The goal of the alternative marketing and e-commerce platform Rokista is to connect consumer and supplier without using the noisy and intrusive techniques that marketing often use in today's media. Their aim is to provide a platform that enables customers to reach out to these suppliers with clear, precise information, seeking specific products that client businesses stock.

The core theme for this website build was to create a marketplace which eliminates the need for businesses to reach out to customers. Instead the customer shows interest in an item, thereafter the business reaches out to the customer and from there discuss the purchase particulars. 

The objectives of the product revolved predominantly around the simplification of the online marketplace experience for users and businesses. In doing this, the Rokista team wanted to achieve 3 essential objectives: 

• Provide a distilled outlook on the buyer/seller relationship.
• Don’t tie the user down with extra information and distractions.
• Maintain a functionality first approach.

In order to achieve this, they undertook a custom discovery and design programme with Arch, exploring how the product would emerge and contend against the established landscape of businesses in this area. 

We created a series of user personas from both sides of the user journey, developing in depth characters with goals and requirements for the platform on which functionality could begin to be assigned. 

There are always functionality that become key to achieving a functioning product typology, however, at Arch we like to explore the extended possibilities of the platforms we work on. To this end, we refined and proposed user functionality to ensure core objectives of simplicity and a quieting of the marketplace landscape were articulated. 

This saw us create an intuitive design system that shaped not only elements such as colour schemes and font guidelines but also the design of complete features within the website.