Designing Trust: Lessons from KitLegit and Adapting to User Needs in the Football Shirt Market

Have you ever wondered if you have a football shirt that is authentic? That’s where KitLegit, a mobile app I helped designing, comes in. It helps people determine whether their football shirt is genuine or a counterfeit. Before 2024, there wasn’t a digital solution for this problem. Even today, KitLegit remains the only solution of its kind.

But there was a challenge. Many users didn’t trust this mobile app when it flagged their shirts as fake. KitLegit uses AI to analyze and determine authenticity, but I kept asking myself: Why don’t they believe it?

That question led to nearly a year of research, redesigns, and rethinking the initial KitLegit purpose. This case study shares the design choices I made and the lessons I learned while working on KitLegit from December 2023 to October 2024.

When I started, KitLegit was focused on football shirt collectors. But my research revealed something unexpected: the app could be even more valuable to independent online shops selling shirts. This insight completely transformed the app’s business model and required a major redesign to serve these businesses better.

This story is for anyone curious about technology, user interface design, or tackling a similar project. I won’t dive too deeply into football shirts themselves, but instead, I’ll focus on how I approached the design and built an improved user experience.

As of September 2024, the app is available on App Store and Google Play

Below it is a working draft as I refine the narrative of the story and add more screenshots in the future. Feel free to share feedback or reach out for collaboration on similar projects!

Why I chose to work on this project
As a passionate collector of match-worn football shirts, joining the KitLegit team in 2023 felt like a natural fit. Since 2020, I’ve been helping others spot fake and authentic Romanian football shirts through the online community I built, “On Romanian Football.” But despite the growing number of football collectors and shops after 2020, there was no global digital solution for this problem — until now. KitLegit aims to fill that gap.

If you’ve bought a football shirt from eBay, a Facebook group, or an online webshop in the past five years, there’s a good chance it could be fake. I’ve been in the same boat — some fakes have even made their way into my collection. These counterfeits are usually produced in Asia and are difficult to spot with the naked eye. Every day, countless questions flood online forums and social media, with fans asking for help and recommendations on where to buy authentic football shirts. The demand for reliable advice shows just how challenging it can be to navigate this market and avoid counterfeits.

That’s exactly why tools like KitLegit are so important.

In the past, the only way to verify a shirt’s authenticity was to rely on experienced collectors through Instagram, Facebook groups, or Reddit.

This process is inconsistent, prone to error, and far from scalable. Facebook groups are often untrustworthy, Reddit users lacked experience, and Instagram wasn’t everyone’s go-to platform. On top of that, response times could be frustratingly slow.

One common method collectors use is Googling a shirt’s style code. For example, if you have a Messi Nike Barcelona shirt with the style code “286784,” a Google search result might suggest it’s authentic as it will find it. However, this method is far from reliable. Counterfeiters have become increasingly sophisticated, even replicating style codes.

You can Google product codes on all football shirts to help verify, example of a Messi Barcelona code

While Googling codes can work for big brands like Nike, it doesn’t cover other critical factors in shirt authentication or work well for lesser-known brands. That’s where KitLegit steps in. It combines multiple layers of analysis into one seamless, reliable solution for most major football shirt manufacturers.

For me, working on KitLegit isn’t just about creating a tool — it was about solving a problem I’ve experienced firsthand and making life easier for collectors, fans, and sellers worldwide.

The Challenge of Building Trust
Designing KitLegit presented two major challenges:

1. Building Trust: Football shirt collectors have relied on tight-knit communities to authenticate shirts for years. Introducing AI to replace these traditional methods was met with skepticism. When the app flagged shirts as fake, many users refused to believe the results, leading to complaints and support issues.
2. User Engagement: Checking a shirt required users to take at least six photos of their shirt. Many dropped out because the process felt too long or because their photos didn’t meet the quality standards for accurate analysis, forcing them to retake them. These issues led to inconsistent results, further damaging the app’s credibility.

Understanding the Problem
To tackle these challenges, I interviewed early beta users and observed their experiences. My focus was on designing a user interface that simplified the photo submission process while helping users understand how accurate photos, from their side, could improve results.

