Biddify

What Shopify did for e-commerce, Biddify aims to do for auction houses. The same issues that businesses faced 10 years ago—the complexity of setting up a personalized online store and the high costs of custom development—has left auction houses with disparate and clunky systems requiring extensive manual processes to support a single auction, limiting the business' scalability.

ROLE

Founding Product Designer

PROJECT TYPE

0 to 1 MVP

PLATFORM

Desktop

DURATION

March - May 2024

TEAM

CEO, CTO, Software Engineer

OUTCOME

Onboarded our first auction house in Jan 2025 with $50,000+ in bids

Overview

Biddify is an auction management platform that helps businesses manage the entire lifecycle of an auction - from setting up an online site, managing bids, integrated payment processing; all the way to invoicing. With a small team of 4, Biddify focused on creating an MVP that solved the core pain points of setting up online auctions.

My Role & Process

I led the UX/UI design of everything that surrounds the Biddify product: marketing pages, user profiles, project pages, and account settings. I worked closely with our CEO, CTO and software engineer to make sure we were accurately communicating the complex capabilities of Biddify in a digestible way.

Goals

With countless potential features to build, we focused on truly listening to auction houses to prioritize the ones that would benefit them the most. Our overall goal was to create an MVP that seamlessly allows admins to manage the lifecycle of an auction. The main user goals were:

Help them look professional.

Manage their invoices and reports efficiently, so that they can spend less time on admin tasks and more time on building their business.

Feel confident in each stage of the auction creation lifecycle, so that they can focus on optimizing their listings and meet deadlines rather than troubleshooting issues.

Information Architecture (Auction View)

The initial v0 platform lacked clear hierarchy and structure, with cluttered navigation bars creating confusion for new users and inefficiencies in finding the right pages. The horizontal layout also made it hard to scale for future product features on the roadmap.

Collaborating with the CEO, we mapped key moments in the auction lifecycle to understand user journeys and cross-cutting scenarios. We discovered that auctions are viewed as standalone projects, with navigation blending task-based flows (e.g., sending invoices, managing consignor reports) and chronological workflows (e.g., uploading lots before adding images). This was followed by building an inventory of key page elements (tables types, forms, and information pages) to understand user focus and identify common patterns.

Changes I made to improve navigation:

A side nav bar with collapsible tabs, so users can access information without going into multiple page layers.
Modified the top nav bar to accommodate longer auction titles and make it easily identifiable that they are working on which auction within Biddify.
Established new navigation patterns (tabs, icons, breadcrumbs) - providing clearer pathways to move between sections, improving discoverability and consistency across the platform.

The Many States of an Auction

The top nav bar shows admins the state of an auction as well as important actions they can take so they can manage its lifecycle, and have the information they need when communicating with their team.

While a seemingly pretty simple feature on the surface, the designs needed to show the multitude of states that an auction can be in (private, public, live auction, soft closing, completed etc.), actions that can be taken in each state (for example, an option to publish the auction to customers only when the auction is still private), and how it impacts the customer (for example, an email that gets sent to customers informing them that the auction is getting extended).

Changes I made:

Inventory Upload Process

Auction houses use CSV files and desktop folders to organize item details and images before uploading them to auction management platforms. There were a number of things to take into account: from the type and quantity of files allowed, to the order of information being uploaded. For new users, the process can feel a little unforgiving. Onboarding, clear file requirements, and user support were important aspects to design for.

Changes I made:

Clarified the next possible action by separating the lot and image upload modal (instead of grouping lots and images in the same one).
Clarified the file specifications using illustration, clear micro-copy, and redesigning the modal text hierarchy.
Made it easier for admins to get started and/or re-start from their previous file upload by adding a starter and current lot template, respectively, as well as providing a link to Biddify documentation.

In January 2025, we onboarded our first auction house where they conducted a public auction that supported over 300 customers and processed $50,000+ worth of bids on the Biddify platform.

Learnings

It’s one thing to build screens and flows in Figma, it’s another to expect someone to understand it. For us as designers, it’s important to bring clarity to facilitating cross-functional collaboration when we can. Sometimes it means that designers need to re-cap a TDLR of why we’re doing something, linking to a Google doc, keeping things neat and buttoned up so when people are looking for it, they come to a source of truth.

It’s important to show not only what we’re building but also why we’re building it. A lot of things can get lost in translation about what’s supposed to happen between transitions. I want to be crystal clear exactly what’s happening in different states, interactions, space and alignment. It’s easy to miss certain requirements and edge cases. Engineers shouldn’t worry about “am i doing this correctly?”.