This is Mercari. The fast and easy way to sell or buy almost anything. With over 40 million downloads in the United States, and 100k+ new items listed everyday, Mercari is on a mission to make selling as easy as buying.
Over the past year, I worked alongside the Mercari product and marketing teams to develop and refine their visual design systems. From brand guidelines to social content, transactional emails to in-app features, I led the design efforts for Nelson Cash.
When we started working with Mercari, their marketing team was in possession of a new wordmark, an updated typeface, and ambitions for a new awareness campaign. What they hadn’t quite developed was a robust system to bring all of these materials together.
Creating a visually consistent brand across all touchpoints became increasingly important as our team jumped into design. What started initially as design systems thinking for online ad-units, quickly turned into the creation of OOH billboards, social campaigns and email marketing assets.
It was the design and creation of these materials that forged the foundation of our evolving visual design system. This was the work that codified some of these standards for the first time. Building off of insights from real work, we created a baseline system for typography, color, and scale.
Once these foundational pieces started to take shape, the Mercari team asked us to apply our design system to their digital product.
First up, all Transactional Emails.
Mercari is a robust e-commerce platform that connects thousands of sellers with buyers every single day, and these transactional emails end up doing most of the work. They alert sellers when their item is purchased, inform buyers when their item is in-transit, and keep both parties up to date on the entire transaction.
Before diving in, our team took time to investigate and understand the transactional experience for both buyers and sellers. We conducted interviews, sold our own stuff on Mercari, and held user-story sessions to better understand user needs at every step of the transaction process.
What was working? What were the major pain-points? What didn’t we understand? What was missing? What could be improved?
The biggest pain-point was illuminated after a lengthy user-story session, when the team realized that at almost every step, we collectively held the same major concern.
Buyers and sellers had a hard time understanding exactly where they were in the process, and what they had to do next.
This inspired a new feature — the transaction timeline — designed to provide context and continuity throughout the entire transaction.
This insight inspired the creation of a component system, that could adapt depending on user needs. In each email, these components changed their content and altered their position to surface the most relevant information for every user at every step.
