Mary Jane
Jane had a successful web marketplace, but its mobile experience showed clear strain. Mobile users encountered friction in discovery, limited personalization, and weak retention signals. As we audited existing flows, it became clear the challenge wasn’t simply reducing steps. It was designing for constraint and change. Cannabis commerce is shaped by overlapping systems: state-by-state regulation, App Store enforcement, inconsistent product data, and evolving consumer trust. The mobile app needed to operate within all of these simultaneously. Every design decision had to balance compliance, clarity, and convenience, while educating users without overwhelming them. This project involved launching a greenfield iOS codebase inside a tightly regulated ecosystem. The goal was to design a compliant, trustworthy mobile experience that felt human, flexible, and durable as the product evolved.
CLIENT
Jane
DELIVERABLES
E-com Customization iOS App Design UX Strategy Branding
YEAR
2022 - 2025
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
Research and Ideation
Rather than validating obvious patterns, we focused on reducing uncertainty in high-impact areas. We spoke directly with users, defined core personas, and pressure-tested flows against real trust thresholds and expectations. Regulatory differences across states directly informed how we designed content visibility, interaction pacing, and system flexibility. The app had to adapt without fragmenting.
Competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation surfaced two critical gaps: store selection and product discovery. These became the backbone of the design effort.
Concepts were validated through a two-stage process. Early peer reviews allowed for fast pruning and alignment, followed by moderated user testing through Usertesting.com to validate clarity, confidence, and intent. In parallel, I extended Jane’s brand system into mobile, introducing custom category artwork and iconography to improve scannability and emotional clarity.
Key questions that guided the work:
How do users want to discover products in a regulated environment?
Are stores getting lost inside the marketplace experience?
How do we impose structure on inconsistent product data?
How do we design for unique and shifting regulations without rebuilding flows?
Strategy and Solution
The strategy centered on three deliberate decisions: where to reduce friction, where to slow users down, and where the system needed flexibility. This approach sparked pushback from leadership, particularly around homepage and PDP prioritization. User testing, paired with analysis of product data at scale, helped resolve these tensions.
We evaluated data completeness, surfaced what users actually relied on to make decisions, and aligned the team around what mattered most in high-intent moments. This ensured prioritization was driven by behavior, not assumption.
A modular, system-driven approach became essential. We designed a flexible toolkit capable of supporting multiple content and interaction types without introducing inconsistency. High-friction moments were simplified intentionally, while privacy and trust were reinforced through restrained, purpose-driven interaction design.
Early technical alignment ensured these decisions were feasible within a new mobile codebase and App Store constraints. The result was a mobile design system built to scale with regulation, content growth, and future features without requiring redesigns.
Core discovery and store-selection flows were rebuilt to improve clarity and reduce friction at critical moments. Cart behavior was adjusted to account for regulatory purchase limits, allowing users to make quick, informed changes without breaking momentum. These learnings fed back into the web marketplace, which was updated to mirror the app’s purchase, store, and product discovery flows.
Clear design specifications, motion patterns, and system documentation aligned product, engineering, and marketing. The app shipped without accruing design debt, positioning Jane’s mobile experience as a stable foundation rather than a one-off solution.