The Leaking Funnel
Ofofo's cybersecurity marketplace was live and already leaking. People arrived, then left. Onboarding was rough, so new users dropped off before they became buyers or sellers. The checkout lost people at the exact moment they had decided to spend money. And the marketplace itself was confusing to navigate: buyers could not tell where to start, sellers registered as buyers by mistake, and the site's structure reflected how the company thought rather than how its users shopped. The tempting move is to start repainting screens. But a confusing marketplace is rarely a page problem. It is a journey problem. Before touching a single screen, I needed to know who was dropping off, at what moment, and what they were trying to do when the experience failed them.Finding the Breaks
Before redesigning anything, three pieces of groundwork located exactly where and why the experience was failing. The platform served two audiences and treated them as one. On the buying side, the core persona is not a security expert. They run a small SaaS company or a fifty-person business, they have been told they need a penetration test or a compliance certificate to close an enterprise deal, and they are one bad acronym away from giving up. That persona thinking later became product surface directly: the resilience models feature opens by describing the buyer back to themselves, "You are a small SaaS company with a lot of big dreams but your team of less than 10 people," and recommends a security bundle to match. On the selling side sat two personas in one door: security companies with catalogues of offerings, and individual consultants such as virtual CISOs selling themselves. Naming these explained the dropoffs. Buyers bounced because the site spoke jargon to people who do not speak it. Sellers mis-registered because the platform never asked who they were until it was too late. Onboarding leaked because it demanded enterprise-length forms from people who just wanted to look around. Mapping the journeys end to end gave every screen a place in a journey rather than a place in a sitemap. I mapped the buyer's path from "I have a security problem" through discovery, evaluation, trust-building and purchase, and the seller's path from landing to listing to first sale, then drew the whole platform as one task flow.
The Buying Journey
With the breaks located, the browse-and-evaluate journey was rebuilt across three design cycles. A lo-fi bake-off picked the layout. The lo-fi stage staged the two classic marketplace layouts against each other: a persistent left sidebar of filters beside list-style results, versus a filter panel behind a button with a card grid. The sidebar read like enterprise software, precisely the feeling scaring our persona away. The grid read like shopping, and won, with applied filters surfacing as removable chips so the panel never had to stay open.
Earning the Purchase
From trust to decision to payment, the second half of the journey is where the original funnel leaked hardest. The trust moment is where security marketplaces live or die. You cannot screenshot a penetration test, and our buyer persona cannot independently judge one, so the offering detail page layers proof instead: verified-purchase badges on reviews, a full ratings histogram, helpfulness voting, and a resource library where buyers preview sample deliverables, real report documents, in a lightbox before spending anything. For services, the page credentials the humans rather than the vendor, with a "Certifications of the people on job" row of badge logos. Services also introduced milestone pricing, a numbered stepper with a name, completion bar, dollar amount and deliverables link per stage, and that one component reappears across the detail page, the comparison table and checkout, so a buyer meets the same mental model everywhere in the journey.
The Wider Ecosystem
The marketplace journeys sat inside a larger system that went through the same discipline. The landing page pivoted across cycles from a browse-first pitch ("We make small businesses resilient", with a segmented, faceted search bar in the hero) to a job-first one ("For CISOs. Buy CISOs.", hiring a virtual CISO in minutes), demoting search once it was clear buyers arrive with a task, not a query. Sellers got their own crimson-themed landing and profile pages that expose revenue size, countries of operation and expertise categories, answering the seller persona's first question: will I be found here? A jobs board joined in a later cycle, complete with edge-case card variants for half-specified experience ranges. And resilience models packaged offerings into persona-matched bundles, pairing every capability with twin meters for security impact versus ease of implementation.What the Numbers Said
Every number here was measured, not felt: behaviour came from Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar, the qualitative side from feedback forms. The rebuilt marketplace UX lifted direct conversions by 56 percent and cut the bounce rate from 73 percent to 41 percent, movement that came from clearer navigation and decision flows rather than any single screen. Onboarding proved the ask-later principle: moving from everything-mandatory to letting users complete their profile as and when a task required it cut the onboarding drop rate from 83.5 percent to 53.1 percent. The comparison feature earned its keep, with seven of every ten buyers running a compare before purchasing. And the zero-results recovery path proved itself at scale once the RFP system launched, with six of every ten custom requests starting from that page.Platform Evolution
Jul 2023
Joined and audited the funnel
Walked into a live marketplace with heavy dropoffs: rough onboarding, a leaking checkout and navigation that confused buyers and mis-routed sellers. Started by defining the buyer and seller personas the design had been missing.