One major issue was that users were taking poor-quality or incorrect photos, which caused the app to analyze them inaccurately. This led to inconsistent outcomes, fueling distrust in the app. It became clear that before building trust, I needed to address this user engagement issue.

Building a Better Experience
In 2024, KitLegit started gaining attention on Reddit among football shirt collectors, and I started to monitor this feedback. While this helped the app grow the beta signups, many Reddit threads revealed a recurring problem: users didn’t trust the app’s results, especially when it flagged their cherished shirts as fake. They believed in their shirts more than the app, exposing gaps in how we communicated KitLegit reliability.

These discussions offered valuable insights, showing exactly where we needed to improve. By addressing engagement first — making the photo process faster and easier — I could focus on rebuilding trust through clear explanations of how the app worked and why accurate results depended on users taking better photos. This dual approach helped KitLegit evolve into a more reliable tool for its growing user base in the long run.

What Is KitLegit and How Does It Work?
Before discussing the challenges I faced, let me introduce you to KitLegit and how it came to life.

A Brief History of KitLegit
Founded in 2022 by three visionary individuals, KitLegit set out to solve a major problem: the lack of a reliable way to authenticate football shirts. While the founders’ main focus was on building a sustainable business, none of them were football shirt collectors themselves. However, one co-founder brought expertise in brand protection and anti-counterfeiting, which became the foundation of the app’s core functionality.

Their goal was simple yet ambitious: combat the growing issue of counterfeit football shirts — most of which are produced in Asia and sold on platforms like eBay. Even though the founders approached the project with a business-first mindset, they were addressing a real and urgent need in the market. Remarkably, even now in 2025, KitLegit remains the only digital solution offering this kind of authentication.

When I joined the team in December 2023 the app was advertised on their website mainly for football collectors.

What KitLegit Offers in 2025
Over the past year, KitLegit has evolved significantly. Initially aimed at collectors, the platform now generates revenue by focusing on online shops. These businesses need reliable tools to build trust with their customers and ensure the authenticity of the shirts they sell.

Through extensive user research, collaboration with the co-founders, and improvements to user flows, we’ve reshaped KitLegit into a stronger product ready for future growth. I’ll dive deeper into how we achieved this later in the story.

The Journey to a Prototype
By the end of 2023, the KitLegit team had developed their first working prototype. They focused their early testing on online football shirt shops within their network. While the app was marketed as AI-driven, the technology wasn’t fully developed. Even so, its approach to evaluating football shirts marked a significant shift in the industry.

Funding was a major obstacle. The co-founders bootstrapped the initial development, investing their own money to hire two developers and build the prototype. By 2024, they set their sights on securing external investment to expand features, explore new markets, and start generating revenue.

This is one of the first flows of the app prototype, which was envisioned having a process of checking shirts for each brand.

First prototype deign in Figma, 2023

How I Joined the Team
At the end of 2023, a friend shared KitLegit’s homepage with me. Intrigued by the concept, I reached out to the founders. Despite their limited resources, I offered to work for free. My motivation was straightforward: I’m passionate about football shirts, and this was an opportunity to deepen my knowledge in a niche I loved while working on something meaningful.

As a user interface designer, I knew I could bring valuable expertise to the table. Joining KitLegit allowed me to combine my professional skills with my personal passion. For years, I’ve shared tips on identifying fake football shirts on my Instagram account and Medium blog, so working on KitLegit felt like a natural extension of what I’d already been doing. This project was a chance to take my knowledge and enthusiasm to a whole new level. I was writing on this blog how to identify fake Romanian shirts:

Screenshot from my blog story National Team kit 2021–2023

A Game-Changing Vision
Even in its early prototype stages, KitLegit aimed to transform the football shirt industry. By introducing technology to a process that had traditionally relied on manual methods and community expertise, the app offered a much-needed solution to both collectors and businesses.

For collectors, it simplified the often time-consuming and uncertain task of verifying shirts. For businesses, especially online shops, it became a powerful tool to build trust with customers and protect their reputations in a market plagued by counterfeits.

KitLegit wasn’t just another app — it was a step forward in tackling a growing issue, combining advanced shirt analysis with user-friendly design to make authentication accessible and reliable for everyone involved.

