A marketplace that earned its rebuild.
Client
Pulse Giftcards
Year
2024 / 2026
Type
Platform rebuild & brand
Role
Brand & Product Designer
01 — Starting condition
An MVP that had outgrown itself.
Pulse is a marketplace for game keys, gift cards, and digital currency. In a category crowded with near-identical storefronts, trust is the product: real money in, digital codes out, instantly.
The first version was designed in 2024 and shipped as a complete marketplace: storefront and checkout, a customer account system, a merchant dashboard with product and order management, API key handling, and identity verification. All of it sat on a documented design foundation of type, grid, colour, and components.
That version ran live for close to two years. What it revealed in production, where users hesitated, what the catalogue needed at scale, which flows carried the most weight, became the brief for everything that followed.
Pulse MVP · the 2024 marketplace, live for two years
02 — Approach
A rebuild, not a refresh.
V2 was not a reskin. Two years of live use had shown exactly what the product needed to become, and the rebuild worked from that evidence rather than from taste.
The method was to treat each surface as a set of decisions, not a layout. Security, checkout, discovery, and verification were each reworked around how people actually behave under real conditions: hesitation, error, risk, and impatience. The reasoning shows in the details, and the details are where a marketplace is trusted or abandoned.
Pulse V2 Sitemap · scope and phasing set before any layout
03 — What was delivered
One platform, rebuilt around real use.
A complete rebuild grounded in two years of live product use, folded into every screen.
Pulse V2 · the 2026 marketplace
Embeddable payment system
A checkout built to run as an iframe inside third-party vendor sites, not only on Pulse. The card grid scales with denomination count, the action stays anchored to the frame at any height, and the design rules came from an audit of 29 accessible vendor sites. The surrounding flow reasons through verification, payment, and returning users: verification reframed away from "login" to cut auth fatigue, invisible fraud checks by default, and last-used payment remembered.
Storefront and discovery
A rebuilt shopfront: editorial discovery rails, trending and best-seller carousels, and product pages carrying variants, critic reviews, and requirements.
Filtering at scale
Faceted filtering across 15,000+ products by region, platform, genre, and price, with live result counts so the catalogue stays navigable at volume.
Responsive account system
Profile, orders, and security across desktop, tablet, and mobile, with every order state legible at each breakpoint.
PULSE V2 · Payment IFRAME For Partners
PULSE V2 · FACETED FILTERING
PULSE V2 · ABOUT PAGE, TRUST TO COVERAGE
PULSE V2 · Login & Product Detail Pages
04 — Outcome
V1 earned the rebuild. V2 ships shortly.
A launch MVP became a platform designed to last: an embeddable payment system, a rebuilt storefront, security and account flows reasoned around real user behaviour, and a catalogue that stays usable at scale. Designed, documented, and handed over, currently in build.
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