IlluviDEX

I joined Illuvium just before the IlluviDEX launch — the marketplace that anchored a $72M land sale for Illuvium: Zero — as lead product designer. The remit started as launch UX and grew into product ownership: information architecture, feature design, prioritisation, and a feedback loop with the trading community.

IlluviDEX needed to host 20+ asset categories across four games without the catalogue collapsing under itself. New asset types were coming online from Illuvium Beyond and other titles. Power users were trading in volume and needed bulk operations that the launch IA didn’t support, while new traders needed an experience that didn’t punish them for not knowing how the ecosystem fit together. The marketplace also had to keep up with the pace of the games it served — features and assets shipping continuously, with real money on every change.

Two channels fed feature decisions: targeted surveys with traders to understand specific behaviours and pain points, and a dedicated Discord forum I stood up so product improvements could be prioritised against real, visible user feedback. Both fed into Dovetail-style synthesis where I grouped patterns into themes and brought them back to the team with priority recommendations.

A few patterns kept surfacing across surveys and the forum:

• Listings didn’t support negotiation, so trades stalled when buyer and seller had different price expectations.
• Power users were doing the same actions over and over (listing, transferring, batching) without bulk tooling.
• Players struggled to navigate large collections when assets in the same set were spread across many individual listings.
• Granular item info (abilities, traits) was buried, slowing down comparison.
• Onboarding and fund movement were rough enough to filter out new traders.

I sequenced the work around two principles: ship the things power users were screaming for, but don’t let the IA collapse under the weight of new categories. That gave us a roadmap weighted toward bulk tooling, navigation, and quality-of-life surfacing — with a ground-up IA rework underneath it so new asset types could land without breaking the model.

The features that landed against those findings:

• An Offers system so players could negotiate on price.
• Grouped Asset Folders to give an overview of unique types inside larger collections.
• A sitewide cart so checkout could happen in one pass.
• Batch Listing and Transferring for power users.
• An Ability Overlay to surface granular item info at a glance.
• The surrounding work: onboarding, fund transfers, account settings.
• A ground-up IA rework so the catalogue could host 20+ categories across four games without collapsing.

Alongside design I moved into product ownership — rewriting documentation, creating feature descriptions, user stories, and acceptance criteria, and prioritising the roadmap. The Discord forum sat at the centre of that: every shipped feature had a paper trail back to specific user feedback, and every prioritisation call was defensible against the community.

IlluviDEX continues to evolve on user feedback and now supports thousands of trades daily. The redesign and new features improved usability and streamlined asset management across the platform, and the feedback loop kept the roadmap connected to the people actually trading on it.

This was my first real run at product management on a platform this size, and the lesson that stuck was that high-traffic marketplaces don’t just test your design — they test your process. You can’t ship good features fast without good documentation, clear acceptance criteria, and a real user channel. Building all three in parallel with the design work was the thing that made the rest possible.