Order before you get there

CONTEXT

What if we could convert queues into more revenue?

At a festival, Attendees spend the set they paid for standing in queues; vendors lose sales they physically cannot serve inside the window; organisers hear about both afterwards. Nobody in that arrangement is happy and none of them can fix it alone.

I co-founded Axer Technologies in 2021 to build No-Q against that: attendees order ahead from their phones, vendors work a live queue instead of a physical one, and organisers get a commerce layer for their event. I am the only designer, and I own the product from the interface through to onboarding vendors in person at live events, which is where most of what I know about this product came from.

The hard part is that a three-sided marketplace has to launch all three sides at once, on a date that cannot move. An event does not slip. If the vendor dashboard is not ready on the Friday, there is no event to be ready for.

SCOPE, THREE SURFACES, TWO AUDIENCES

Two B2B surfaces and one B2C surface, designed and shipped in parallel.

PROCESS, RESEARCH

Research existing patterns, then adapt to the usecase

I audited UberEats, DoorDash and SkipTheDishes for consumer ordering, and Amazon Seller Central for vendor management, before drawing a single screen. Not to copy them, to find the assumptions they all share and check which ones survive our unique usecase.

Most do not. Delivery apps assume you are somewhere else and time is elastic; a festival attendee is a short walk away and time is the constraint. Seller Central assumes a merchant at a desk with an operator's attention span; a food vendor has one hand free, a queue in front of them and a phone propped against a cash tin. Those two mismatches drove more of the design than any interface reference did.

From there: hand-drawn wireframes across the journeys (discover, browse, order, fulfil), then three passes in Figma. Information architecture and flow, then the component system and visual language, then hi-fi and the edge cases.

PROCESS, INITIAL SKETCHES

Mapping the key journeys first

Before any screen existed, I sketched the key user journeys: discovering and browsing vendors, placing an order, and tracking it. The sketches were about finding where a three-sided flow breaks, not about making things look finished.

PROCESS, ITERATIONS IN FIGMA

Three passes, each one simpler

From the sketches I ran three full passes over the customer flow: map, store, item, cart, contact form. Each round simplified the entry and tightened the checkout.

PROCESS, DESIGN INSPIRATION

References and adaptations

The store profile borrowed the Reddit profile header, minus the follow button and follower count, and kept the gradient while adding a banner image for store customization. The vendor cards borrowed SkipTheDishes restaurant cards, swapping in a white background and an outline to group each vendor. The product item followed SkipTheDishes again, with a clean look and the description left optional so items without one do not leave awkward white space. The goal was not to re-invent the wheel, but to adapt existing patterns to a new context.

PROCESS, DESIGN TO CODE

Considering the small-sized team for this project, we could not afford for the Figma system is not the deliverable. I took on the role of a technical design here and built the components and pages in React and Tailwind, this helped save time and reduce the gap between design and implementation.

DESIGN CHANGES, TWO THINGS I REMOVED

Both of these tested well as ideas and failed as features. Removing them is the work I would defend hardest.

BEFORE / AFTER

The two changes, shown as the before and after.

OUTCOME

In production at live events, still in active development.

vendors onboarded onto the platform

~50vendors onboarded

signed memorandum-of-understanding event partners

3signed MoU event partners

orders processed through the platform

300+orders processed

GALLERY