CASE STUDY

Turning Jane.com’s Seller Onboarding and Approvals into a Scalable Operating System.

Led the end-to-end UX strategy and design of Masada, Jane.com’s internal platform that replaced spreadsheet-driven seller onboarding and approval workflows with a centralized, role-based system built to scale..

OVERVIEW

Jane.com is a daily deals e-commerce marketplace featuring boutique products from independent sellers. Rapid marketplace growth placed increasing strain on internal operations, where seller onboarding and product publishing were managed through spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected tools. Masada was created to centralize these workflows into a single internal platform.

MYROLE

I was a Senior UX Designer on the Masada team, working alongside other designers, Product Management, and Engineering. I contributed to UX strategy, workflow design, interaction patterns, and system foundations from discovery through launch.

In parallel, I collaborated directly with engineering on front-end implementation, helping translate complex operational workflows into scalable, production-ready interfaces that held up under daily, high-volume use.

THEPROBLEM

Internal teams relied on fragile, manual processes to onboard sellers and publish products. Work was tracked across spreadsheets, inboxes, and ad hoc tools, making ownership unclear and increasing the risk of errors. As marketplace volume increased, these workflows became a bottleneck, slowing publishing, creating inconsistencies, and placing strain on Merchant Ops, Content, and CX teams.

THEGOAL

Design a centralized operations platform that reduces friction, improves accuracy, and supports high-throughput daily use. The system needed to accommodate distinct roles while maintaining a shared source of truth. Success meant enabling growth without proportional increases in headcount or error rates.

APPROACH

The team grounded the work in workflow analysis, role clarity, and system-level design. Rather than treating Masada as a feature checklist, we framed it as an operational engine optimized for speed, predictability, and error prevention. Tradeoffs favored clarity and throughput over feature completeness.

RESEARCH&STRATEGY

Through stakeholder interviews and user shadowing across Merchant Ops, Content, and CX teams, we observed how work actually moved through the organization. Research revealed teams had built manual workarounds to compensate for missing tooling, increasing cognitive load and error risk. This led us to reframe Masada as a workflow-first platform centered on queues, states, and ownership.

KEYTRADEOFF

Early discussions favored a single, uniform interface across roles to simplify development. The team ultimately supported role-based experiences tailored to how each group processed work, accepting additional design complexity in exchange for speed and accuracy. This prioritized operational efficiency over surface-level consistency.

EXPERIENCEDESIGN&FRONT-ENDCOLLABORATION

I contributed to the design of role-specific dashboards and approval flows aligned to each team’s responsibilities. Merchant Ops received queue-based views with bulk actions, Content reviewers gained detailed product views with inline quality checks, and CX teams received full audit trails and status timelines.

I partnered closely with engineers during build to ensure tables, filters, bulk actions, and state transitions behaved predictably under real production conditions.

SYSTEMS&SCALE

I helped design and maintain a modular component system in Figma, including reusable patterns for data tables, filters, status badges, and approval states. These patterns were intentionally aligned with front-end components, allowing the platform to scale without fragmenting the user experience.

IMPLEMENTATION

Masada launched as the single source of truth for seller onboarding and product publishing at Jane.com. Teams transitioned incrementally from spreadsheets and email-based workflows to minimize disruption while maintaining daily throughput.

IMPACT

Seller onboarding time was reduced by approximately 40 percent, enabling marketplace growth without proportional headcount increases. Publishing errors decreased by 75 percent through clearer validation and unified product views. CX response times improved as teams gained real-time visibility into status and history.

BUSINESS&USEROUTCOMES

Internal teams moved work through the system faster with fewer handoff failures and less rework. Leadership gained clearer insight into operational bottlenecks and capacity. Masada established a durable operational foundation that supported continued marketplace growth.

REFLECTION

This project reinforced the importance of applying product-level UX rigor to internal tools and designing with implementation constraints in mind. Close collaboration with front-end engineering was critical to delivering workflows that remained fast, predictable, and scalable over time.

Nathan Gordon