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Design Lead · Brand & Product
2020 – 2021 · California, United States (Remote)
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Eze: Building Trust in Wholesale Electronics
Design Lead · Brand & Product
2020 – 2021 · California, United States (Remote)
The Challenge
When I joined Eze in 2020, the YC-backed company had momentum but no design function. Features shipped fast, decisions scattered across engineering and sales, and the brand felt like an afterthought. For a B2B electronics marketplace trying to build trust with buyers trading tens of thousands of dollars in devices, that was a problem.
My mandate was simple on paper: establish design as a discipline. In practice, that meant figuring out what design should even mean for a product-led company scaling across continents.
The Team That Didn't Exist Yet
People assume you walk into a company and immediately start hiring. That's not how it works. You don't build a team because you can—you build one because the work demands it and the organization is ready to absorb it.
For the first few months, I was hands-on with everything: redesigning the trading dashboard, rethinking the checkout flow, sketching logo iterations at 2 am. As the product matured and our customer base spread across 15+ countries, the cracks became obvious. One person couldn't maintain quality at that scale.
So I made the case: we needed specialized help. Not four people at once—that would have overwhelmed the system. We started with a brand designer to handle the growing marketing surface area. Then a product designer to take ownership of the seller experience. Eventually, a content designer and another designer joined to handle the expanding interface.
The structure emerged from necessity, not org charts. Product designers partnered with engineering and product management. Brand worked closely with marketing and sales. I stayed across both, setting direction and jumping in wherever the work needed shaping.
Eze Design
Tomi Abe (Me)DESIGN LEAD
Nifemi AjayiWEB / PRODUCT
Olumide FajuloBRAND / MARKETING
Godwin OlatundeVISUAL
Godsgrace NzewiCONTENT
A Mark That Means Something
The existing logo bothered me. Not because it was ugly—it wasn't—but because it didn't say anything. Eze's entire business model revolves around facilitating value exchange: buyers and sellers trading devices in a transparent marketplace. The logo should have reflected that.
Looking closer, you could see hints of the letters "e" and "z" buried in the mark, but they weren't intentional. The rotating arrow—meant to suggest exchange—felt unfinished, like someone started an idea and never pushed it all the way through.
I wanted to make that connection explicit. What if the arrow was the letterforms? What if the "e" and "z" created the motion of exchange, visually reinforcing what the company actually does?
I worked through dozens of variations, testing how the mark scaled down to app icons and up to signage. The final design locked the letterforms into a continuous loop, readable as both "EZ" (easy) and as cyclical movement—devices flowing from seller to buyer and back into the market.
From there, the rest of the visual system fell into place. We chose Inter as the brand typeface because it's highly scalable and carries a technical neutrality that suits a B2B platform. Color palette stayed minimal—trust doesn't need decoration. The system needed to work across business cards, partnership labels, email templates, and eventually the product interface itself.
The brand guide became internal infrastructure. When new designers joined, they had something to reference. When marketing needed assets, they weren't starting from scratch every time.
Rethinking Discovery and Navigation
Before anyone could check out, they had to find what they needed. That sounds obvious, but Eze's navigation and product discovery systems weren't making it easy.
Navigation Redesign
Mobile users made up a significant portion of traffic, and their primary action was search. We restructured navigation to prioritize that behavior—prominent search placement, quick access to popular categories, and a secondary navigation bar on desktop to accommodate additional menu items without cluttering the main interface.
Marketing Site Refresh
Eze was expanding into new device categories, and the homepage needed to communicate that growth. Working with the marketing team and a designer, we explored multiple approaches before landing on a content-first design that clearly conveyed Eze's value proposition and showcased the range of devices available. The goal: make visitors want to explore, not just land and leave.
Authentication Flow
Registration and login needed to feel frictionless. Instead of full-page redirects, I designed a pop-up modal system that let users authenticate quickly without losing their place in the browsing experience. The flow adhered to the style guide while minimizing interruption.
Shop Experience
We analyzed what users searched for most, what product details mattered at the browsing stage, and how to surface price changes and stock levels without overwhelming the interface. Collaborating with engineering, we introduced refined filtering—by model, grade, condition, price range—tailored to different device categories.
Two view modes emerged: grid view for quick scanning, list view for detailed comparison. Each had a clear visual distinction to prevent confusion. We also built a product pricing list view that showed real-time price fluctuations, helping buyers track market changes and make informed decisions.
Research showed users needed more information before adding items to their cart. We redesigned product detail screens to surface comprehensive specs, recent sale prices, and shipping options (domestic vs. international, with estimated delivery times). Users could adjust filtering parameters directly on the page to refine their search without backtracking.