How KitLegit Works
At its core, KitLegit operates on a powerful database built on years of expertise. One of the co-founders, with over a decade of experience in brand protection and anti-counterfeiting, played a key role in creating this foundation. Their deep knowledge and extensive data on counterfeit practices formed the backbone of KitLegit’s authentication process.

The Shirt Check Process
To determine if a football shirt is authentic, users upload photos of four key elements:

1. Front of the Shirt
2. Back of the Shirt
3. Wash Label
4. Style Code Label

These images are analyzed by KitLegit’s system, which combines advanced algorithms and the database to evaluate factors like stitching, branding, patterns, and other indicators of authenticity.

Below there is a screenshot part of the Check Flow. A user would have to use the camera photo feature built into the app to take photos of the shirt in a guided, step by step process. At the end the system built into the app will analyse the photos and give tell you the final result: if it is a legit shirt or a counterfeit.

Image Analysis and Database Power
KitLegit uses advanced image analysis to compare uploaded photos against its growing database. Among the key elements analyzed, the Wash Label and Style Code Label are the most critical, as they hold essential information for determining authenticity. Other photos, like the front and back of the shirt, neck labels, and swing tags, further enhance the accuracy of the results.

The Power of the Database
KitLegit’s database started small, focusing on shirts from major brands like Nike and Adidas manufactured after 2015. Over time, it expanded by encouraging the first beta testers to upload photos, contributing in training the AI system. By the summer of 2024, KitLegit had achieved a 98% success rate in identifying counterfeit and authentic shirts uploaded by the early beta users.

While highly effective, the app has and had some limitations:

• It performs best with shirts from major brands like Nike and Adidas. System is being trained on other brands based on what people are uploading and co-founders will do a manual check on that brand using their expertise and slightly adjusting the algorithms.
• Shirts manufactured before 2010 are less reliably authenticated due to no data available. Again the co-founders would have to first create a manual process of authenticating shirts before 2010 and then add it into the app algorithms.

Even as the app was in beta until September 2024, beta users were actively uploading new photos of shirts, helping the database grow and improve. This collaborative effort is expected to broaden KitLegit’s accuracy significantly within the next 12 months, in 2025, making it an even more powerful tool for collectors and businesses alike.

My first task on KitLegit: understanding how it works
When I joined KitLegit, my first task was to understand the system’s workflow and how the AI system performed shirt checks. In its initial version the process was labor-intensive. Users would upload photos, and the KitLegit team would manually verify these images to train the database and ensure accuracy.

After photos were uploaded, the system would generate an initial authenticity score. However, the co-founders often reviewed the results manually to spot issues like:

• Mismatched photos.
• Low-quality uploads.
• Attempts to cheat the system (e.g., fake style codes).

This manual verification sometimes led to changes in the initial results of a shirt chec, creating a loop where human checks refined the AI’s understanding.

To understand how I could improve the app, I needed to see this process in action. The co-founders walked me through the backend dashboard, showing how each shirt was analyzed. I learned about the key factors each photo went through before the system delivered its verdict. This gave me invaluable insight into how the AI system was trained and how human oversight played a role in building trust in the results. This is how the backend looked:

My First Redesign Task
My first assignment was to redesign the backend dashboard to make it more user-friendly for the co-founders handling manual checks. The existing interface was functional but not optimized for efficiency. By improving the layout and flow, I aimed to:

1. Streamline the manual review process.
2. Highlight key decision points for faster checks.
3. Create a clear link between backend insights and the frontend user experience.

This redesign not only helped the team work more efficiently but also laid the groundwork for creating a more intuitive frontend results page for users. My understanding of the backend became the foundation for designing a better overall experience for everyone involved. I used Bootstrap library to redesign the backend and we ended up like this:

Lesson 2: Fighting Cheaters
An unexpected challenge emerged when working on this: some users tried to manipulate the system. For example, they would upload fake photos for certain parts of the shirt, like the Style Code Label, to generate a “Legit” digital certificate. The KitLegit team had to do this manual reviews to combat this behavior and adjust scores if foul play was detected. Thefore all of the checks had to be manual checked in the backend to make sure photos are real.

This new redesigned dashboard significantly improved the co-founders’ ability to manage manual checks efficiently, reducing the time spent identifying cheaters while maintaining the app’s integrity. Despite these challenges, KitLegit continues to evolve into a trusted tool, paving the way for a more secure and transparent market for football shirt collectors and businesses.

