Testxchange

Testxchange is a B2B marketplace MVP for industrial product testing — connecting manufacturers with certified testing labs end-to-end.

Year

2016

Role

Lead Designer

Problem

Manufacturers needed certified testing labs to validate parts against DIN standards, but the discovery process happened over email, phone, and referrals. Labs had no shared shopfront, and buyers had no fast way to compare accreditations side by side.

Testxchange set out to be the first B2B marketplace for industrial testing — but a marketplace only works if both sides show up. Labs had to be able to publish a credible profile in minutes, and manufacturers had to be able to search by the standard they actually cared about.

Approach

I led design on the MVP from sketch to shipped, working closely with the founders to map the two-sided flow before opening Figma. DIN standards became the matching primitive — the thing labs declare and buyers search on.

Sketching the two sides

Early work happened on paper. I mapped the lab-side wizard, the buyer-side search, and the request handoff between them — figuring out what a profile had to contain before either side would trust the platform.

A small design system

Industrial blue, Calibre for type, and a tight set of buttons, inputs, and form patterns. The system existed to keep a long onboarding wizard and a dense search experience feeling like one product, not two.

Onboarding the supply side

The marketing landing led with logos of the kind of manufacturers labs wanted as customers — Audi, Rolls-Royce, Bosch, Bentley, Porsche — to signal who the marketplace was being built for. After signup, labs dropped into an empty state that did one thing: invite them to create their first lab profile.

The services step

Labs declared which categories of testing they offered. Each selection unfurled more specific options later in the flow — the wizard widened as labs went deeper, so the form never felt heavier than it needed to be.

Accreditations and DIN standards

The most important step. Labs tagged which DIN standards they were accredited for — the same identifiers buyers would later search by. A confirmation modal made it explicit that these claims would be visible to manufacturers, and held labs accountable for what they listed.

Search by standard

Manufacturers searched by the standard they needed — for example DIN 19527 — and got back a list of accredited labs they could filter by location, capability, and turnaround. On mobile, filters slid up as a full-screen overlay so the result list stayed scannable on small screens.

Profile to request

Each lab profile pulled the wizard data into something a buyer could read in thirty seconds: services, accreditations, location, contact. From there, manufacturers could submit a test request — the moment the marketplace actually transacted.

Outcome

Shipped MVP in 2016 covering the full loop: lab signup, profile wizard, DIN-based search, and request submission — responsive across desktop and mobile. The design system carried through every surface, and the DIN-standard primitive gave both sides a shared vocabulary to meet on.