Collapsible sections kept the page organized—open what you need, keep the rest tucked away. Multiple product images gave buyers visual confidence. Payment options were clearly displayed, removing any guesswork about how transactions would work.
Every enhancement aimed at the same outcome: help users make confident purchasing decisions without needing to contact support or leave the platform to verify information elsewhere.
Friction at Checkout
Analytics showed something uncomfortable: 70–80% of people who added devices to their cart never completed the purchase. For a marketplace moving hundreds of thousands of devices annually, that's revenue evaporating.
We ran surveys with 20 buyers, interviewed 10 more, and conducted usability tests with another 10. The problems weren't subtle:
- The checkout flow had too many steps, forcing users to bounce between pages just to adjust quantities
- Payment options were limited and poorly explained
- Shipping workflows assumed single-address delivery, but many buyers needed flexibility
- The entire process felt opaque—buyers couldn't tell how close they were to finishing
The solution wasn't about adding features. We needed to remove steps and reorder the ones that remained.
New structure: Cart → Checkout → Confirmation. Three stages, clearly labeled with a progress indicator that showed exactly where you were. Quantities editable in-cart, so no one had to leave to adjust their order. Payment and shipping consolidated into a single screen with smart defaults and upfront error handling. Address management streamlined with inline validation that caught mistakes before submission.
We prototyped the new flow and tested it with 10 buyers over Zoom. 90% preferred the simplified version. One person asked about shipping to multiple addresses simultaneously—we noted it for future work but kept scope tight for this release.
Checkout to confirmation flow
Post-launch, abandonment dropped by 8% points. Not massive, but meaningful when you're talking about high-value B2B transactions. Sales lifted by 10%. Customer feedback on Trustpilot during that period consistently mentioned easier ordering and reliability, reflected in a 4.8/5 rating.
The work also surfaced bigger questions: Should we allow guest checkout? (No—B2B buyers need account-level pricing, order history, and verification for compliance.) What about crypto payments? (Interesting, but risk and adoption weren't there yet.) Insurance options? (Noted for exploration.)
Trading Without Leaving the Shop
Early on, the trading dashboard lived on a separate subdomain. Users could monitor real-time price fluctuations for devices they cared about, but accessing it meant leaving the main shopping experience. That friction added up.
The insight was straightforward: if buyers need to watch prices to make smart purchasing decisions, let them do it without breaking their workflow. We integrated the dashboard directly into the shop interface—same browser window, same context.
Now buyers could filter devices, compare models, track price changes, and make purchasing decisions all in one place. The trading view became an extension of the product grid, not a separate tool they had to remember to check.
This also meant redesigning how we displayed pricing information in the product list. We tested multiple formats to show model-specific pricing, grade variations, and availability without overwhelming the interface. The solution: a collapsible pricing list view that let users drill into detail only when they needed it.
Designing for Decision Clarity
Across projects, one lesson held: ambiguity kills confidence. When key details are hidden or inconsistent, users hesitate.
We focused the design system on making decisions visible. Information architecture prioritized what matters at the moment of choice—clear specs, recent sale prices, shipping options with estimated delivery windows, and multiple images for inspection—supported by consistent patterns for layout, typography, and states.
We built a component library (buttons, forms, modals, notifications) and foundational tokens (color, spacing, type scale) to reduce cognitive load and ensure uniform behavior across screens. Accessibility checks, empty-state guidance, and data‑presentation rules made information legible and actionable, so users could decide without backtracking or contacting support.
The result: faster implementation for engineers, less rework for designers, and a consistent, confidence‑building experience wherever users interact with the product.
A Few Customer Spotlights
Eze’s impact on sellers across Africa and South America.What Stayed With Me
The company grew from fragmented execution to coherent experience during that year. Design became something people referenced in roadmap conversations, not an afterthought.
But the most useful lesson wasn't about process or deliverables. It was about recognizing when to push and when to pull back. Early on, I wanted to fix everything at once—rebrand, redesign, rebuild. That would have been chaos. The organization wasn't ready to absorb that much change simultaneously.
So we sequenced it: identity first, because brand clarity unlocked better product decisions. Checkout next, because conversion directly impacted revenue. Team building gradually, as the workload justified it. Each phase built on the last.
Involving engineers early meant fewer surprises during implementation. Treating support and sales as design partners meant solutions reflected real buyer behavior, not assumptions. Staying hands-on even as the team grew meant I understood where the actual constraints were.
A few years later, the work still holds. That's not because we built something perfect—we didn't. We built something that could evolve, with people who understood why decisions were made and how to extend them.
Press & Recognition
Press coverage during this period includes Built in Africa (March 2021), TechCabal (August 2021), and PYMNTS (August 2021), highlighting Eze's growth across 15+ countries and emphasis on transparency and trust—outcomes directly tied to the systems and frameworks established during this work.