Aug 2023
Journeys, task flow and card sorting
Mapped buyer and seller journeys end to end and drew the platform as one task flow, locating the breaks. Three open card sorts across dev and executive cohorts rebuilt the marketplace IA and confirmed the registration confusion.
Sep 2023
Lo-fi bake-off
Wireframed two browsing patterns, sidebar filters with list results versus a filter panel with a card grid, at desktop and as nine separate mobile screens. The grid pattern won for feeling like shopping rather than enterprise software.
Oct 2023
Cycle 1: the full marketplace
Structured four-field discovery bar, category rail, deals carousel, the offering card with its portable pricing capsule, a twelve-group security-specific filter panel, comparison tray and pages, offering detail pages, and desktop, tablet and mobile builds of everything.
Apr 2024
Checkout and chats
Rebuilt the leaking checkout to absorb zero-dollar, milestone, discount and subscription pricing without changing shape, with a three-step mobile flow and designed success and failure endings. Buyer-seller chat shipped with order-anchored threads.
Jun 2024
Cycle 2: shortening the path
Replaced the structured search with one conversational input, moved discovery into a mega-menu with live counts, cut the marketplace page height by a third, and turned the empty state into a custom-quote lead path.
Aug 2024
The vCISO pivot
The landing experience repositioned from browse-the-marketplace to hire-a-vCISO, with named seller listings, five pricing tiers from Forever Free to Contact Sales, and compliance badges covering 170+ frameworks.
Outcome
A funnel that holds
Marketplace bounce cut from 73% to 41%, direct conversions up 56%, and onboarding dropoff down from 83.5% to 53.1% once profile data became ask-when-needed, with 375+ SMBs using the platform across 45+ countries and $800K+ in transactions.
Lessons
- Dropoffs are journey problems wearing page costumes Every dropoff pointed at a screen, but no screen fix would have held. The checkout leaked because of what the journey demanded before it, and onboarding bounced because of who we imagined was filling it in. Diagnose the journey, then design the page.
- Personas are cheap, and designing without them is not The single most valuable early move was naming who we were designing for. The moment "SMB owner who does not speak security" was written down, half the existing site's decisions became visibly wrong, and the other half became defensible.
- Design the pricing capsule once, spend it everywhere The same price block appears on cards, detail pages, comparison columns and seller profiles. Buyers learned to read it once, and every subsequent surface got cheaper to design and easier to trust.
- Ask for commitment after value, not before Optional buyer profiles, coupons deferred to checkout, role switching for mis-registered sellers: every fix to the dropoff problem amounted to the same principle. Let people move forward first and formalise later. The boldest version, a guest checkout needing only an email and an OTP, was designed and mapped but never shipped.
FAQ
Three compounding things. The site's structure reflected the company's org chart rather than buyers' mental models, so people could not find what they came for. Onboarding demanded long forms before showing value, so new users bounced. And the checkout assumed simple pricing in a marketplace selling milestones, trials and zero-dollar offerings, so decided buyers hit confusing totals at the worst possible moment.
Because the failing pages were symptoms. A checkout redesign cannot fix a buyer who arrived confused, and a prettier onboarding cannot fix a seller who registered through the wrong door. Mapping who the users were and what journey they were on located the actual breaks, several of which sat two screens before the page where the dropoff showed up.
They settled the marketplace taxonomy with evidence instead of opinion, confirmed the buyer-seller registration confusion independently of the journey map, and set the experiential benchmark: executives kept comparing the filtering they wanted to hotel-booking apps, which became the bar for how shopping should feel.
By changing only one thing. The layout, the order table, the summary card and the billing flow are identical for every purchase. Only the price details block mutates: milestone splits, trial dual totals, deferred coupons. Buyers get a consistent journey, and the complexity stays contained in the one component built to express it.
No single fix. The single registration flow with a clear user-type fork replaced the old three-way front door and stopped sellers landing in buyer accounts. Optional profile forms let buyers defer paperwork, cutting the onboarding drop rate from 83.5 to 53.1 percent. The rebuilt IA meant people arriving from search landed somewhere that made sense. And clearer decision flows carried buyers from category to card to checkout without dead ends. Each removed one reason to leave, and direct conversions rose 56 percent alongside.
Every cycle shipped desktop, tablet and mobile builds. Mobile was never an export: the lo-fi stage wireframed nine separate iPhone screens, and the checkout became a proper three-step stepper on small screens rather than a squeezed desktop page.