Discovery, research, and the design of a digital stamp catalogue and collection tool
Role
Sole product designer
Scope
Discovery, research, design, user testing
While working for a heritage collectibles business, I led the design of a new digital stamp catalogue and collection platform. The company already had a long-standing catalogue and collection tool, but it had been built by a third party and left largely unmaintained, meaning the data was outdated. It also relied on a simplified dataset that did not reflect how serious philatelists collect. As a result, the company set out to build a modern platform with a comprehensive dataset, enabling collectors to explore in greater depth, search effectively, and keep a digital record of the stamps they owned and wanted.
I was the sole product designer on the platform from discovery through to a beta release tested with around 75 users. I led discovery and owned the end-to-end design of the platform and its design system, working alongside a senior product manager, a delivery manager, and six developers. During the research phase, I was supported by a senior product design contractor who assisted with survey design and proposition testing.
Re-created screens using fictional stamp data.
Why the existing data wasn't enough
The company's catalogues come in two levels of detail. Simplified catalogues typically list only one version of each stamp design, even when a design was reused or printed in different shades, and exclude varieties such as watermarks and paper types. Comprehensive catalogues include all recognised varieties, with pricing across up to four conditions instead of two. Taking the Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp, as an example: the simplified listing shows a single black stamp, while the comprehensive catalogue recognises several distinct shades and other varieties like inverted watermarks. These differences may seem subtle, but they matter to high-value collectors because they can significantly affect a stamp's rarity and value.
The legacy tool relied exclusively on the simplified dataset, a limitation repeatedly raised in feedback from users who cancelled their free trials. Supporting the comprehensive catalogue became a core requirement for the new platform.
Simplified vs comprehensive comparison for the Penny Black.
Discovery
Discovery began with interviews across stamp, coin, and trading card collectors and dealers, exploring how they discover, acquire, manage, and value their collections. These surfaced recurring pain points across the collecting journey. To find out how widespread they were, I ran a survey of 900+ collectors, working with the contractor on design and analysis. The clearest findings: discovering items is difficult for high-value collectors, and over half of stamp collectors find it hard to keep track of their collection digitally, with high-value collectors the most likely to want a digital record.
From there, I ran proposition testing of ten possible directions with collectors, again supported by the contractor. The clear front-runners were a digital catalogue (4.3/5 average interest), a digital collection (3.3/5), and historical sale and auction data (3.1/5). We scoped the MVP as a digital catalogue with collection features built in, with the other validated ideas, like historical data, planned as later additions, keeping the first release focused while enabling faster validation with real users.
Winning proposition cards tested with collectors
The core design challenge: the set
Going into the platform's design, I knew the most important component to get right would be the set: a group of related stamps issued together as part of the same series, from the first issue containing the Penny Black through to modern commemorative releases. Because catalogues are organised around sets, they became the foundation of the interface, reappearing throughout the platform in explore, search, and across users' collections.
The legacy platform presented sets as a traditional table, reflecting printed catalogues: a heading with shared attributes like year of issue, and each stamp as a row with catalogue number, description, pricing per condition, and controls to add it to a wants list or collection. But the underlying data is far from uniform, with some sets having up to four pricing columns and others as few as one. The table also struggled on smaller screens, especially with the new platform introducing two additional conditions. The challenge was designing a component that could represent this irregular data responsively, without making missing information look like errors.
The grid-to-list pivot
The first direction came from a clear opportunity. Print catalogues show very few images because page count is expensive, but a digital catalogue has no such constraint. The plan was an image-led grid view, aiming to show a reference image of every stamp. For our initial build we focused on Great Britain, our most popular catalogue, where we could source images for most stamps easily. But when we added Commonwealth data, images were much harder to come by, leaving a grid full of placeholders.
Image-led grid view, Great Britain vs Commonwealth comparison. Showcasing the placeholder image problem. Re-created screens using fictional stamp data.
Rather than continue down that path, I prototyped a list-based alternative and tested it with users, who consistently preferred it, not just because it avoided the placeholder problem, but because missing conditions could be hidden entirely rather than shown as gaps, it made room for more intricate controls like adding quantities, and it let stamp entries and users' custom data sit in the context of the set, which suited more serious collectors.
List view, with added flexibility for hiding missing data, more intricate controls and stamp entries shown in context. Re-created screens using fictional stamp data.
One component, many contexts
Because the set is reused everywhere, designing it well meant designing for every state it appears in: browsing in explore, filtering in search, and displaying owned stamps, wants, and albums in a user's collection.
The set shown in it's four different states in Search/Explore, My Stamps, My Wants and My Albums. Re-created screens using fictional stamp data.
Alongside the set, I designed the surrounding pages: an explore page for drilling down by country, a search page with filters across the whole database, and the collection pages for managing owned stamps, wants, and albums. I also built the supporting design system, using and adapting Chakra UI components, which kept handoff to the six developers manageable.
Where it reached
The platform was designed through to a beta tested with around 75 users ahead of launch. The grid-to-list decision came directly out of testing during build, an example of the design changing in response to what users told us rather than being fixed up front.
Reflection
This project taught me that getting one core component right can matter more than designing dozens of screens. Because the set is reused everywhere, all the time spent making it handle the messy, irregular reality of stamp data paid off across the whole product. It also taught me to hold plans loosely: the image-led grid was a perfectly reasonable idea the data didn't support, and the better answer only appeared because a constraint forced me to test an alternative. Starting from comprehensive data and real collector behaviour, rather than the simplified catalogue that came before, was what made the tool genuinely useful to the collectors who needed it most.