Reducing drop-off by 12% through progressive onboarding in a B2B aggregator.

When I joined this project, I knew absolutely nothing about the scope of work. My only clear directive was simple: design a mobile app based on web platform functionality.

Before sketching a single screen, I refused to guess the solution. I needed to understand the core business logic first. How does this company make money? Where is the current funnel leaking? Why do they actually need a mobile app right now?

To dig up these answers, I started by conducting deep stakeholder interviews to audit their business strategy, operational bottlenecks, and existing sales flow.

During these business alignment sessions, I uncovered a critical insight about their legacy web funnel. The platform required a mandatory upfront financial deposit just to access the service.

It didn’t matter how beautiful, fast, or polished the final mobile application would be if users were blocked from ever seeing it. If our onboarding flow forced a high financial commitment before letting buyers touch the product, they would never reach their "aha" moment. I realized we had to completely re-engineer the onboarding experience, or the app would fail before launch.

The stakeholder's original logic for the hard paywall was based on their legacy web funnel. Users faced a massive wall of text and were forced to pay a €500 or €800 deposit immediately to see cars. This caused an 80 to 90% drop off rate. To save these lost leads, the company was paying sales managers to manually call dropped users to explain the platform's value.

I realized we could solve this through UX. By introducing a Soft Paywall, we shifted the burden of "explaining value" from the sales team to the product itself..

To figure out exactly what these buyers needed, I conducted 5 in-depth interviews with active car resellers on the platform. I quickly realized a fundamental truth that shifted my entire design strategy: B2B resellers do not acting like normal consumers.

They are not looking for a specific "dream car." They are shopping strictly for profit margins. Based on this, I defined three core UX pillars for the app:

When designing the core search and filtering experience, I knew we didn't need to reinvent the wheel. Our target users are professional car resellers, they already spend a significant amount of their time selling inventory on Auto Ria, the largest automotive marketplace in Ukraine.

Instead of building a custom filter mechanic from scratch and forcing users to learn a new pattern, I conducted a deep competitive analysis of Ayvens Carmarket, BCA Buyer, and Auto Ria. I strategically adapted Auto Ria’s proven filtering framework as our baseline, layering in our unique B2B data points (auction type, country, supplier, in good condition or with technical defects / damaged).

This strategic decision saved weeks of development time for our MVP and ensured users felt instantly familiar with the interface, allowing them to search for profitable margins with zero friction.

Buying a damaged car without seeing it in person requires immense trust. On the backend, we were parsing massive, unstructured arrays of text from various auction houses. If we dumped this raw text onto the screen, users would abandon the platform out of frustration.

I restructured this data dump into distinct, scannable categories (Configuration, Comments, Car Report, and Auction Conditions). To optimize the flow for power users, I introduced lateral navigation at the bottom of the modals. This allows resellers to seamlessly tab through the vehicle's entire technical history without ever losing their context or dealing with click fatigue.

During user interviews, the loudest pain point was margin destruction caused by hidden auction fees. Resellers calculate their profit margins down to the dollar, and surprise fees at checkout completely destroy platform trust.

To solve this, I designed a dynamic bidding engine. As the user types their maximum bid, the "Total cost of the car" updates in real-time, instantly factoring in all auction services, taxes, and platform fees. "Total cost of the car" is clickable, which immediately opens a transparent, itemized breakdown of every single charge. This absolute transparency empowers users to bid aggressively with total financial confidence.

The application successfully launched on both iOS and Android and immediately shifted user behavior. By solving the core friction points of the legacy platform, the app became the primary tool for professional resellers.

• I utilized stakeholders as user experts: instead of treating stakeholders as just "approvers," I facilitated syncs to extract their deep knowledge of the B2B business model. These insights directly shaped the margin-driven filtering logic I designed.
• I aligned the technical teams to hit our deadline: acting as the PM, I established strict communication cadences between the client, our frontend developers, and the backend team. By clarifying exactly what the UI should look like and tracking our core metrics, I ensured we shipped the complex MVP on a strict timeline with zero compromises on quality.