[UI/UX Design]
Teachify One: A One-Page E-Commerce Platform for Digital Creators
Helping first-time sellers easily launch their own store and make their first sale
[Role]
User interviews
Survey analysis
Market research
website UI design
[Team]
[Timeline]
Oct – Nov 2023 (5 weeks)
[Tools]
Figma
Google Forms
[Deliverable]
Website Prototype
Overview
[Background: The Creator Economy]
According to NeoReach's 2023 Creator Earnings and Insights Industry Report, the global creator economy is valued at $21 billion USD. Adobe's 2022 survey further reported that the number of creators worldwide has surpassed 300 million — signaling a market with significant growth potential.
[Client: Teachify — Online Course Building Platform]
Teachify is a SaaS platform focused on helping educators launch online courses. In response to the growing creator market, Teachify planned to introduce a lightweight product — Teachify One — dedicated to helping small-scale creators build personal websites and sell digital products.
Teachify's existing platform is built for established course creators — offering over 15 backend features including course management, membership plans, marketing tools, and analytics. For a beginner creator who simply wants to sell their first digital file, this level of complexity creates an unnecessarily high barrier to entry. Teachify One's opportunity lies in offering a focused, lightweight starting point — and increasing the likelihood that successful early creators will eventually upgrade to the full platform.
[Process]
1.1 Who Are the Creators?
Based on creator market research reports, we initially defined our primary user group as individuals aged 25–34 — a generation characterized by their familiarity with online platforms and their ability to present their work digitally.
To better understand this group, we conducted 1.5 weeks of research across three directions:
What are creators' experiences and pain points when selling digital products?
How do creators manage their personal brand?
How do existing platforms currently operate?
1.2 User Interviews
We conducted one-on-one interviews with 4 creators who had experience selling their work — including 2 graphic designers, 1 visual artist, and 1 illustrator/writer — to understand their selling experiences and pain points around building a personal brand. Key findings, organized through affinity mapping:
1.3 Survey Findings
Given the diversity of the creator landscape, we distributed a survey across various Facebook creator communities and Instagram, collecting 33 responses. Key data insights as below:
1.4 Competitive Analysis
We analyzed two direct competitors — Gumroad and Patreon — alongside Teachify's existing product across five dimensions: product positioning, target users, revenue model, strengths, and weaknesses.
[Key Insight]
Teachify One can build on Teachify's core strength — giving creators greater operational autonomy — while addressing the gap that neither Gumroad nor Patreon fully covers: a purpose-built buying and selling experience for digital products, designed for creators who are just getting started.
Gumroad's interface is approachable but places the full burden of traffic generation on the creator. Patreon's subscription model suits established creators with loyal followers, but creates a high barrier for newcomers. Teachify One's opportunity lies in combining low onboarding friction with meaningful creator support — without requiring an existing audience to get started.
1.5 The Core Problem: A Journey Without a Starting Point
Research revealed a consistent pattern: most beginner creators know they want to sell their work, but don't know where or how to start. The current landscape forces them into a fragmented, self-directed path.
Without Teachify One
Want to sell work
Unsure which platform to use
Manage orders through Instagram DMs manually
Handle payments and logistics independently
No data — unclear who is buying or why
Feel stuck, no clear next step
With Teachify One
Want to sell work
Free sign-up, fill in basic info
Step-by-step guided setup
Integrated payment processing
Clear backend analytics
Sense of direction and momentum to grow
The gap is not just functional — it's motivational. Beginners don't lack the desire to sell; they lack a structured starting point that makes the first step feel manageable.
2.1 User Persona
2.2 Business Strategy
Using the Lean Canvas as our framework, we identified three core business strategies, with increasing registration rates and file transaction volume as the primary business objective:
2.3 Design Strategy
2.4 Challenges and Constraints
01 Prioritizing MVP features within a limited timeline
Given the five-week timeline, we prioritized features that most directly impact the core user experience — registration, product listing, and data visualization — while deferring community and educational features to a future phase.
02 Determining RWD development priority based on cross-device usage patterns
We designed primarily for web, with a responsive mobile interface as a secondary deliverable. The reasoning: creators managing their backend and reviewing sales data benefit from the larger screen real estate of a desktop browser, while buyers visiting a creator's storefront are more likely to be browsing on mobile — making a responsive mobile experience important for the purchase flow.
03 Building on Teachify's existing design system to reduce development costs
To manage development costs and maintain brand consistency, Teachify One's design system extends the visual language of the original Teachify platform.
3.1 Information Architecture
3.2 Design Prototype
01 Homepage Onboarding — A frictionless registration and setup flow
We broke the website setup process into clearly defined steps with encouraging copy at each stage, guiding users through the full onboarding experience one step at a time.
02 Creator Dashboard — Product Listing
A first-time seller doesn't need course management, membership plans, or marketing campaigns. They need to upload a file, set a price, and hit publish. Teachify One reduces Teachify's 15+ item backend into a focused, three-step flow built for exactly that.
Teachify's existing digital product listing flow splits information across two separate tabs — "Sales Info" and "Downloadable Content" — which can cause first-time users to miss steps or lose track of where they are in the process. There is also no way to preview how the product will appear to buyers before publishing.
We redesigned this into a single-page flow with three focused sections:
Basic Info — Product name, cover image, and description in one place
Upload File — Drag-and-drop upload with clear supported format guidance
A live preview panel runs alongside the form, so creators can see exactly how their product page will look to buyers as they fill in each field — removing the guesswork from the publishing process.
03 Creator Storefront — A smooth shopping experience
An e-commerce experience built for digital products, supporting multiple file formats.
01. UX writing shapes how first-time users experience a product
During usability testing, participants noted that the tone of the onboarding copy could be improved. We also found that certain technical terms used in the website setup flow needed to be simplified or accompanied by explanatory text to avoid confusion.
02. The most important assumption we never questioned
Our research skewed toward creators who were still building their audience — students with limited budgets whose primary need was visibility, not a place to sell. But Teachify's existing user base tells a different story: creators with 5K to 70K+ followers who already have an audience to convert. This points to a tension in the brief itself — positioning Teachify One for "first-time creators" while ruling out marketing support are constraints that work against each other. A more useful target definition would have been creators with roughly 1K–5K followers who are ready to monetize but don't yet need a full-scale platform. The core design decisions remain valid either way, but sharper targeting would have produced sharper research — and more confident decisions.
03. Teachify One's competitive strength lies in its role within the ecosystem
As a standalone product, Teachify One has limited differentiation against Gumroad or existing social commerce options. Its strongest argument isn't the feature set — it's the upgrade path. A creator who starts on Teachify One and outgrows it has a natural next step: the full Teachify platform. This framing turns Teachify One from a competitor to Gumroad into a feeder product for Teachify's core business — and would be worth centering more explicitly in any future iteration of the product strategy.