Beyond the UI: A Product Registration Strategy to Combat Gray Market Counterfeit

Manuel Ortiz
Nov 10, 2025
4 min read

Updated: 4 hours ago

2024-2025

A strategic design project that transformed a simple registration flow into a powerful business tool to combat gray market counterfeit.

Systemic Design - Strategic Design - Business Modeling - Visual Design

Summary

My Role:

Product Designer & UX Strategist, responsible for redesigning a key part of the product lifecycle experience to solve a critical business threat.

The Challenge:

On the surface, this was a simple product registration update. The real business challenge was to design a system that could, without adding user friction, strategically track and identify black market counterfeit products.

The Outcome:

Designed a low-friction registration flow that increased gray and black market product identification by more than 30% in the first year.
Transformed a simple, low-engagement UI feature into a powerful business intelligence tool that provided the company with its first-ever reliable data stream to combat fraud.

*Engineer using his phone to register a product. AI generated image.*

NDA Disclaimer: This Project is protected by an NDA. To respect client confidentiality, this case study focuses on the strategic process and uses abstracted, anonymized visuals.

Initial Context and Challenge

The Business Problem

The company was facing a multi-million dollar “double loss” from counterfeit products. First, they lost the initial sale to a fraudster. Second, they were paying to replace these fraudulent products, which were being mistakenly registered and processed under warranty.

The User Problem

For legitimate customers—engineers and distributors—the registration feature was a dead end. It had poor visibility and offered no tangible, long-term benefit beyond a simple warranty, resulting in near-zero user engagement.

Initial Constraints & Ambiguity

I was brought in after initial research and an MVP were already in place. My task was not to start from scratch, but to uncover why engagement was failing and develop a new strategic direction that would integrate the feature into the broader product lifecycle.

My Role and Strategic Contributions

My contributions focused on transforming a simple feature into a core strategic asset:

Evangelized the UX design process and facilitated stakeholder alignment through asynchronous video memos and bi-weekly workshops.
Partnered with a business analyst to form a data-backed strategy incentivizing product registration.
Redefined the end-to-end registration experience to capture strategic data points without increasing user friction.
Owned the user journey and created key prototypes and artifacts that aligned multiple teams around a single, coherent vision.

Collaborators

This project was a deeply cross-functional effort combining business strategy, design, and technical feasibility.

Business Analyst: Partnered on data synthesis and strategic modeling to uncover user incentives and identify counterfeit risk patterns.
Engineering Lead: Provided technical validation and integration planning for the registration and tracking systems.
Product Manager: Ensured alignment between design strategy, business goals, and global release timelines.
UX Researcher: Supported usability validation and incentive testing across pilot markets.
Visual Designer: Created clean, scalable wireframes and simplified data-heavy interfaces to maintain low cognitive load.

Each collaborator played a key role in ensuring the final experience balanced usability, scalability, and business intelligence.

The Design Journey

Chapter 1 — Finding Clarity

The Challenge

We had a functioning product, but engagement was nearly zero. We needed to understand the real reason why users weren’t registering.

The Action

I partnered with our business analyst to analyze usage data and map the customer journey—from product delivery to on-site installation.

The Key Insight

The issue wasn’t just visibility; it was motivation. The “extended warranty” incentive failed because engineers on the plant floor didn’t find it compelling enough to justify the extra step.

Chapter 2 — The Messy Middle

The Challenge

Our first strategy iteration focused on enhancing the warranty offer, but testing showed only a marginal improvement. It wasn’t enough.

The Action

I reframed the entire value proposition. Instead of a short-term transactional reward, I looked for long-term, functional value by connecting product registration to existing company services—technical specs, maintenance alerts, and support records.

The Key Insight / Pivot

The “a-ha” moment came when we realized utility was the new incentive. By tying product registration to ongoing operational benefits, engineers now had a strong, self-serving reason to register.

Chapter 3 — Getting to the Solution

The Challenge

Limited access to end-users and siloed teams made alignment difficult. We needed a way to unify everyone around the new experience.

The Action

I created a comprehensive user journey map and interactive prototype that visualized how registration data flowed across systems. This became the central alignment artifact across teams.

The Key Insight / Validation

The unified prototype revealed the true strategic value: when registration became the bridge between the product and its digital services, engagement surged in testing even before development began.

The Solution and Design Rationale

Feature 1: The Low-Friction Registration Point

To remove the “extra task” barrier, registration was embedded directly into the existing setup flow. Using a QR code scanand pre-filled data, user effort dropped to near zero—creating a seamless on-ramp for engagement.

Eye-level view of a designer's workspace with sketches and a laptop showing wireframes — *A high-level wireframe representing the product registration website on a mobile phone.*

Feature 2: The “Quid-Pro-Quo” Dashboard

Once a product was registered, engineers unlocked an interactive product dashboard offering real, ongoing utility:

Live maintenance schedules
Technical documentation
Support history and issue tracking

This dashboard created a mutual value loop: users gained meaningful functionality, while the company gained reliable product traceability and counterfeit data.

Impact and Reflections

The Impact

30%+ Increase in Fraud Detection: The system provided the company’s first reliable data stream to track counterfeit products.
Enabled Real-World Action: The business could now collaborate with local authorities to identify and shut down counterfeit operations.
Feature-to-Intelligence Transformation: A once-ignored registration flow became a strategic business tooldriving both user engagement and fraud reduction.

Personal Reflection

This project was a lesson in seeing the design problem behind the business problem. The solution wasn’t just a cleaner UI — it was a new value proposition.

By connecting the dots across systems and aligning multiple stakeholders behind a unified vision, we turned a low-engagement feature into a high-impact business mechanism. It reinforced my belief that the most valuable design work often happens beneath the surface of the interface — at the strategic layer.