Real Time Auctions
Designing a live bidding platform from 0 to 1, and shipping 5 million pounds of traded material in its first months.
Impact
Overview
In early 2025, I led the design of Matium's Auctions feature, a 0-to-1 product that brought competitive, real-time bidding directly into the platform for the first time. Before this, sellers were running auctions outside of Matium entirely. That meant fragmented workflows, extra steps, and lost platform value every time a high-stakes trade happened elsewhere.
I designed both sides of the experience: an Owner View for sellers to launch and manage live auctions with full visibility into bids as they came in, and a Bidder View built for speed, transparency, and mobile accessibility. The feature launched in February 2025 with Total Energies as the first partner. After launch, I ran user interviews, identified friction points, and shipped a second iteration that added flexible bidder management, dedicated auction product tiles, and a deliberate moment of delight at the close of every auction.
Problem
Sellers were already running auctions, but doing so outside of Matium created friction and added steps to every transaction. They wanted the convenience of hosting auctions directly on the platform, with real-time visibility into bids and a streamlined way to engage buyers. There was no native tool for it. We built one.
Solution
Working with the product and engineering team, I designed two tailored experiences within the Auctions feature. The Owner View gave sellers the ability to launch auctions, set parameters, monitor bids in real time, and declare a winner. The Bidder View made participation fast and transparent with clear status indicators, a countdown timer, and mobile-first accessibility. Both experiences were built on top of the existing Public Offers infrastructure, which let us move quickly while adding net-new functionality for live bidding.
Maximize Seller Value
Give sellers a tool to drive competitive bidding and capture stronger margins on their inventory. Auctions create urgency and price discovery that static listings cannot.
Simplify Buyer Access
Enable bidders to participate quickly and easily, lowering the barrier to entry and encouraging broader market participation.
Drive Market Momentum
Create a dynamic, transparent marketplace where activity is visible and outcomes are clear. Momentum in an auction benefits both sides of the transaction.
Before Auctions, raw material trading on Matium relied on fragmented, manual workflows. Sellers lacked tools to maximize inventory value, and buyers missed opportunities because of delays and poor visibility.
We identified an opportunity to build a dedicated auction experience that made bidding fast, clear, and accessible. Rather than building from scratch, we leveraged the existing Public Offers feature as the backend architecture and UI foundation. From there, we layered in the new functionality: split views for owners and bidders, bid status cards, a countdown timer, and status indicators for Leading, Trailing, Losing, and Cancelled states.
Define Owner and Bidder Flows
I mapped the auction journey end to end to understand where owner and bidder needs diverged. Owners needed real-time visibility into who was bidding and at what price. Bidders needed a clear, frictionless path to participate and monitor their standing.
Establish Bid Statuses
To keep participants informed, I introduced clear, persistent status tags: Leading, Trailing, and Cancelled. Cancelled bids remained visible in the My Bids view, giving users full transparency into their activity even after a bid was no longer active.
Simplify Auction Creation
I adapted the existing Create Public Listing form for the auction context, adding fields for starting price, weight, shipping terms, end date, and bid increment. This made setup fast and intuitive for owners without requiring a new mental model.
The first version of Auctions launched with strong adoption. Bids came in quickly, and our launch partner Total Energies was able to determine winners based on real-time pricing with minimal friction. Users specifically called out the ability to place bids from anywhere on mobile, even while traveling, as a meaningful improvement over the manual processes they had been using.
After running the first two auctions, I shifted focus to refinement and scalability. User interviews surfaced clear friction points and uncovered new opportunities in both the owner and bidder experiences.
I introduced flexible editing states so owners could add or remove bidders mid-auction, giving them greater control over participation without needing to cancel and restart. I redesigned listing pages to include a dedicated Auctions tab and updated auction cards that surface bid status at a glance. When an auction is live, a subtle green broadcast beacon appears on the listing. When no auctions are active, the beacon disappears, keeping the interface clean without hiding time-sensitive information.
To make live auctions more visible across the network, we introduced a dedicated Auctions tab on listing pages. When an auction is live, a subtle green "broadcast" beacon appears, signaling activity in real time. When no auctions are active, the beacon disappears, keeping the interface clean while ensuring users never miss an opportunity to bid.
Dedicated Auction Product Tiles
I designed custom product tiles for the Auctions tab, surfacing the most important details -- time remaining, bid status, and activity level -- based directly on user feedback that images mattered less in this context than competitive data.
Adding or Removing Bidders
I introduced flexible editing states so owners could add or remove bidders mid-auction, giving them greater control over participation without needing to cancel and restart.
When an owner declares a winner, confetti fires. Bidders who win see the same moment. It is a small thing, but it turns a high-stakes transaction into a memorable event.
Since launching in February 2025, Auctions has become one of the most active features on Matium's platform. Over 5 million pounds of material have been traded, and participation continues to grow month over month. Sellers report capturing higher prices. Buyers get faster access to supply.
What went well
Design and engineering came together quickly on a net-new feature with almost no roadblocks. Building on Public Offers meant we could focus on the real design challenge: what does live bidding need to feel like in this market, for these users?
What could have been improved
Timeline constraints pushed several planned features into the next iteration. More runway upfront would have let us ship a more complete first version rather than sequencing the experience over two releases.
What was memorable
As the first auctions went live, we held a virtual launch party and watched bids come in from different buyers in real time. It was one of those rare moments where a product you designed is doing exactly what it was supposed to do, live, in front of you.