Twice Commerce

Twice Commerce is a commerce platform that allows people to rent, sell, and resell anything. Their mission is to accelerate the sustainable consumption of durable goods and promote a circular economy.

Because listing items on online marketplaces can be a tedious chore, Twice decided to reimagine the entire process with generative AI. They partnered with Reaktor, and together we built a powerful mobile app that lets you create a detailed product listing by simply uploading or capturing a photo and letting genAI do the rest.

Twice was not new to the world of generative AI. Their forward-looking team had already developed an AI feature on their platform that allowed users to create listings with a traditional chatbot approach. However, using the chatbot took relatively long, and due to its limited technology, the quality was inconsistent. This caused users tedious waiting times. What's worse, it sometimes mysteriously got stuck.

To improve their platform and find better ways to enhance the user experience, Twice teamed up with Reaktor to concept, design, and create a brand new genAI-powered mobile app.

The biggest challenge with Twice’s former chatbot was its slowness and tendency to freeze – and the poor visibility of the reasons causing the problems. Because of this, it was time to move away from the chat interface. Together with Twice, we made an overhaul of how genAI was used.

Instead of a slow prebuilt AI system, we designed the app so that there are several genAI systems working in parallel. This ensures the sustainability of the genAI capabilities in the app. Once the user uploads an image of their product or captures a photo with their phone’s camera, the genAI works across the app, creating a headline, description, price, and other listing details – all in seconds. This approach significantly improved the quality of the listings and the speed at which they can be created. 

Distributing the generative AI across the app also brought internal transparency into how the genAI works within the app. We also helped implement a monitoring system to get a view into genAI. This enables the team to monitor and update individual prompts seamlessly and solves the “genAI black box” issue the previous solution had. What’s more, the team can now better measure and improve the impact of the genAI.

Alongside the new genAI capabilities, we created the concepts and designs for the new mobile app. Designing for a genAI project can come with its own uncertainties. Given genAI's novelty, our designers needed to keep an open mind and create the app so it supports emerging technologies and allows users to use them without having to struggle with the technology. Close collaboration and iterations with developers and user testing are also key to success when designing for genAI.

As a result, users can now easily browse others’ listings or list their own pre-loved items in the marketplace by letting genAI handle the heavy lifting.

• Prompt engineering
• Implementing genAI monitoring systems
• Concepting and designing a new mobile app