Digital handshake | Nezz
Designing trust into high value transactions
A guided transaction experience that helps buyers and sellers move through complex, high-value purchases with greater clarity, security, and control.
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Platform
Responsive Web
Timeline
2-3 Months
Collaborators
Founders, Engineers
The Challenge
One Transaction, Two users, Multiple Decisions …
The Digital Handshake needed to support both buyers and sellers as they moved through the same transaction from different perspectives. A user might continue, cancel, withdraw, wait for the other party, provide documentation, review information, or encounter a transaction that had expired. That meant the experience couldn't be designed as a single linear path.
Each side of the transaction needed different information, actions, and feedback. Users needed the ability to continue, cancel, withdraw, or respond to the other party without losing context. Documentation required to authenticate high-value items needed to become part of the transaction without overwhelming the experience. Certain stages included time constraints, which needed to communicate urgency without creating unnecessary anxiety. Users needed to understand what had happened, what was currently happening, and what they needed to do next.
The Journey
The Solution
Sparking Trust in Peer-to-Peer Trades
P2P transactions often fail at the negotiation step due to friction or sudden withdrawals. We designed a clear chat-embedded proposal flow where the buyer signals formal interest with one tap.
Clarifying the Complex Trust Journey
Legal terms and payment holds can be intimidating. We engineered a step-by-step trust blueprint modal that visually guides both users through contract signing, document validation, and escrow payment holding.
Double-Sided Verification Actions
True confidence requires reciprocal validation. Buyers get full cryptographic access to verified certificates of authenticity, while sellers sign off on non-negotiable prices and shipping parameters.
Escrow Lock & Graceful Edge Cases
The loop closes when funds are securely held in escrow under system control. We designed visual safety valves, clearly structured countdown timers for final signature, alongside clear system alerts for withdrawal and cancellation requests.
Outcome
Reflection
As an early-stage startup, Nezz did not yet have the customer volume required to measure the Digital Handshake through metrics such as conversion or transaction completion. My contribution was therefore focused on defining and designing the product experience itself. I took the Digital Handshake from a founder-led concept to a complete UX/UI flow that could be reviewed with stakeholders and handed off to engineering.
The project established a structured interaction model for one of the platform's most important experiences and demonstrated how complex, high-value transactions could be broken into manageable steps for buyers and sellers.
Early in my design career, I often associated simplicity with reducing the number of screens or interactions. This project taught me that simplicity is really about reducing the amount of uncertainty a user experiences. A five-step process that clearly communicates what is happening can feel significantly easier than a three-step process that forces users to stop and figure things out themselves.
If I were revisiting the experience today, I would put even greater emphasis on validating individual stages with users. Particularly around transaction status, documentation, and cancellation, to understand where additional guidance is valuable and where the experience could be further streamlined.
The biggest lesson I took from the project is one I continue to bring into my work, Designing something simple doesn't always mean designing less. It means making complexity easier to understand.
Integrating Banking Into a Marketplace
NEXT CASE STUDY
How I approached navigation, information architecture, and visual hierarchy while designing a banking experience inside a larger marketplace ecosystem.