The Complexity of Beta Testing
KitLegit has this backend dashboard where all checks are manually reviewed by the co-founders. While the AI handles initial authentication, it occasionally produced inaccurate results (“kicks”), requiring manual adjustments based on the co-founders expertise. This manual intervention added a layer of complexity for me to understand how it works but also it helps refine the AI over time. Basically through this dashboard you train the AI system to offer better results.

As a beta testers were onboarded into the app I learned a lot about how the core of how KitLegit works. This helped with the next task which was streamlining the user interface. So I hoped on feedback calls between the co-founders and their first beta testers as soon as possible.

First Look at KitLegit User Interface
When I joined KitLegit in December 2023, I began by testing the first prototype on my phone and working on the backend dashboard at the same time. Over the next eight months, from December 2023 to October 2024, I played a key role in transforming the app’s interface and user experience.

The workflow was fast and iterative, following the typical startup approach: design, build, test, and repeat. Most of the time, we worked in quick cycles to get features from design to live.

• We designed in Figma and immediately pushed prototypes to the app for testing on our phones.
• The focus was on shipping features quickly and fixing any issues later, rather than conducting extensive upfront testing.

While I conducted in-depth research with beta testers to gather insights and refine the design, we didn’t rely on other types of formal testing or user validation through Figma prototypes. The priority was speed, and the real-world feedback from beta users drove most of the decisions.

This approach helped us make quick progress but also came with trade-offs. Some design issues only surfaced after features went live, reinforcing the need to balance speed with deeper testing in future iterations. Despite the constraints, this rapid cycle allowed me to learn, adapt, and contribute to shaping KitLegit’s user experience in meaningful ways.

Starting with User Insights
One of the first things I pushed for was direct engagement with early testers. I suggested using Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery framework to guide the process. This approach emphasized regular user interviews to uncover valuable insights that could inform design and product decisions.

Within a few weeks of speaking to users, I gathered feedback that pinpointed key pain points in the app’s initial prototype, such as:

• Confusion about the steps required to complete a shirt check.
• Frustration with photo upload requirements and quality standards.
• Uncertainty about how the app’s results were generated.

Designing with Purpose
These insights became the foundation for my design decisions. I reimagined the user flows, simplifying complex processes and ensuring a more intuitive experience. I also began preparing new design prototypes to showcase to users for early feedback. This allowed me to refine ideas before full implementation, ensuring the redesign addressed real user needs.

A Collaborative Approach
By involving users in the design process early on, I was able to iterate quickly and improve both the interface and user experience. Presenting prototypes to testers gave me actionable feedback, which I incorporated into subsequent versions. This iterative, user-centered approach ultimately reshaped KitLegit into a more engaging and effective tool for its growing audience.

Figma file with the KitLegit re-designed flows as of October 2024

In the next sections, I’ll dive deeper into specific changes I made and how they impacted the app’s overall usability and trustworthiness.

Biggest Challenge: The Check Flow
The core feature of KitLegit is the “Check Flow.” As an end user, you take several photos of your football shirt directly through the app, which then analyzes the images to determine if the shirt is authentic or counterfeit.

However, when I joined the project and starting getting user insights, it became clear that the Check Flow had issues. Up to that point, the app’s user experience and conceptual design were handled by one of the co-founders, whose background was in business rather than UX or design. As a result:

• Many user flows were copied or adapted from other popular apps, without considering the specific needs of KitLegit beta users.
• The interface was built using free Figma libraries, leading to an inconsistent and clunky design.
• The flow itself was fragmented, with separate steps for each brand, making the process unnecessarily complicated.

Each shirt manufacturer (e.g., Nike, Adidas) had its own specific flow in the app. While this might have seemed logical initially, it fragmented the user experience and made the process unnecessarily complicated. Users had to navigate separate steps based on the brand, which added friction and confusion.

