European research marketplace system-level redesign
Role
Company
Timeline
Senior Product Designer
European Open Science Cloud
2022-2024
Scope of work
Product discovery · UX strategy · Stakeholder workshops · Information architecture · UX debt reduction · Design systems · Agile UX practices · Mentoring
CONTEXT
The European Open Science Cloud connected researchers with scientific services, datasets, software, and computing resources provided by European organisations. Platform consisted of Portal, Marketplace, Provider Hub and was connected to Monitoring and Observatory.
I joined in a critical moment with the time running out as another European Commission checkpoint was around the corner and product failed UX tests with users. If this will happen again, all teams will loose the funding.
The team I joined was responsible for the Marketplace and parts of the Provider Hub. Over several years, the platform had been developed incrementally by separate product teams, without a shared product strategy or strong cross-team coordination. This resulted in siloed products, inconsistent interaction patterns, fragmented navigation, and limited shared design practices. UX debt had accumulated significantly, particularly because the team had worked without a dedicated designer for the previous year.
My role was to lead the end-to-end redesign of service discovery, support ongoing product delivery, reduce UX debt, and establish design and operational foundations for consistent development.
My scope covered product discovery, qualitative and quantitative research, information architecture, interaction design, usability validation, implementation support, design-system foundations, stakeholder alignment, and Agile UX practices.
CHALLENGE
How might we improve both sides of the marketplace by helping researchers discover relevant resources while enabling providers to contribute complete, high-quality information more easily?
Low engagement and retention rates: Users were not finding the platform intuitive or valuable enough to return frequently.
Onboarding for providers: Inefficient processes (like very long forms) led to incomplete or poorly presented resources, reducing their visibility and appeal to researchers.
Complex user flows: Navigation and discovery of services among 5M+ objects were overwhelming, resulting in user frustration and high churn.
Impact on Users and Business:
For Researchers: Difficulty discovering relevant services affected productivity and satisfaction, led to page abandonment.
For Providers: Poor resource presentation reduced their ability to attract users, ultimately impacting the platform's value proposition.
DISCOVERY
The main discovery question was not only why researchers struggled to use search, but what conditions were required for search to work well.
I led regular stakeholder workshops with Product Owners, developers, and representatives to align teams around user needs, data dependencies, organisational ownership, and technical constraints. We were mapping what is not working and why, what we need to achieve and how we can get there.
The discovery phase drew on a range of methods:
user and stakeholder interviews,
Google Analytics and Hotjar analysis,
heuristic evaluation,
information architecture reviews,
search and metadata audits,
competitor benchmarking,
cross-functional workshops.
The workshops produced an ecosystem map, prioritised opportunity areas, shared navigation principles, and a shared view on which problems needed platform-level intervention rather than isolated interface fixes.
The evidence showed that poor discovery was a system problem.
Search relevance depended on complete provider metadata, clear relationships between services and resources, consistent navigation, reliable data ownership, and coordination between independently managed product areas.
This moved the work from interface fixes to system design. Provider onboarding became part of the marketplace discovery strategy rather than a separate administrative process.
SOLUTION
☞ Connect discovery across product boundaries
The information architecture was reorganised around user needs and relationships between resources rather than the ownership of individual product areas.
The redesigned experience introduced clearer search entry points, more consistent navigation, improved listing and detail structures, and stronger connections between services, providers, catalogues, and research resources.
I mapped discovery journeys across the Portal, Marketplace, Provider Hub, and other connected areas to identify fragmented entry points, duplicated paths, and gaps between related resources.
Working with Product and Engineering, I translated these findings into updated navigation, search, listing, and detail-page structures. I also defined reusable interaction patterns that could be applied across independently developed product areas.
In parallel, I collaborated with the technical team on the direction for federated search using Elasticsearch and connected datasets. The goal was to support discovery across multiple resource types while presenting the results as one coherent experience.
☞ Improved metadata quality at the source.
Provider onboarding was redesigned as a guided contribution flow rather than a long technical form.
This was important because search quality depended on the completeness and consistency of the metadata submitted by providers. Improving the contribution experience therefore supported both provider completion rates and the quality of discovery for researchers.
I restructured the process into clearer steps and used progressive disclosure to reduce the amount of information presented at once.
The redesigned flow introduced:
clearer sections and progression;
plain-language guidance;
contextual examples;
visible completion status;
improved validation and submission feedback.
This made complex requirements easier to understand while helping providers submit more complete and consistent service information.
☞ Reduce UX debt while maintaining delivery pace
Reducing UX debt and supporting ongoing product delivery had to happen in parallel.
Rather than separating system improvement from roadmap work, I used new features and redesigned journeys to introduce more consistent patterns and reusable foundations.
I established shared Figma libraries and refined scalable patterns for:
navigation;
search;
forms;
listings;
validation;
statuses;
content hierarchy.
This allowed teams to continue shipping while gradually replacing fragmented solutions with more consistent product behaviour across connected areas of the platform.
☞ Establish Agile UX practices
I introduced operational practices that brought design into the development process earlier and made collaboration across teams more consistent.
The new ways of working included:
early design involvement in product definition;
regular stakeholder workshops;
cross-team alignment sessions;
iterative validation;
design critiques;
shared documentation;
closer coordination between Product, Design, and Engineering.
During the first year, I worked as the sole designer. As the design team grew, I mentored two junior designers through project reviews, design critiques, and day-to-day product decisions, helping them take on more independent responsibilities.
I also worked in a product triad with the Product Manager and Technology Lead. This created a shared decision-making structure across product, design, and technical perspectives, helping the team resolve dependencies earlier and move more efficiently from problem definition to delivery.
OUTCOMES
The redesign delivered measurable improvements across user experience, delivery, and team collaboration:
25% increase in marketplace conversion
60% reduction in provider onboarding drop-off
90% positive user feedback after launch
UX debt reduced incrementally without interrupting ongoing delivery
Shared design-system foundations introduced across connected products
Agile UX practices embedded into the product development process
More consistent collaboration between Design, Product, and Engineering
Positive UX evaluation from European Commission stakeholders
Two junior designers mentored into more independent responsibilities
REFLECTION
The project showed that marketplace discovery cannot be improved through search-interface design alone. Search quality depends on metadata, provider behaviour, data governance, navigation, and collaboration between teams. The strongest results came from treating these elements as one connected product system.
It also reinforced that UX debt cannot be separated from the product roadmap and addressed through a one-off redesign. The platform needed to improve incrementally, with each new feature and redesigned journey introducing clearer behaviour, more consistent patterns, and reusable foundations.
Design maturity depends not only on the quality of individual solutions, but also on the practices that allow teams to deliver them consistently. The challenge was therefore to balance immediate product delivery with long-term system improvement.
