Vend

Rethinking app experience across Nordic marketplaces

Sector
  • Retail & E-commerce
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Expertise worth sharing

Vend is home to some of the Nordics’ most trusted marketplaces, including FINN, Blocket, DBA, Bilbasen, Tori and Oikotie. Together, they cover different services, from homes and jobs to cars and second-hand goods, for millions of people across four Nordic markets. The challenge is to create one app experience that worked across all of them.

 

Framna has designed some of the most used apps in the Nordics, including Swish and SJ. Vend wanted to draw on that experience to inspire its own designers, especially in how to adapt apps to iPhone and Android. What began as knowledge sharing between Framna's and Vend's designers grew into an exploratory discovery phase focused on app navigation.

Where the gap appeared

Each of Vend’s business areas has its own teams and priorities, but they all design for the same apps. Vend already had a strong design system, although it was largely built with the web in mind. When Apple introduced Liquid Glass, it raised new questions about how the design system should support native iOS apps.

"Our current struggle is how to keep a whole product, a whole brand, cohesive."

Product Designer

Vend

Know-how that stays

The goal was to help Vend’s designers build native app expertise on top of their existing experience, so it becomes a natural part of their everyday work.

Share

Shared components help many teams build apps that look alike, but they don’t decide how the apps behave. For that, every team needs the same understanding of how iPhone and Android work, or each one ends up solving the same questions in its own way. This was also what Vend’s designers asked for most. In Framna’s survey, they ranked guidance on native interactions above any single component. Framna’s sessions on native app design gave them that guidance, and soon Vend asked Framna to design alongside them.

Listen

Starting with discovery instead of a fixed brief puts the effort where it makes the most difference and gives every decision a solid basis. When designers, developers and user data all point in the same direction, it's also easier to get the whole organisation behind the next step. At Vend, interviews, a survey and data from Framna’s Mobile App Trends Report resulted in a discovery report that has become a shared reference across the organisation. Sharing the work openly along the way also meant that Framna and the search team could build on each other’s work.

Explore

When every part of an app shares the same navigation, people only need to learn it once. After that, the navigation fades into the background and each marketplace’s own content gets the attention. For the teams, it means fewer separate solutions to the same problem. Both the interviews and the survey pointed to navigation as a top priority, so the discovery phase explored what one shared navigation across Vend’s apps could look like, starting from iOS and Liquid Glass. The result was a low-fidelity prototype and a set of principles for native interaction, kept deliberately simple so the direction can be discussed and tested early, before anyone spends time on details.

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Exploratory concept from the discovery phase, showcasing a possible direction for Vend’s apps.

A foundation to build on

Vend’s designers now have a shared set of principles for native app design to turn to when they explore new ideas or make design decisions. No set of principles will fit every marketplace and every user, but a common starting point helps teams ask the right questions and find solutions with more confidence. The discovery report and the navigation prototype give the teams that starting point.

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katarina_bjernefalk
Katarina Bjernefalk Commercial Lead, Framna Sweden