Make local services feel simple to discover and book.
The product needed to move from open-ended browsing into informed action: choose a category, compare options, trust the provider, and pay.
Service marketplace
Blik
Find your service. Meet your match.
An iPhone app for booking local services: set an address, see upfront prices, and send one request.
- Role
- UX/UI Designer
- Scope
- Discovery, service detail, booking, wait states
- Focus
- Local context, payment trust, mobile UX
- Role
- UX / UI Designer
- Mobile app structure, discovery surfaces, payment flows, interface states, and visual system.
- Focus
- Service marketplace
- Help users find nearby services, compare providers, understand pricing, and move to booking.
- Platform
- iOS product
- An iPhone app with light and dark surfaces, map context, and account flows.
- Year
- 2024
- Designed and shipped end to end through 2024.
- Duration
- ~3 months
- Roughly a three-month sprint from intent-to-payment flow through hand-off to engineering.
Project arc~3 months - Audit, completed
- Flows, completed
- Wireframes to motion, completed
- Validation, completed
I shaped the flow from intent to payment.
The UI work connected home discovery, service cards, provider sheets, wallet setup, and account states into one consistent mobile system.
Inside the home screen
Where and what, before any commitment.
Blik’s first job is orientation. The home screen asks for the address, shows what can be booked and puts a map of the area underneath, all before it asks for a decision. Here is each zone and the reasoning behind it.
Home · iOS appFive zones, top to bottom
01 / 05A header with one job.
Is anything waiting for me?
A header with one job.
The wordmark names the app and a single bell carries notifications. There is no search field, menu or profile chip competing with it; services and the account each have their own tab, which keeps the top of the screen for the address.
- One job per region
- Status in a fixed place
Where is the job?
Location is the first decision.
Which provider is matched and how soon they can arrive both depend on the address, so it is the first thing under the wordmark. Under a Service location label, “Set your address” shares one row with Change, so setting or correcting the address always starts with one tap.
- Context before choices
- Ask once, early
What can I get done?
Categories read as buttons.
Each service is a card with an illustration, a name and one short line (Cleaning: Spotless & shiny). The arrow in the corner makes the whole card read as tappable, and the third card peeks in from the edge to show the row scrolls.
- Recognition over recall
- Show there is more
What is around me?
A map before any commitment.
A map of the area sits under the categories, with location markers on it and zoom and recentre controls beside it. In the app code the map draws a dot at each listed provider’s coordinates, and when no provider is listed the screen says so above the map.
- Place before choices
- Say when there is nothing
Where is everything else?
Five tabs, one in brand blue.
Services, Chat and Account are quiet black outlines with a label under each. Home is the active tab in this capture, so its icon is filled in a lighter blue. The centre tab is a solid blue B that opens orders. It is the largest and strongest block of colour in the bar, which makes orders the easiest destination to find. The bar floats over the content, which keeps scrolling underneath it.
- Labels with icons
- One emphasis per region
Inside the service list
The price is on screen before anyone is contacted.
Choosing a service is the step where a customer decides whether to trust the price. Every option shows an upfront price, a duration and what is included, under the service location and its map.
Cleaning · iOS appPlace, scope, price
01 / 03The place leads the list.
Is this for the right place?
The place leads the list.
Service location, a Change button and a map sit above the first option. Change opens the saved addresses in a sheet, so fixing the address does not mean leaving the category.
- Location first
- Easy to correct
What do I get, and for how long?
Each option says what is included.
Left of the price, a card has four parts: an icon, the name, a line giving the duration and scope (2.5 h, every room cleaned top to bottom) and a blue check line listing the tasks. What the money buys comes before the price in reading order.
- Scope before price
- One card pattern
What will it cost?
Price and time share one column.
$59 and $95 line up on the right edge with the duration under each, so the list can be compared by scanning straight down. Each price is on the card before anyone is contacted.
- Compare by scanning
- Price before contact
On the matched provider’s sheet, one tap on the insurance line opens How Blik protects you: providers are required to carry their own liability insurance and are reviewed before approval, and Blik helps mediate disputes. The sheet also says plainly that Blik is not the insurer.
No providers available right now gives the reason (everyone nearby is booked or offline) and offers Search again. The address and the service stay in place behind the sheet, so retrying costs nothing.
UX cases
What a customer asks, and how the app answers.
Pick a question. See the screen that answers it.
Concepts · not shipped
Three I would design next. Try them.
- BedroomsBathrooms
- KitchenCounters, stovetop and sink
- FloorsVacuum and mop throughout
- 2 bedroomsDust surfaces, make beds
- 1 bathroomToilet, shower and mirrors
$115about 2.5 h · sample prices
Price the home before booking.
Add rooms Request sent. The provider has an hour to accept.
