Overview

• Role: Team Lead, UX & UI Design (research support)

• Team: 3 designers

• Deliverable: Mobile app concept + service system

2VIDA (short for "segunda vida," second life) is a marketplace I led the design for: a place where design and architecture students can source new materials for a project, and resell whatever's left over instead of letting it go to waste. As team lead, I owned the UI system and interaction flows, and stayed closely involved in research and testing to keep every decision grounded in what people actually needed, not just what looked clean on screen.

The Problem

Talking to design and architecture students surfaced the same pattern again and again: buying materials was never the hard part; the errand around it was. People bounced between hardware stores, art suppliers, and lumber yards, then carried heavy, awkward loads back on their own. And once the project was done, whatever material was left over usually just sat there, while someone else down the hall went and bought the exact same thing new.

We framed two objectives early and kept both visible through every decision that followed:

• Functional: redesign how students source, transport, and recirculate materials for their projects.

• Emotional: make people feel relaxed and taken care of, not burdened.

From Persona to Product Decisions

We interviewed 10 students about their material-sourcing routines, then turned those conversations into a persona and a journey map, pinpointing exactly where friction and relief showed up along her experience. That map became our real backlog: search filters by material type, a Split Order feature for splitting both the material and the cost with classmates, and delivery to home or school that fit around a packed class schedule. Split Order also drives the cut itself: materials arrive pre-cut according to each person's share, so nobody's stuck dividing a sheet of wood in a parking lot. Every one of these traced back to something a real person told us, not an assumption.

Designing the System

I set the visual language (moodboard, typography, color) and built the core interaction flows: browsing vendors, building a cart across multiple stores, splitting costs with teammates, and scheduling pickup, all inside one guided checkout instead of five separate errands.

Storyboard: from journey map to concept. Once the journey map showed us where friction and relief lived, and before designing screens, I turned it into a story on paper. Nine frames follow a student from "I have leftover materials I paid a lot for" to a delivery arriving at her door. Drawing it helped us agree on the moments that mattered: entering through Community, Stores or Promotions, browsing by material, building one cart across several sellers, and delivery. Our working title, Bazar de diseñadores, later became 2VIDA.

From there, I set the visual language (moodboard, typography, color) and turned the storyboard into the interface flows: browsing vendors, building a cart across multiple stores, splitting costs with teammates, and scheduling pickup, all inside one guided checkout instead of five separate errands.

User-Flow

Testing

We tested with 8 potential users, three interviews per team member, and the feedback reshaped Split Order directly: a percentage-based split replaced flat divisions, and a confirmation notification closed a trust gap we hadn't caught on our own. Small changes, but each one traced back to a real conversation, not an assumption.

Outcome

The name says it all: a second life for materials that would otherwise go to waste, and for a tedious errand most students simply put up with. 2VIDA showed me how a frustrating experience can become a business opportunity when you take the time to understand it.

It was also where I learned what leading means when momentum drops. I set clear scopes, delegated with defined expectations, held firm boundaries, and kept the project moving until it was done.