A store full of bundles. No way to find one.

Nothing to search with

No search field, no filters, and no way to hold two bundles side by side. What a bundle contained sat behind a click.

A workaround, desktop only

Desktop players had invented one, Ctrl+F. On mobile there was nothing to invent.

A 30% margin at stake

Web purchases skip the commission Apple and Google take, so the business pays players bonus credits to shop here rather than in game.

The most valuable place a player could spend was the hardest place to spend. Every purchase that gave up and bought in-game handed 30% back.

Three of sixty players rated findability 9 or 10. The traffic was not the problem. The last step was.

My own survey of 60 STFC players, February to May 2025, recruited through the game's own communities.

85% already bought here. The business did not need more traffic, it needed the traffic it had to stop failing at the last step.

Name-knowers arrive with a bundle name from alliance chat or Discord. Need-knowers arrive with a resource they are short of and no idea which bundle carries it.

The catalogue is full of bundles that share a name and an item list, differing only in quantity. This shaped everything after it, and search cannot solve it.

One search field serves the name-knowers and abandons the need-knowers.

Sixty survey responses and nine interviews over Discord, 61.7% of them playing more than three years, is how I found that out.

Search

Two ways in. A name field for name-knowers, category and resource chips for need-knowers.

Filters

That show how many bundles survive before you commit to them.

Comparison

Built for the case the research found, two bundles that look the same and are not.

Additive, inside the store's existing design language. A redesign would have been a better portfolio piece and a worse answer.

Mobile web only, deliberately. One person, part-time, so one platform fully rather than two platforms partly.

Type four letters, get bundle names back, land on the one you came for. Typing returns names, not results: a bundle card is tall, so under an open keyboard a results grid shows a fraction of one card.

Two chip sets sit under the field before you have typed anything. Nine store categories, and resource type in the game's own economy: Latinum, Parsteel, Tritanium, Speed Up. Filters extend it with a quantity range, because players search by how much a bundle holds.

The apply button counts as you filter, twenty results becoming ten before you commit, so nobody filters their way onto an empty page.

Mega Value across the top, 1 Left at the bottom. Both the store's, and both persuasion. I could add to this card, not remove from it.

Three things, all of them information. The contents, so nobody clicks to find out what is inside. A way to hold two bundles side by side. And a buyer count.

The count came from research. Players were already leaving the store to check Reddit and Discord on whether a bundle was worth it. The information existed, it just lived somewhere else, and going to get it was how purchases died.

The comparison table marks which bundle gives more of each item, then stops. No best-value badge, no total, no recommendation, because I wanted the player to decide, not the store.

The buyer count is where that principle got tested. In usability sessions it was the element players responded to most: a higher number meant more trust. That is the feature working, and it is the part worth sitting with.

A number that makes someone trust a purchase is, from the other side of the screen, a number that makes them more likely to spend.

I put no constraint on the count. I did not foresee the manipulation risk.

Constrain it. A count is information as long as it reports what happened.

The moment it is engineered, made urgent, or attached to whichever bundles the store most wants to move.

Search and filters, and the store stops hiding its inventory. That was a complete answer to the problem as stated.

Search takes a player to Station Pack. It does not tell them the bundle beside it, at the same price, gives more. So the work grew a third feature: comparison, shaped for near-identical bundles.

Item names down the middle, each bundle's quantity either side, arrows marking whichever gives more. A conventional table puts labels left and columns right, which on a 375px screen means horizontal scrolling.

Comparison starts from a bundle card, not a separate section. Comparing is not a task players plan, it is something they realise mid-browse.

Three screens, in the order a player meets them.

Mobile web only. Every screen here was drawn at 375 points wide, and the decisions were made at that width rather than shrunk to fit it.

Both found it smoother than the live store, both singled out seeing bundle contents upfront and comparing side by side, and both wanted more flexible filtering than I had built.

After I published the project, a designer who had worked on the actual STFC search feature messaged me unprompted. Independent work, same destination. Direction confirmed, not an endorsement.

Nothing here is a novel pattern. Search, filters and comparison are e-commerce basics, and the insight was that their absence was quietly taxing every purchase in the store the business most wanted people to use.

What stayed with me is the second thing: the buyer count worked because it was true, and it moved people because it was persuasive, and those are the same property viewed from two sides.

More participants

A measured outcome rather than an impression.

Harder comparisons

Mismatched contents, unequal prices, and more than two bundles at once.

Commercial is not neutral

Commercial surfaces need the same scrutiny as safety-critical ones.