The brief
Design Wanted is a design blog. It writes about objects made by young, mostly unknown designers — and the obvious question is why you can't buy them there.
The brief came as four questions, and they're worth quoting because they set the shape of the whole project:
How can designers turn a project into a brand, and a brand into a business? How is a social commerce different from a website that just redirects you to an online store? Which social features make a sales platform worth visiting? And how do you fold an existing editorial blog into a commerce service without breaking either one?
What the research actually said
We ran two studies: ten designers through an online survey, and eight end users in face-to-face interviews. Small samples, and worth reading as directional rather than conclusive.
The supply side was easy. 80% of designers said a new platform to sell through would be welcome. On money they were more careful: 50% would pay a fee only per sale, 30% said it depends, 20% weren't willing at all.
The demand side said no. Asked whether they'd buy inside the blog, 90% said they wouldn't. They used words like risky and not reliable; they said they needed time to compare prices, they needed to trust the seller, they wanted more information before spending.
But the same people said something that pointed the way out: 70% do buy after reading an article that interested them. They trusted the content. What they didn't trust was the transaction. The content created trust, while the transaction itself created uncertainty.
Where those numbers came from
The survey and the interviews were the visible part. Most of the work was contextual: meeting people where they actually shop and read, sitting with them at a table, and getting them to sort and rank things rather than describe them.
My contribution included conducting user interviews, facilitating card sorting, sketching the mobile experience, defining the information architecture and developing the interaction and prototype at high fidelity. This was a team project, and the work was shaped by the combined fieldwork and design activities.
What already existed
We benchmarked two sets of products against each other: commerce platforms designers already sell on — Archiproduct, Yanko Design, Society6, Faberin, SquareSpace — and the social platforms they already promote on.
Two columns of the commerce matrix are empty for every single platform: credit points and visual scanner. On the social side the pattern is reversed — the social mechanics are all covered, but only Facebook does direct payment well.
That gap is where the concept went. It's also the honest reason to be careful: a feature nobody has built is either an opportunity or a thing that doesn't work, and a benchmark can't tell you which.
Two archetypes out of five
The research produced five archetypes: shop owner, startup owner, creative producer, non-designer shopper, social and design eager. We kept two and dropped three.
The two we kept — Creative Producer on the selling side and Social & Design Eager on the buying side — are the ones for whom the social part of a social commerce isn't decoration. The creative producer needs an audience before she needs a checkout. The buyer wants to talk about design as much as own it.
The three we dropped were the more conventionally commercial ones. That choice narrowed the market and made the product sharper, which is the trade-off worth naming: a service designed for people who want to talk is a harder sell to people who just want to buy fast.
Two journeys, told as storyboards
Rather than writing requirements, we drew both sides end to end: Alessandra from seeing a product on Instagram to unpacking it on video, and Anna from registering as a seller to managing her first shipment.
Drawing them is what surfaced the features. The chat with the seller appears in Alessandra's story because she wants to know whether a chair is made of real wood — not because a competitor had a chat feature.
The answer to the trust problem
If buyers don't trust the transaction but do trust the content, then the service has to make the people visible rather than the catalogue. Three features carry that:
Talk to the person who made it. Direct chat between buyer and seller. The seller stops being an anonymous storefront and becomes the designer you read about.
Ask the community before you buy. Post what you're considering, collect opinions, see how others rated it. It replaces the price comparison people said they needed with something a blog can actually offer.
Find products from your own room. Capture a video of your living room, kitchen or office, and the service surfaces products that fit it. This one is the most speculative of the three — in 2019 it was a concept, not something we built.
These three weren't picked from a list. We printed twenty feature cards — images, reviews, wallet, wish list, seller profile, voice recognition, virtual reality and the rest — put a real product at the centre of three concentric rings, and asked people to place each card by how much it mattered: very important, interesting, not useful. Then we changed the product at the centre, from a smart speaker to a chair to an event ticket, and watched the cards move.
We used a card-sorting exercise with feature cards placed around three concentric levels of relevance. Participants evaluated the importance of different features in relation to a product. The board shows features such as purchase process, description, images, reviews, videos and mobile app closer to the centre, while features such as virtual reality, voice recognition, popularity platform and personal profile were positioned further out. This is a qualitative artefact: it supports the discussion of what mattered in context, without claiming a statistical ranking of the most important features.
The service, not just the interface
Because the workshop was about services, the deliverable that mattered most wasn't a screen. It was the blueprint: where the blog sits, where the commerce platform sits, and every third party the service depends on — payment gateway, CRM, inventory, shipping, accounting, the post office.
It's the drawing that shows whether a concept is buildable by the company that would have to run it, and it's the one that makes the difference between a proposal and a mockup.
Two products inside one service
Buyer and seller got separate architectures, because they're doing genuinely different jobs. The seller's world is a dashboard: insights, wallet, orders, shipping status, training. The buyer's world is a feed: search, wishlist, cart, community, tracking.
One decision here is worth pointing at. The seller side includes paid training — video courses on marketing and photo editing. It answers something the research said out loud: designers know how to make things and not how to sell them. It also gives the platform a second revenue line, which matters when 20% of your sellers won't pay a fee at all.
Look and feel
Minimal, young, fresh, social, geometric, ordered, tidy — the keywords the moodboard was built around. The interface stays quiet so the objects don't have to compete with it, which is the right call for a catalogue of things people made by hand.
The concept in motion
The videos show how the service was translated into flows and interactions: the main buyer experience, the mobile experience and the concept for a camera-driven discovery flow.
Where it stopped
This project stopped as a concept developed during the SUPSI/Frog Design workshop. There is no documented evidence of a client launch, implementation or broader testing after the end of the project.
What it does show is a coherent design story: research → insights → archetypes → journeys → feature prioritisation → service concept → information architecture → high-fidelity prototypes.
What I would do differently is give more explicit attention to how trust and community are introduced into the buying flow, and to test that assumption earlier in a more concrete service model. That would be a reflection on the concept, not a claim of a documented project failure.