UI/UX
UX Research
Product Design
Branding
Interaction Design
E-Commerce
A curated marketplace where skilled Indian artists sell handmade work and collectors find pieces worth owning. Built around trust, craft, and the story behind every object.
02 Racanā
Product Design
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Racanā is a curated marketplace for handmade work by skilled Indian artists, designed for collectors and buyers who value craft, provenance, and the story behind what they own. The platform connects artists directly with people who buy with intention, built around two principles: trust and transparency. Every design decision on Racanā was made in service of those two things.
about
Product Design
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S-UX/ The Seller Flow
For Arjun, the most significant operational risk is what happens after a sale. Handmade ceramics are fragile, high-value, and frequently mishandled in standard courier systems. A single shipping dispute can damage both the transaction and the brand.
Rather than leaving packaging standards to individual judgment, I designed a mandatory Fragility and Packaging Check into the listing tool itself. Arjun classifies fragility, confirms compliance with Racanā's packaging standards, and only then can a listing go live. Quality control is built into the workflow rather than enforced after the fact.
UI/UX ————— UX Research ————— Product Design ————— Branding————— Interaction Design————— UI/UX ————— UX Research ————— Product Design ————— Branding————— Interaction Design————— UI/UX ————— UX Research ————— Product Design ————— Branding————— Interaction Design—————
Wire-framing
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Wireframing on this project was less about laying out screens and more about pressure-testing the logic before committing to any visual decisions.
The core question at this stage was whether the journey from discovering a piece to understanding its maker felt genuinely effortless. I worked through the information hierarchy on each screen until the artist's story had the space it needed, and the functional elements supported it without competing. The visual design came after that foundation was solid.
Racanā is a two-sided marketplace, and designing for one side without fully understanding the other would have produced a product that worked for neither. Before any flows or screens, I mapped out the two people this platform needed to serve.
Natasha Menon, 32, Senior Product Manager, Mumbai represents the discerning buyer. She shops with intent, researches before purchasing, and expects the same visual and functional polish from an art marketplace that she gets from any well-designed consumer product. Her pain point with existing platforms is the gap between what something looks like in a thumbnail and what it actually is as an object. For Natasha, trust is built through detail, and detail has to be designed in.
Arjun Sharma, 38, Full-time Ceramicist, Jaipur represents the maker. He operates a high-skill, low-volume practice and needs tools that reflect that reality. His concerns are practical: conveying texture and scale accurately, managing fragile logistics, and maintaining the perception of quality that his work deserves. For Arjun, the platform needs to feel like a gallery, not a warehouse.
Every feature in the product can be traced back to one of these two people. The personas kept the design honest.
User Personas
User Flows
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B-UX/ The Buyer Flow
The standard e-commerce pattern moves a user from product discovery straight to a purchase decision. For a marketplace selling handmade art, that sequence skips the most important step: understanding what you are actually buying.
I introduced a Provenance and Transparency Panel between the Product Detail Page and the purchase decision. The placement was deliberate. By the time Natasha reaches the point of committing, she has already read the story behind the piece, understood the materials and process, and seen the artist's practice documented. The value gap is closed before she has to decide.
Sitemap
The information architecture had one job: stay out of the way.
For a platform where the art and the artist's story are the product, the structure needed to move users from curiosity to discovery as directly as possible. Filters organised by Style, Medium, and Subject bypass the noise and get Natasha to work she will actually want. Every path through the app converges on the Product Detail Page, where the Racanā Process and artist provenance take centre stage.
The cart and checkout flow was kept deliberately lean. By the time a user reaches it, the trust has already been established upstream. The final steps should feel effortless, not administrative.
Building out both sides of a two-sided product in parallel sharpened how I think about design decisions. Every feature had to justify itself twice —
once for the buyer, once for the seller.
That constraint made the work more considered.