Challenges I identified:

• The flow didn’t account for user behavior or pain points researched in the interviews, such as why users might drop out midway of the Check or that the users wanted a different user flow
• The lack of consistency in the UI elements created frustration and made the app feel unpolished in their opinion
• Without a cohesive structure, expanding or scaling the app’s functionality would have been challenging

The biggest takeaway from working on the Check Flow and conducting user research was realizing that there is no perfect flow — at least not yet. This was the first time end users had access to such a powerful tool for authenticating football shirts. Because this space was uncharted, there were no established patterns or best practices to rely on. It was my job to bridge the gap between user insights and design possibilities, presenting the co-founders with different options to consider.

What stood out to me was how appreciative users were to finally have a tool that could assist them with shirt authenticity. Even with its early imperfections, they saw its potential to fill a gap that had long been ignored.

As a user interface designer, I came to understand the weight of this opportunity. I wasn’t just refining an existing experience — I was helping to define one of the first design flows in this industry. The decisions I made here could set the standard for future tools in football shirt authenticity, shaping how users interact with similar technologies in the years to come.

Redesigning the Check Flow

Despite this challenges, the existing Check Flow provided a foundation for improvement. Based on all the interviews I could immediately see some pattern emerging. My goal was to transform it into a seamless, user-focused experience. While it might sound simple — take six photos and you’re done — working on this feature for four months revealed its true complexity.

The Challenge: User Retention
User retention emerged as the biggest hurdle. During the beta phase in 2023, approximately 100 users were onboarded to test the app. However, a troubling pattern quickly became clear: most users dropped out after taking just two or three photos, closing the app without completing the process. There were few users, close to the co-founders, whom really trusted the app and did regular shirt checks.

One of the co-founders shared a key metric: 75% of checks remained in “draft” mode. This was a critical problem because the app relied on users uploading photos to expand the image analysis database, which in turn improved accuracy. Without completed checks, the app couldn’t achieve its full potential.

The business model at that time was built on a credit system. Each check required one credit, which users could purchase from the in-app store by upgrading to a Premium users, later the co-founders changed to “credit packs” . To ensure a consistent revenue stream, users were charged one credit at the start of the Check Flow. To address potential frustration, the co-founders allowed users to save checks in draft mode, giving them the option to return and complete the check flow later.

The lengthy check flow and time consuming flow inadvertently contributed to the high number of incomplete “draft” checks.

Simplifying the Flow
To tackle these issues, I simplified the Check Flow by redesigning the user interface and introducing features tailored for what I learned during the research phase while talking with 10 users, collectors and online shops.

Here’s a brief overview of the solutions I identifed after talking with users:

• Split the Check flow: I emphasised the importance of offering multiple types of Check Flows to the co-founders rather to have one master flow for each brand.
  -Guided Check: Designed for collectors and first-time users, this flow provided step-by-step instructions to ensure users could take accurate photos and complete the process seamlessly.
  -Bulk Check: Targeted at webshops and experienced users, this flow allowed them to upload pre-existing photos of shirts, streamlining the process for those managing multiple items at once.
  -Speedy Check: Focused only on two 4 key authenticating factors of a football shirt, it aimed to give a slightly less accurate result at the cost of lesser photo upload process — aimed for people on the go, that are in physical shops or at flea markets.
• Guidance Screens: Clear, step-by-step instructions to help users take accurate photos and complete the process with ease. An issue was that people took “blurry” or bad format pictures of their shirts leading to incorrect results.
• Daily Featured Checks: A feature designed to engage users and encourage consistent app usage. By showcasing a featured “Check” on the home screen of the app I hoped I would encourage users to get inspired how to take proper photos during their own Check flow.

The redesigned Check Flow not only addressed user retention issues but also improved the app’s functionality for both collectors and independent shops. By tailoring the experience and removing unnecessary friction, we moved closer to achieving KitLegit’s goal of creating a trustworthy, scalable solution for authenticating football shirts.

My goal after the research was to evolve the app’s user experience by creating tailored flows for its two main target groups: collectors and independent sellers. Until that point, KitLegit had only one master flow for both groups, which lacked the specificity needed to address their distinct needs.

Through my research, I discovered that while collectors like me were an important audience, the majority of usage and interest came from people trying to sell their shirts. Independent sellers were actively seeking a reliable tool to authenticate their inventory, which presented an opportunity to better serve this group with a dedicated experience flow.

