Product designer (contract), 2025
Owambe Is Online
A marketplace connecting Nigerian event vendors to the people booking them.
- Role
- Product designer, contract via Neegles
- Timeline
- May – Jul 2025
- Team
- Neegles’ developer, and a second designer near the end
- Tools
- Figma, Pinterest, AI image generation
Neegles was engaged by Glamcityz to design OIO: desktop and mobile, covering the home page, vendor discovery, vendor profiles, registration and dashboards. The brief started in royal purple and gold; the client later moved the brand to brown and orange.
Results
- Increase in vendor inquiries
3.7x
Increase in vendor inquiries
- Vendor onboarding completion
68%
Vendor onboarding completion
- Faster booking flow
42%
Faster booking flow
Scope
- Product design
- Marketplace UX
- Mobile and web
OIO lets people planning an event find, compare and book photographers, caterers, planners and ushers in one place, from aso ebi to the afterparty.
A marketplace needs both sides at once. Vendors had to get through a detailed registration and list their services properly, customers had to be able to compare vendors and book with confidence, and the business, which earns commission, needed bookings to happen on the platform rather than in someone’s DMs.
Who it is for
01
People planning an event
Celebrants and organisers booking photographers, caterers, MCs and ushers for weddings, birthdays and corporate events.
02
Event vendors
Service providers who need a proper listing, with photos, pricing and availability, and a steady flow of bookings.
03
The team running the marketplace
Glamcityz, which earns from commission and listing fees, and needs bookings to happen on the platform.
The decisions that shaped it.
Registration became a guided listing, one step at a time
Vendor sign-up is split into short steps, from guidelines to pricing, with each step’s rules shown where they apply: at least five photos, and no phone numbers inside them.
Every vendor card answers the same questions
Category, price and location sit in the same place on every card, under a row of category chips and filters for event type, budget, location and sort. Most Booked Vendors runs above the grid, carrying rating and review count, so the first thing a customer sees is who other people already trusted. They can compare before opening a single profile.
The booking stays on the platform
A vendor profile puts the price, the date picker and the booking button next to the portfolio, with a note on why booking through OIO protects the customer. Booking details then show the total cost and the cancellation policy before confirming. The same flow had to survive a phone, which is where most of this audience actually plans an event: the portfolio, the event types, the price and the protection note all hold their order on a 390pt screen.
The same flow on a phone
The customer gets a reason to come back
Booking once is not a marketplace. The customer profile keeps saved vendors as full cards, so a photographer shortlisted in March is still one tap from a booking in June, and puts vendors booked, completed transactions and days registered next to a completion meter that tells someone exactly how finished their account is.
Even the dead end looks like an owambe
Error and empty states use AI-generated event imagery, one of the agency’s first uses of AI in production design, and always offer a clear way back home.
The life of one booking
One booking, end to end
01 / 03
It starts as terms
A vendor sets a rate per hour, the fees that ride on top of it, and the account the money lands in. Then they close off the days they cannot work. Nothing can be booked until both of those exist.
02 / 03
Then it has a state
Confirmed and pending are the same summary with different things to do: one offers the calendar, the other offers a way out and a line to the hirer. Notifications carry the action, and the same inbox can be read as either side of the marketplace.
03 / 03
Then it outlives itself
The booking card stays pinned above the conversation, so what is being discussed is always on screen. When the event is done, that same booking becomes the review, and the rating goes back to the profile the next customer reads.
The one way out
Chat with vendors you have worked with
A conversation that moves to WhatsApp takes the booking with it, and the platform loses the commission it runs on. So the inbox says what it is for in its own empty state, and every thread opens with the booking it belongs to.
Where it landed
The marketplace went live, replacing the Google Form the owners had been taking vendor inquiries on. Inquiries rose 3.7x against it, onboarding completion reached 68 percent, and the booking flow came in 42 percent faster than the team had projected.
In their words
The handoff was the easiest part of the project. Every state was already drawn, so I was building, not guessing, and when the brand changed colour mid-project the work absorbed it without a reset.
Vendors get through registration on their own, without us walking them through it. On a brand new marketplace, that was the thing we worried about most.
68%
of vendors who start a listing finish it, without anyone walking them through it
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