XCLAIM is a marketplace for bankruptcy claims trading—kind of like eBay, with buyers and sellers, but instead of sneakers and vintage Pyrex, the "products" being bought and sold are bankruptcy claims.
I joined as the first (and only) full-time product designer. The XCLAIM web app launched on August 2020, exceeding the $10M goal in trades by years' end.
Detailed below are selected XCLAIM projects:
Role UX designer, researcher
Responsibilities Figma design, comparative analysis of search products, design system, moderated customer research, product presentations, engineering reviews
Product team Experience designer (me), two product managers, marketing manager, copywriter, junior visual designer
Software Figma, Miro, Otter.ai, Google Slides
Team— UX designer (me), product manager, senior engineer, junior engineer
Problem— The buyer experience lacked personalization. Just as buyers on eBay like to save and categorize specific items for later purchase, XCLAIM buyers wanted to group claims according to trading viability, sort them by value and sellers who are likely to accept their first or second offer.
Process— Our search vendor, AWS ElasticSearch, had default out-of-the-box capabilities, many of which I wanted to work with in order to fulfill a tight turnaround time. In future iterations, I would enhance functionalities by customizing the default ElasticSearch features, such as display of search results, filtering capabilities, and display of frequent search terms.
UX— I was in constant contact with my team's senior engineer, ensuring a smooth transition between design to implementation. To flex to future versions of search, a full-screen takeover (right, top) was a low-cost way to add space for another feature, such as saved searches. During the design process, I maintained contact with a couple buyers in order to get quick feedback and make my turnaround deadlines.
Outcome— As of February 2021, search is in implementation and became live by the end of March.
Team— UX designer (me)
Problem— As an incoming designer taking over design work from a previous contracting designer, I had a hard time finding components (if they existed) and maintaining consistency in color palette and design patterns. Even though building a formal design library was a luxury due to the higher priorities of our development schedule, I knew I had to make good headway on it and save myself a lot of headaches down the line.
Process— With overlapping colors and styles scattered throughout Figma, I began "clean-up" by building out a component system. Global changes would become much more nimble with organized components. Using Brad Frost's Atomic Design approach, the XCLAIM design system was my pet project squeezed in between other initiatives. All UI was created in Figma, using the component/variant feature and a strict object naming hierarchy (e.g., a/label/leftAlign, where "a" stands for atom).
UX— The design system evolved as we added features. I wanted to ensure any incoming designers (or any employee who isn't accustomed to a design library) could onboard with efficiency. Organization of individual elements as "atoms" all the way up to compilation of "templates" were completed alongside feature sets. Switching between system versus component-level thinking was a must, also something that would be required of any future incoming designers.
Outcome— I've lost count of all the instances in which I was able to make a global change with a few clicks. The initial work put in is tedious and time-consuming, but it saves so much time in the long-term. When new feature sets and design patterns are established, the existing design library components only needs a few modifications rather than sifting through multiple files and pages to ensure changes were indeed global.
