CASE STUDY
GOLDCLUB
Mobile Platform UI/UX Design
Consider using this if you need to provide more context on why you do what you do. Be engaging. Focus on delivering value to your visitors.
The Brief
Vicky Jewellery Works is a 52-year-old gold business in Kolkata — a refinery, bullion dealer, and BIS hallmarking centre with deep roots in Eastern India’s jewellery trade. Their vision for GoldClub was to digitise an entire supply chain that still ran on physical transactions: jewellers from East and North-East India travelling to Kolkata to collect inventory in person.
The platform concept was essentially Shopify for the Indian jewellery market. Any jeweller could use GoldClub to deploy their own branded e-commerce storefront – their logo, their colours, their catalogue – while GoldClub handled everything underneath: storefronts, payments, inventory, shipping, taxes, and analytics. The brief: design the entire platform from zero, solo, across web, mobile, and tablet, and get it to production-ready high-fidelity before the public debut at the Kolkata International Jewellery Expo in December 2024.
No designer had been able to understand and execute this vision before I came on board.
The Challenge
Jewelry e-commerce has a specific, demanding UX problem. Customers are not buying a commodity – they’re buying an emotionally significant, high-value product. The UX has to earn trust at every step: before they add to cart, before they enter payment details, before they receive the piece. That trust has to be built through clarity, not decoration.
At the same time, GoldClub is a white-label platform – meaning the same interface has to work for any jeweler’s brand identity. The system needed to be flexible enough to carry different brand colors, logos, and aesthetics without breaking visual coherence. This is an information architecture and design systems problem, not just a visual design problem.
The additional layer: jewelry UX is reference-grade. The benchmark I was designing against was CaratLane, BlueStone, and Tanishq — the best jewelry e-commerce experiences in India. GoldClub needed to match that standard, or surpass it, as a platform that any jewelers could deploy under their own brand.
The Approach
I started with structured competitive research — not surface-level scanning, but a systematic 14-point analysis of 15+ jewelry e-commerce platforms covering navigation, product UX, checkout flows, account management, filter and sort logic, size guides, pricing displays, and trust signals. Platforms analyzed included CaratLane, Tanishq, BlueStone, Mia, SencoGold, Kalyan, P.C. Chandra, Joyalukkas, and others.
I also observed real users navigating competitor platforms through complete purchase flows — from landing page to checkout confirmation. This primary research identified 12+ specific UX friction points that became direct inputs to GoldClub’s design decisions.
From there: user flows for every journey the platform required — browse, product customisation, cart, checkout, account management, store locator. Wireframes for primary screens before full population. Then high-fidelity screen design, building the design system simultaneously as a structural reference rather than a retrospective documentation exercise.
Throughout the process, I evaluated multiple alpha builds of the developer’s implementation — testing across devices and browsers, logging every spacing, rendering, navigation, and interaction issue, and providing structured feedback through approximately three rounds of revisions.
What Was Built
Design System (from scratch)
A complete, token-based design system including color palette with dynamic theming support, a modular component library, pattern documentation, a grid system for desktop/tablet/mobile, a typography ramp across all device classes, and a custom trust/assurance icon set (BIS hallmark, GIA certified, easy returns, doorstep delivery, Made in India, cadmium-free, 925 Sterling Silver, and others).
Three fully specified brand themes –
Sophisticated Classic, Royal, and Vibrant – allowing any jeweler tenant to choose a storefront aesthetic without developer involvement. Result: approximately 35% reduction in design-to-development inconsistencies, and approximately 40% faster screen production time per new feature.
40+ High-Fidelity Screens across Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet
Every screen in the core user journey was designed to production-ready standard.
On desktop: full homepage with header and mega-dropdown navigation, gold rate real-time popup showing live gold rates, multi-product listing with filters and sort, single product page with six overlay types, cart, login, delivery, address management, payment gateway, profile, orders history, and store locator. Every screen carry “Technology Powered by Gold Club™” in the footer.
On mobile: the same core flows, plus an expanded hamburger navigation with category trees and visual thumbnails, mobile-specific filter panels, full cart price breakdown overlays, mobile account login and signup, and 10 loading screen variants per device class.
On tablet: homepage, single product page with all overlays, multi-product listing, cart and checkout steps, and store locator.
Event Branding — Kolkata International Jewellery Expo 2024
All print and event materials for GoldClub’s public debut. Large-format outdoor flex (6m×8ft, VJW brand and jewelry lifestyle photography), indoor banner (5m×5ft), GoldClub Experience Zone flex (4m×8ft) featuring the app on device mockup, QR code, and tech stack logos.
Stall wall panels in bilingual English and Bengali. Business cards for three directors across multiple design iterations. Everything delivered to print-ready specification and large-format output.
Brand Extension
GoldClub’s logo — a navy heraldic shield with gold GC monogram — was not designed from scratch, but I significantly refined and extended it: proper SVG vector files, animated GIF versions, defined primary and secondary color palette, and visual consistency rules applied across all touchpoints. The brand was effectively codified through application because I owned every touchpoint — platform screens, event collaterals, print, business cards.
RESULTS
The Outcome
GoldClub launched its Android app prototype publicly at the Kolkata International Jewellery Expo 2024, with the design system and screens I built forming the entire visual and UX foundation of the product. The platform was designed to onboard 400+ B2B jeweller clients at launch.
The competitive research resolved 12+ critical UX friction points identified across competitor platforms, with a projected improvement of 25–40% in seller onboarding success rate. The three-theme customisable storefront system means jewellers can manage their brand identity through the platform without requiring a designer for every change.
This was, from start to finish, solo. Eight months. One designer. A platform of this scope — market research, user research, a complete design system, 40+ screens across three device classes, event branding, alpha testing across multiple rounds — is not a solo undertaking under normal circumstances. It happened because the scope demanded it, and because judgment under that kind of constraint is part of what this work produces.
LET’S COMMENCE