CMUsed: a zero-to-one campus marketplace
CMUsed is a Carnegie Mellon community marketplace for students to sell and buy from each other. I helped take it from a fragmented campus selling process to a trusted product — with a design system, cross-functional launch strategy, and room to keep refining after ship.
Role
Product designer
Type
Zero to one
Skill
Design systems, user testing/research, wireframing, rapid prototyping, cross-functional collaboration
Duration
Sept 2025 – April 2026
Team
Yutong, Brian, Andrea, Amy
The problem
Selling on campus lived in group chats, not a product.
Students already buy and sell furniture, textbooks, and dorm goods — but the flow lived across Facebook groups, Discord, and word of mouth. Trust, timing, and follow-through were inconsistent, especially around move-in and move-out when furniture actually needs to change hands.
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The goal
Stand up a marketplace students would actually use, without losing the campus-specific need.
Zero-to-one meant choosing a focused problem — trusted peer-to-peer selling for the CMU community — and resisting feature sprawl while still leaving room for a brand and system that other BTG products could inherit.
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Solution overview
A campus marketplace with a system underneath it.
CMUsed is the student-facing marketplace. Underneath it, we invested in a design system and brand so screens, states, and future BTG products could share language — instead of designing one-off pages that would fall apart at launch.
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Primary learnings
The work was systems, stakeholders, and tradeoffs — not just screens.
Building a design system and brand
We needed a visual and component language that could scale past the first flows: listing, browsing, and trust. The system had to feel CMU without becoming a poster, and stay implementable for a student engineering team.
Working cross-functionally
Design sat with business, data, and developers. Research and wireframes had to survive actual constraints: what we could ship, what we could measure, and what the campus calendar would allow.
Balancing user wants with product focus
Students asked for a lot. The job was to hear the want, name the underlying need, and keep the product pointed at selling and buying — instead of becoming a general campus app.
Managing external competition
We worked with the business team on when to launch versus how polished to be. The call was to release after competition, but ride the furniture-selling timeline so quality and moment both mattered.
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The impact
The campus selling process actually moved.
Beyond the first-week spike, CMUsed changed how the CMU community sells and buys — a shared place instead of a scavenger hunt across chats and groups.
700+
users within the first week of launch
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Next steps
What I would carry into the next BTG products.
A full design system for CMU BTG
We are producing more websites and products. Curating a studio-wide system would keep quality consistent and make the next zero-to-one faster.
More user testing on the live product
Onboarding and general UX still need additional testing now that real students are in the flows — not only the prototype.
Tighter design–dev handoff cycles
Launch taught us where specs, QA, and iteration loops broke down. Improving that cadence is part of the system work, not a separate chore.
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