Role: Senior Product Designer

Client Name: Sketapp

Industry: Ecommerce

Scope: Vendors Mobile App, Buyers Mobile App, Design System

Year: 2024

Sketapp is a mobile-first, dual-sided virtual marketplace connecting buyers and vendors through digital markets modeled after real, physical commercial hubs, supporting both product listings and service-based offerings. I joined the project after an initial version had already been designed, coming in as senior product designer to scope up the product and design the full feature set the first version hadn't covered, spanning both a buyer app and a vendor app operating as one cohesive system.

Many vendors already operate across multiple physical markets, running separate shops with different staff at each location, but had no unified way to manage those shops, track sales in real time, or assign the right staff member to handle an order as it came in. On the buyer side, finding the right vendor meant physically travelling between markets to compare products, prices, and availability, with no easy way to see options across locations at once.

Sketapp needed to solve both sides of this at once, give vendors a single platform to run multiple market presences, and give buyers a way to explore and compare across those same markets without leaving home.

To ground the design, I researched standard patterns across e-commerce and marketplace platforms, how discovery, trust, and transactions are typically structured in this category. Alongside that, I spoke directly with vendors who already sell across multiple physical markets, to understand how they currently operate day to day. That research surfaced the core insight that shaped the rest of the product, vendors needed one platform to manage multiple shop locations, not a single-store model retrofitted to handle multiple markets.

Trust-Calibrated Onboarding Buyers and vendors carry different levels of risk on the platform, so onboarding was designed to match that. Buyer signup is lightweight, email and phone number, with an optional wallet they can fund to make purchases. Vendors go through a fuller KYC process, submitting identification and shop address details, since a vendor has the ability to affect many buyers if their identity or business isn't genuine. Verification effort scales with the risk each account type introduces, rather than applying one standard to both.

Escrow and Payment Protection A specific failure mode shaped this decision, a buyer pays for an item and the vendor either never delivers it or delivers something different from what was promised. To prevent that, payments are held in an escrow wallet and only released to the vendor once the buyer confirms the item they received matches what they paid for. This shifts the risk of a bad transaction away from the buyer having to trust a stranger upfront.

Bidding: Beyond Automatic Matching The base bidding flow lets buyers post a request, with optional images, budget, and deadline, to a market, where vendors submit competing proposals. The product spec supported automatic resolution, such as accepting the lowest price or the highest-reputation vendor. But price or reputation alone don't capture everything a buyer weighs when choosing who to trust with their money.

I designed in a manual review layer on top of that: buyers can see each vendor's real-time proposal details, shop tenure, address, item catalog, reviews, and star rating, before accepting, then move directly into chat to finalize the order. This keeps the speed of automatic matching available while giving buyers control when it matters.

The result is a marketplace where vendors can manage multiple shop locations from a single platform and assign staff to handle orders as they come in, and buyers can explore and compare across several physical markets without leaving home. Trust is built into the product at each critical point, who can transact, how payments are protected, and how buyers choose who to deal with, rather than added on afterward.