By splitting the master flow into two tailored experiences — one for collectors and one for sellers — I aimed to improve usability, engagement, and satisfaction for both groups, while aligning the app’s design with the real-world needs of its users.

Split Check flows
The football shirt market has evolved dramatically over the years. Platforms like Classic Football Shirts have been pioneers in this space since 2006, establishing strong partnerships and becoming the go-to source for buying football shirts, both old and new.

The left images showcases the entry point to the Check Flow in the v1 of the app, on the right it is my redesign with spliting the checks.

However, the market saw explosive growth after 2020, with independent sellers on platforms like Vinted, eBay, and Etsy transforming into professional businesses with their own web shops. Despite their growth, independent sellers face stiff competition from established platforms like Classic Football Shirts, which benefit from a long-standing reputation for trust and authenticity.

While smaller sellers often offer the same shirts at lower prices, buyers tend to stick with trusted platforms to avoid the risk of counterfeits. Independent shops, lacking tools to support their authenticity claims, are essentially forced to “sell trust” before they can sell their shirts.

KitLegit provided a unique opportunity for independent sellers to gain a competitive advantage. By generating an authenticity certificate (in PDF format) after each check, the app allowed smaller sellers to offer proof of authenticity for their shirts. This feature was a game changer for sellers looking to build credibility in a crowded and competitive market.

Classic Football Shirts, despite their reputation, have faced challenges with counterfeit shirts over the years. Independent sellers lack the resources and tools to address these challenges at the same scale. This is where KitLegit steps in, empowering smaller shops to compete by providing an innovative way to build trust with their customers.

To make KitLegit more effective for independent sellers, I implemented features designed to address their specific needs in the Check Flow. By focusing on the needs of these independent sellers, KitLegit positioned itself as a valuable resource for smaller businesses aiming to compete in the football shirt market. This change of UI and UX lead to more Premium signups, and ultimately help the co-founders secure more agreements with web shops.

These changes not only expanded the app’s appeal but also demonstrated its ability to adapt to a rapidly evolving industry. What I learned in the research phase was that collectors might do one or two checks a month, while an independent seller does up to 10 checks per week. Therefore a Bulk Upload feature in the Check Flow has been my first real design task.

Building Trust

Or how I thought I could build trust.

Once I had an idea how to fix the issue of user engagement, my next challenge was building trust. During interviews with beta testers, I noticed a recurring theme: skepticism toward the app’s results. Some users didn’t believe the app when it flagged their shirts as fake. However, I also discovered a promising insight — many were curious and willing to learn how the app worked.

Understanding the Skepticism
The skepticism often stemmed from two issues:

1. Unfamiliarity with AI: Users were unsure how the app reached its conclusions. When we explained the AI’s process during research interviews, some became more open to trusting the app.
2. User Errors: Many beta testers uploaded incorrect or poor-quality photos, leading to inconsistent results. These errors made the app seem unreliable, even when the AI was functioning correctly.

Designing for Mistakes
One critical realization was that penalizing users for mistakes undermines trust. If users felt judged or blamed for uploading the wrong photos, they were less likely to continue using the app. To counter this, I designed a user interface that:

• Guides users through the process: Clear prompts and examples help users understand what photos to take.

• Allows for mistakes: Instead of penalizing users, the app offers helpful suggestions, like asking them to retake a photo or highlighting what went wrong. Instead of step by step flow I introduced an alternative of uploading at your own pace the pictures of the shirt. So this way gives freedom to the user of doing the check at his own pace rather than be constrained by doing step by step how it was previously.

• Builds transparency: A step-by-step explanation of how results are generated reassures users and builds confidence in the system. The result page of a check would tell a user what factors have been checked. If for example there would be an issue with the Label information I wanted to communicate that through the UI to give an idea of where it went wrong.

The Outcome
By focusing on creating a supportive and nonjudgmental interface, I aimed to make users feel more comfortable experimenting with the app. This approach not only reduced frustration but also created opportunities to educate users about how KitLegit works, fostering trust in the process.

Building trust wasn’t just about improving the app’s accuracy — it was about helping users feel confident in their ability to use the tool and understand its results. This shift in perspective became a cornerstone of the app’s evolution.

Other business cases
While the app is primarily targeted at online shops and football collectors, one specific business case caught my attention, showcasing another potential use for such an app.