Show the wait as it passes.
Drag time- No one is free right now.
Your request goes out for tomorrow at 9 am.
Offer the next free time.
Pick one
Character and motion
The waits have a face.
A marketplace has pauses the customer cannot skip: loading, searching, sending a request, waiting for a provider to accept. Each one gets the same character, so a pause reads as something happening and not as something broken.
The line rotates through three messages while Blik looks for a match: Browsing providers near you, Checking who’s available, Matching your service. In the app this is a half-height sheet over the service list.
One short hello under the wordmark while the app loads.
The character loops while Blik looks for a match, so the screen never looks frozen.
A full-screen moment that marks the step from choosing to waiting.
Decorative only: it never reflects or advances the booking state, so it cannot mislead.
With Reduce Motion switched on, the app shows a still frame in place of every clip.
Two sides of one marketplace
One product, two very different jobs.
Blik only works when both sides trust the middle. Switch between the customer and the provider journey to see how the same system serves each of them.
The customer side is built to remove hesitation: orient first, compare in context, check the protection, then pay in a way that can't surprise you.
Customer · step 1 of 5
Start from where you areLocation is the first thing on screen. Service categories and a map of the area appear before Blik asks for any commitment, so discovery never starts from a blank search box.Location anchorTappable categoriesMap of the area
More from the app
The catalogue and the provider side.
Four more screens captured from the app: the full list of services, and three screens from the provider side, captured in early September 2026 before provider sign-up was reworked.
Cleaning, Painting, Car Detailing and Moving carry Book now. Handyman and Lawn & Snow are marked Coming soon instead of being hidden.
A separate sign-in with a Remember provider mode switch keeps the two sides of the marketplace apart on a shared device.
In this September 2026 capture, name, contact, a photo and a short bio sat in one sign-up form. Sign-up has since been split: the account screen asks for name, email, phone and password, and the provider application is a separate step.
That sign-up form ended with two cards: Verify your identity, which earns the ID badge, and Bring your own liability insurance, needed before the first job.
Companion site · bliknow.com
The website says where the product actually is.
The site is in provider-recruiting mode for Toronto and the GTA, and its first paragraph says so. It lists the services with the same cards the app uses and carries no performance numbers.
“Help build local services you can trust” sits above a service picker and the category cards from the app, with Coming soon on the ones that are not open yet.
Headline, paragraph, picker, then the cards in two columns.
UX process
How the Blik system came together.
The work split into four overlapping phases: research first, then structure, then surface, then validation. Each phase produced an artefact the next phase consumed.
Discovery & competitive audit
Studied how on-demand service apps (TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Jiffy, regional cleaners) handled the four hard moments — service discovery, provider trust, wallet setup, booking confirmation — and mapped where each one leaked users. Findings became the problem statement: shoppers abandon when they can't verify the provider quickly and when payment setup feels like a separate journey.
Information architecture & flows
Sketched the four core flows — Discover → Compare → Book → Pay — and pressure- tested each step against the audit findings. Provider quality controls and live dispatch surfaced as system primitives that needed first-class UI, not buried metadata.
Wireframes → high-fidelity → motion
Wireframes in Figma, then a light + dark interface system around a calm blue palette and a soft-card hierarchy that keeps long-form info readable. Motion was spec'd at component level (provider sheet, wallet drawer, dispatch states) so engineering had real specs, not guesses.
Validation & companion site
Prototype tested with five service-booking customers and three providers; iterated the comparison sheet copy and the wallet add-method flow based on what they got stuck on. The companion site at bliknow.com followed once the in-app language was stable, so the brand outside the app matched the brand inside.
The app’s tokens, parts and screens, rebuilt as an interactive library.
Outcome
The price is known before anyone is contacted.
What shipped, what is not measured yet, and the state I would take further.
What shipped
- Customer flow on iOS: address, a service list with upfront prices and durations, the request, and the wait states
- Provider side: a separate sign-in, sign-up with a services picker, and identity and insurance checks before the first job
- Trust and empty states: the How Blik protects you sheet and a plain No providers available sheet
- A character for the four waits: launch, searching, placing the order and waiting for approval
- Blik Home Services on the App Store, version 1.2, with the companion site at bliknow.com
What was measured
No booking, rating or conversion numbers are quoted here. The site says Blik is still recruiting its first providers, so there is no usage data to report yet.
The call I’d revisit
I'd make the empty state do more than retry.
When no provider is free, the sheet explains why and offers Search again. It does not yet say what the customer can change: another time, a wider area, or a nudge when someone comes online. In a marketplace that is still adding providers, that sheet will be seen often, so it is the one I would take further first.
What I’d instrument next
- Time from request sent to provider accepted
- Share of requests that move to a second provider
- How often the No providers available sheet is shown