Designing for small businesses who can't afford to get this wrong
An ecommerce builder whose real constraint wasn't 'make it clean'. It was 'make it maintainable by non-technical teams'.
Crecmos is a company builder helping pre-seed Latin American startups reach their next stage. This project was an ecommerce builder aimed at small businesses that couldn't justify custom technology just to start selling online. A short freelance engagement: a full discovery-to-prototype cycle across six two-week sprints.
Context
Building an ecommerce presence takes cost and technical expertise most pre-seed businesses don't have. The harder constraint: the target users (non-technical teams running small businesses) would eventually have to maintain and extend the product themselves. That ruled out a design system built the usual dense, technical way.
What I did
Write-storming to pressure-test direction and voice before committing to UI, an explicit UX-writing voice tuned for a small-business audience, low-fidelity wireframes with accessibility built in from the start, and multiple rounds of usability testing with real pre-seed entrepreneurs to catch what 'simple enough for non-technical teams' actually meant.
A note on the evidence
The product never launched publicly. These are UI-quality and discovery outcomes, speed and rigor under a tight timeline, not market or business metrics.
Visuals
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