Funge NFT Marketplace Design

The V1 product was a straightforward NFT marketplace: list, browse, buy. It ran on Android, leveraged Polygon's low transaction fees as its primary value proposition, and had a small but engaged community on Discord. It did what it said on the tin, but not much more.

The client's ask was broad: expand the platform scope based on user feedback. After reviewing the data, it became clear there were four distinct problems stacked inside that brief:

I structured the research around three parallel tracks that are essential on marketplace projects: understanding the existing product's failure modes, understanding user mental models (not just pain points), and understanding where competitors had created real competitive moats versus superficial ones.

Before running any user research, I conducted a structured heuristic evaluation of the existing app. This is a step I insist on before any user sessions.

The Discord community channel was a goldmine that had not been properly synthesised. I spent several sessions doing structured qualitative analysis of the feedback threads: tagging comments by theme, sentiment, and recurrence. This gave me signal on what was genuinely bothering users versus what was noise.

I designed a structured survey targeting the Funge community across three user archetypes: crypto-native collectors, independent creators, and newcomers to Web3. The goal was not to confirm assumptions but to surface the gaps between what the client believed users wanted and what users actually needed.

I focused the competitive analysis less on feature comparison and more on identifying the experience gaps the market had not addressed. The findings shaped the differentiation strategy more than any single internal insight.

Three personas were developed grounded in the research data: not archetypes invented in a workshop, but composite profiles built from actual survey responses and Discord quotes.

One of the most common failure modes on feature-expansion projects is building a roadmap that satisfies stakeholder ambition without genuinely serving user needs. The mitigation is always the same: make the alignment between business objectives and user problems explicit and visible before a single wire is drawn.

Rather than jumping straight into feature design, I worked with the team to establish a short set of design principles that would act as decision-making guardrails throughout the project. These are not values statements: they are testable constraints.

The V1 navigation was a symptom of a product built feature-by-feature without a coherent mental model. I rebuilt the IA from scratch using card sorting sessions with community members to understand how they naturally grouped platform capabilities, not how engineers had grouped them internally.

The V1 component library had been assembled reactively: one screen at a time. By the time I audited it, there were four different button styles in use with no clear hierarchy, three inconsistent input field states, and a colour palette that had drifted significantly from the brand guidelines. This was not a documentation problem. It was a structural one.

The brief asked for "community features similar to Discord". My counter-proposal was that a Discord-clone inside a marketplace would split user attention between two fundamentally different contexts. Instead, I designed a social feed that keeps discovery and commerce tightly coupled: you follow a creator, see their work in your feed, and can act on it immediately.

This was the feature I pushed hardest for during scoping. The data was unambiguous: beginner users were abandoning the platform not because they did not want to engage, but because they did not know what to do next. Every competitor had assumed crypto literacy. Funge could own the beginner experience.

Requiring users to own Polygon (MATIC) before their first purchase was a fundamental acquisition barrier. The new wallet system integrated credit and debit card purchasing with automatic conversion: users could think in dollars and the platform handled the crypto mechanics behind the scenes. Gas fee transparency was a direct response to research data: 87.7% of users had cited opaque gas fees as a pain point. Every transaction screen now shows a plain-language fee estimate before users commit.

Auction UX is notoriously difficult because it requires users to make financial decisions under time pressure. Bad auction UX does not just frustrate users: it costs them money. The auction experience was designed around three principles: real-time status visibility, one-tap bid modification, and unambiguous outcome communication when auctions close.

The research-first approach was the right call, even though it delayed design work by three weeks. The alignment it created between the client's feature wishlist and a cleaner, evidence-backed prioritisation framework saved significantly more time later. Stakeholders who might have pushed back on certain feature de-prioritisations accepted the outcomes because they could see the user data behind them.

Due to budget constraint on the client's side, I didn't see this project to when it was shipped.