A mobile-first subscription experience that empowers users to manage their coffee queue and discover new brews with clarity and ease.
Project Type: Mobile app design
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Industry: e-Commerce, subscription DTC
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Notion
THE OPPORTUNITY
Exploring what a truly mobile Trade experience could be
While coffee subscriptions represent a small but growing slice of the market, their success lies in repeat engagement and retention—behaviors that increasingly happen on mobile.
Over 55% of consumers now prefer mobile apps as their primary way to interact with brands, yet many subscription services still treat mobile as an afterthought.
Trade Coffee, while widely loved for its curated roasters and flexible delivery model, offers no dedicated mobile app and its mobile web experience often reflects a pared-down version of its desktop interface.
Before rethinking what Trade’s mobile experience could look like, I wanted to better understand it:
Which actions matter most to users on the go?
What specific friction points were undermining mobile usability?
How could the interface better support clarity, discoverability, and trust?
EXPERIENCE AUDIT
Surface-level polish, but friction underneath
To identify where Trade’s mobile experience was falling short, I evaluated it through three focused lenses:
Heuristic Audit
A systematic evaluation using Nielsen Norman Group's "10 Usability Heuristics" to identify usability breakdowns in Trade's web experience.
-> Heuristic audit with featured quote. View full evaluation.
User Journey Map
A behavioral and emotional map based on my own subscription usage over several months visualizing key peaks and drop-offs across the customer lifecycle.
Visual Teardown
A detailed, annotation-driven analysis of Trade's key flows to reveal interaction-level friction and missing continuity between states.
-> Visual UX teardown with featured quote. View full teardown.
This approach helped me step outside my habits as a user and see the product as a system—where visual gaps, interaction quirks, and ambiguous logic quietly erode trust and usability.
In doing so, the depth of the issues came into focus. There were cracks everywhere, some small, some structural, each hinting at deeper misalignments between what the product promised and what the experience delivered.
KEY INSIGHTS
A system that works in parts, not as a whole
When I stepped back, the patterns came into focus.
The issues weren’t about volume—they were about cohesion. Small points of friction echoed across flows, revealing a deeper disconnect between how the system was built and how users moved through it.
From there, I distilled the findings into three foundational breakdowns that shaped usability, trust, and continuity.
Queue Management Lacks Flexibility and Context
Managing your coffee lineup is more tedious than it should be.
Visual hierarchy is weak
Task flow feels brittle
Feedback is inconsistent
Discovery Feels Disconnected and Directionless
There’s no clear way to browse subscription-eligible coffees.
No filters, no smart tags
No visual cues about delivery compatibility
No gentle nudges from the system
Favorites is a Missed Opportunity for Personalization
Users want to revisit coffees they’ve loved—but there’s no central space to do that.
Favoriting is buried in rating flow
No way to view, sort, or reorder past favorites
No memory of user preferences or patterns
DEFINE
Narrowing insight into intention
Using the audit insights, I wrote How Might We (HMW) statements to sharpen the problem space and defined three product goals to guide the design.
Insight
Users want more flexibility and control when managing their coffee queue, but the current interface feels rigid, hard to scan, and easy to misinterpret.
POV
I’d like to explore ways to help returning subscribers who want to stay in control of their coffee schedule but feel confused by the current mobile flow—because the lack of clear structure and feedback makes simple tasks unnecessarily difficult.
HMW
How might we support more flexible, intuitive queue management to help subscribers confidently edit, skip, or reorder coffees?
Insight
Users can’t easily tell which coffees are eligible to add to their subscription, making discovery feel confusing and inefficient.
POV
I’d like to explore ways to help users who want to browse and try new coffees but struggle to identify which ones can be added to their subscription—because the current interface lacks visual cues, filters, and guidance.
HMW
How might we clarify the subscription context within the discovery experience so users can confidently explore new coffees that match their plan?
Insight
Users have no meaningful place to revisit coffees they’ve loved, making it hard to build long-term preference or personalization.
POV
I’d like to explore ways to help subscribers who want to remember and re-engage with coffees they’ve enjoyed but feel disconnected from their past preferences—because the current experience lacks any meaningful actions.
HMW
How might we elevate the Favorites experience to support personalization, memory, and seamless reordering?
Goal
Build flexible, intuitive queue management
Goal
Design discovery for context and clarity
Goal
Make Favorites personal and persistent
FRAMING THE SOLUTION
Designing for control, curiosity, and continuity
At its best, Trade should feel like a companion that understands your rhythm—helping you stay in control, stay curious, and remember the coffees you love.
To bring those goals to life, I translated the insights into a few focused design approaches.
Build flexible, intuitive queue management
Design Approach
Introduce “Edit Queue” mode with drag-and-drop reordering to give users direct control.
Replace coffees via a lightweight bottom sheet modal for quick, focused actions.
Add contextual overflow menus for swapping, skipping, or removing items.
Provide real-time feedback for queue changes to build trust and reinforce action.
Design discovery for context and clarity
Design Approach
Clarify the difference between Home and Discover. Home highlights queue-eligible coffees; Discover showcases the full catalog with filtering options.
Use smart carousels to surface coffees by roaster, brew method, or theme — making browsing more intuitive and contextual.
Show user-specific history (e.g., what’s in the queue or past orders) to help users connect their choices to what they already love.
Make favorites personal and persistent
Design Approach
Elevate Favorites to a primary tab in the main nav to make it an always-accessible destination.
Add persistent heart icons on coffee cards for quick, visible favoriting.
Allow manual and automatic favoriting — whether users tap the icon or rate a coffee as “Loved It.”
Pair Favorites with context like prep notes, last ordered date, and one-tap reordering to make revisiting effortless.
DESIGN BUILDOUT
When clarity got buried under complexity
I began with low-fidelity sketches to explore layout patterns and early visual direction.
From there, I moved into medium-fidelity wireframes to solidify structure and shape key interactions across three essential flows: queue management, discovery, and favorites.
Then, I hit a turning point.
I built fast. And deep. Every fix led to a rebuild, every idea to another flow. I let my excitement convince me that more screens meant more clarity but really, I was just building for the sake of building. Before long, I wasn’t refining Trade—I was trying to rebuild it. The story got buried in the system.
Somewhere between organization and obsession, my UI kit became a living archive of every idea I couldn't let go.
So I stepped back. Working solo had made it easy to overbuild, mistaking polish for progress. I started asking myself if every screen really needed to exist. Eventually I realized clarity wasn't about volume. It was about restraint.
That shift reshaped how I approached the second half of the project. I focused less on building more, and more on building meaningfully. From that point on, every decision had to earn its place.
FINAL DESIGNS
Trade, reimagined for mobile
The final design brings Trade’s mobile experience into focus, grounded in clarity, consistency, and ease. Each flow was refined to remove friction, strengthen continuity, and make the experience feel more personal and human.
What I Learned
This project became a crash course in designing with intention, the kind of clarity that only comes from wrestling with complexity. I learned that simplicity isn’t a starting point; it’s something you earn through structure, iteration, and relentless attention to detail.
Working on Trade taught me how every part of a system connects, and how making something feel effortless requires noticing everything, refining, and rebuilding until it finally works as one.