Bringing data visualization to carbon credit markets
• $XM in payments delivered to landowners
• Reduced risk by millions per project cycle by pivoting to an order book model
• 4x growth in carbon supply on the platform
• 20% less landowner support tickets related to market confusion
How can a forest carbon marketplace build more trust with landowners? What does transparency look like in financial markets? How do people understand and interpret graphs? What data is most critical in decision making? These questions, and more, are what I set out to understand more deeply.
My first project at NCX was implementing an Order Book to balance supply and demand in the market. Order Books are common in financial markets, and it was a key opportunity to explore in order to bring live data to users for the first time and improve the overall marketplace experience. As the Design Lead and Founding Designer, I owned the end to end project management and designed a modern, data-driven experience that matched users (forested landowners) with businesses (carbon credit buyers).
Research revealed something critical: landowners were making anxious, uninformed financial decisions due to a confusing product experience that lacked market visibility and data transparency. Through customer support tickets, interviews, and surveys, I discovered users didn't understand how to price their credits or trust the system. The lack of data was the biggest problem. Landowner Platform users shared feedback like, “I don’t like it. Confusing.” and “Not very intuitive. Nothing I have done like it before. Once you get the hang of it, it is manageable.”.
The challenge I faced here was translating complex financial market concepts into an intuitive and highly interactive interface for non-technical landowners, while working within tight tech constraints of keeping component expansion minimal, and making the interactive data visualization feasible in a 5-week delivery timeline.
The marketplace redesign launched on time — successfully reducing business risk by millions per project cycle and leading to 4x growth in supply on the platform. By structuring the experience around actual questions users had, implementing progressive disclosure of market data, and creating a transparent side-by-side market view, the redesign significantly lowered support tickets related to market confusion, and increased matches.