Designing trust into a system that broke it

Limited sneaker releases are one of the most emotionally charged purchasing experiences in consumer retail. Demand massively outstrips supply. The window to enter is minutes long. And for most real users, the outcome is always the same: they lose.

That loss is tolerable. What isn't tolerable is not understanding why.

Across platforms like SNKRS, GOAT, and StockX, the experience is structurally broken in three specific ways. Bots dominate entry windows before real users have a chance. Raffle outcomes are announced with zero explanation—no context, no entry count, no selection logic. And after repeated failure, users disengage entirely—not because they stopped wanting the product, but because the system stopped feeling worth engaging with.

My job wasn't to solve scarcity. It was to design a system where losing felt fair—and where users wanted to come back anyway.

I conducted competitive analysis across SNKRS, GOAT, and StockX, ran one-on-one interviews with sneaker enthusiasts, and ran task-based walkthroughs of existing drop flows. Three patterns emerged consistently across every session.

The obvious move was to redesign the marketplace, better search, better listings, better checkout. That would have been the wrong call.

Every trust problem in the research pointed to one specific moment: the raffle. That was where users felt manipulated. That was where disengagement began. That was where the product was failing them most severely.

Instead of spreading across the entire platform, I focused entirely on rebuilding the raffle system as the core trust mechanism. Fix the raffle, and everything downstream—engagement, retention, brand loyalty—follows.

Trust is not a byproduct of good design. At Snix, it had to be designed as a feature.

Every meaningful design decision in this project involved a real tradeoff. I made these explicitly, not as compromises, but as intentional choices with documented reasoning.

The most contested was the equal weight raffle versus a loyalty-based priority system. A loyalty model would reward returning users and incentivize engagement but it would also mean that users with more history had a statistically better chance of winning.

That directly contradicted the core trust argument. I chose fairness over loyalty, with full awareness that it left engagement incentives on the table.