, and order status is harder than designing for it up front. I designed for the present when I should have designed for the model.
I'd talk to sellers earlier
The onboarding flow is grounded in the founder's conversations and competitive patterns, not my own interviews. Five conversations with already-listed businesses would have told me which fields they actually stumble on — and I suspect fulfillment and shipping, the two I spent longest structuring, are where I'd have been wrong.
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