In early months of 2024, a Premier League club faced an issue in their physical shop and they reached to one of the KitLegit co-founders.

Their customers would purchase authentic shirts from the store and return them a few days later. However, the returned shirts were counterfeit — knockoff replicas bought on eBay and manufactured by one of the many factories in Asia dominating the counterfeit market. The club fanshop clerks were unable to differentiate between the authentic shirts and the fake ones, as the replicas were nearly indistinguishable from the originals. The football club was losing money.

This is where KitLegit could step in to help the clerks ensure that the returned shirt was the same one originally sold.

The idea was to customize the KitLegit app with the club’s colors, remove some of the advanced features, and streamline the experience by focusing solely on the Check Flow. This would create a faster and more efficient tool for the clerks. This scenario made me wonder how many other football clubs might have faced similar issues over the years and how KitLegit could provide a solution to this widespread problem.

Insights and Lessons Learned

During my time working on KitLegit, I gained several valuable insights that shaped my understanding of the app, its users, and the market it serves

1. The Camera Feature Missed the Mark
The app’s built-in camera feature, intended to help users take photos of their shirts, wasn’t being used. From my interviews with beta testers, I learned:

• Users already had photos: Webshops typically took bulk photos of multiple shirts (about 10 per session), edited them in Photoshop, and uploaded them to both their webshop and KitLegit.
• This workflow highlighted the need for a Bulk Upload feature, as 80% of users followed this process. The existing design didn’t accommodate their needs, making the camera feature irrelevant for now.

2. Skepticism Toward AI
Building trust in AI was a significant challenge:

• Reddit discussions revealed doubt: Users openly questioned the app’s AI capabilities, often convinced their shirts were authentic despite being flagged as fake.
• AI adoption is a gradual process: This niche community values expertise and manual verification, so introducing AI requires transparency and patience. I realized that KitLegit’s journey to earning trust would be slow, requiring clear communication about how the technology works and consistent accuracy in results.

3. The Value of Authenticity Certificates
One clear takeaway was the potential of authenticity certificates:

• For independent webshops, offering a certificate is a competitive advantage. It can help sellers differentiate their products in a crowded market.
• As the market matures, I believe authenticity certificates will become a must-have for webshops dealing with sports memorabilia. KitLegit automatically generates you one.

Closer look at the UI and other screenshots

End
I stepped down from the project in October 2024. After a fulfilling year of completely changing the user interface and proposing major changes to their business model we ended up releasing the app on Apple and Google in September 2024. The app started having finally a revenue.

When I started we agreed that I will give it a shot and work for free for couple of months without talks for compensation. When I brought the topic again about the chance of me getting a compensating the co-founders could not find a solution for me.

The screenshots and my design thoughts used in this article are based on how KitLegit looked and worked by December 2024. Due to volatile markets this might have changed at the time you might be reading this article. And probably KitLegit is something different at this moment in time.

During my time with KitLegit team I helped with the following:

• Conducting in-depth interviews with early-on beta testers to uncover insights into user behavior and expectations (March, August 2024)
• Utilizing feedback from these user interviews to redesign the “Check” flow, ensuring the interface meets evolving user needs — check flow is the core feature of the app and most used feature (March, April 2024)
• Designed the back-end dashboard, using Bootstrap, for our admins managing all checks coming through (December 2023 — January 2024)
• Designed the “Results page” screen for a “Check” in the app (February, March 2024)
• Introduced design tokens, allowed us to have a light theme (March 2024)
  - Redesigned from “Free plan” to “Premium plan” user journey (July, August 2024)
• Art direction for Social Media content design (August 2024)
• Progressing towards standardizing the user journey and interface, making it intuitive and consistent across different user interactions by using my design system experience
• Advising on the product roadmap, on key features and improvements to align with user needs and market trends
• Designed “Daily Picks” feature and “In-app advertising” (August — September 2024)
• Soft launch on Google Play and App Store (September 2024)
• Tweaked the “Check” flow user experience after new feedback received once the app was soft-launched (September 2024)

I post stories about Romania match worn shirts on Instagram. If you want to get in touch with me you can find me there as onromanianfootball:
https://www.instagram.com/onromanianfootball/