Organizing fashion discovery in a social marketplace
Role
UX/UI Designer
Solo Designer
8 weeks
Tools
Figma
Overview
Designing an organizational feature for Treffa
Treffa is a social retail app where users can post bounties for clothing items and receive recommendations from other users. The original poster's favorite recommendation receives the bounty.
View feed
Make a request
View recommendations
Award your favorite
The Problem
Great finds disappear far too soon, and there's no way to organize them
Treffa users can post bounties, receive recommendations, and stumble upon hidden gems all in their feed, but they can’t save or organize them. Great finds often ended up relegated to screenshots, buried in the notes app, or forgotten.
Treffa is a growing platform, with a large "lurking" audience—for those who love to browse and rarely post, this means less engagement, more frustration, and missed opportunities.
Target User
Introducing Sarah—a Gen Z fashion enthusiast
Throughout the process, I consulted with Treffa's first user to determine the pain points of Treffa's target users. I created a user persona to help guide my features for Treffa and my design.
The Solution
Capsules—build personal styles and connect with others.
Treffa needed a way to turn the fleeting moments of fashion discovery and inspiration into something lasting, visual, and social.
Capsules are built for fashion discovery and curation. Every item inside is tied to a real recommendation or bounty, so users can track its source, context, and follow up with the person who posted it.
Onboarding
Onboarding allows Treffa users to create a capsule and save initial suggested recommendations, driving more users to Treffa's two-sided marketplace.
Add clothing items you see to capsules
This feature allows users to save either images from requests or recommendations to their capsule, creating an ecosystem around recommendations, requests, and capsules.
Follow other capsules or invite collaborators
Users can follow other capsules, get inspiration from them, and co-create capsules, bringing fashion lovers together. Capsules that the user follows are also used to curate the user's main feed, providing them more relevant posts.
Turn your capsule into a bounty
Gen Z audience doesn't just buy a standalone piece of clothing, they shop to fulfill a specific vibe or aesthetic. Being able to attach a capsule to a bounty/request turns shopping collaborative and a hunt to find the item that will match the user's capsule/style.
Learnings and Takeaways
What I Learned
Navigating ambiguity and a lack of structure and process, especially for my first design project. I was given a high-level brief to create an organizational tool, and I had to do a lot of outside research on how to use Figma.
Technical constraints were important to consider. I proposed a few different features for capsules that I thought could be fun and unique, but they would be too technically difficult to implement for the one developer staffed on Treffa.
If I were to redo this project, I'd focus on recruiting more users for user research to gain more comprehensive insights, conducting usability tests throughout my design process, and overall utilizing what I've learned in the past year about the design process. I focused primarily on benchmarking UI patterns from similar apps, namely Pinterest and Poshmark.
