Case study 05 · Retail commerce · Product design
From First Click to Factory Floor
Making custom shopping feel simple. For everyone.
The transformation · 2023–2026
I connected customer journeys, product configuration, and technical delivery to make a complex retail experience easier to navigate and easier to operate.
Outcomes are reported project results. Website and POS metrics describe different workstreams; measurement periods and attribution should be added when available.
Project snapshot
Customer-facing retail journeys
UX strategy, research, interaction design, prototyping, design systems, QA
Desktop and mobile e-commerce
In-home consultation, showroom discovery, mobile navigation
Leadership, product, engineering, marketing, SEO, Experro development partners
01 / THE CHALLENGE
Beautiful products. Fragmented journeys.
Customers could shop online, visit a showroom, or book an in-home consultation—but those paths competed for attention. On mobile, important actions were difficult to prioritize.
The opportunity was to make each next step obvious without hiding useful product and service information.
Buying custom window treatments involves choosing a product and deciding how to shop.
What style works best? Should you measure the windows yourself? Would it be easier to visit a showroom? Or have someone come to your home?
The website offers plenty of information, yet important actions can compete with promotional content and navigation.
Now imagine you're a store associate helping that same customer.
You've found the perfect product. But configuring it means working through measurements, materials, operating systems, and rules that determine which combinations are possible.
Too much effort between knowing what you want and getting it done.
That's where I started.
02 / THE BIG IDEA
One experience. Clearer decisions.
I organized the redesign around three principles: lead with customer intent, reveal information when it helps a decision, and reuse consistent patterns across channels.
I didn't want to make the website prettier or give the POS system a new coat of paint.
I wanted to make both experiences easier to use.
For customers, that meant making it obvious where to go next.
For employees, it meant making complex product choices easier to understand.
And for the business, it meant creating flexible, consistent experiences that could grow.
Three ideas guided the work:
Make the next step clear. Help people move forward without searching for answers.
Show the right information at the right moment. Keep complexity available without making every decision feel complicated.
Make consistency part of the system. Build patterns that work across products, devices, and teams.
03 / DISCOVERY
Research synthesis: where the journey broke down.
The project explored journey friction through existing experience reviews, behavioral analytics, customer feedback, usability work, and cross-functional discussions. Original sample sizes, transcripts, and test protocols are not included in this portfolio package.
Three working hypotheses shaped the redesign: customers needed clearer service choices; mobile navigation buried high-intent actions; and complex configuration required better guidance. The first two became the primary e-commerce focus.
People didn't always know where to start.
Customers had several ways to shop: online, in a showroom, or through an in-home consultation.
Those options were useful. But the website didn't always make the differences clear enough.
The opportunity wasn't to add more explanations.
It was to help customers recognize the right path sooner.
Mobile needed to get to the point.
On a small screen, every extra step matters.
Important services needed to be easier to find, and navigation needed to reflect what customers came to accomplish.
That meant giving priority to high-intent actions rather than treating every destination equally.
Store associates were managing a lot of complexity.
Custom window treatments aren't one-size-fits-all.
Measurements, materials, mounting choices, and operating options can affect one another.
The POS experience needed to guide employees through those decisions without making them remember every product rule.
The insight: The problem wasn't that people needed more information. They needed information presented in a way that helped them make decisions.
RESEARCH ARTIFACTS · RECONSTRUCTED
Designing for a customer who needs confidence, not more choices.
Illustrative persona synthesized from the described shopping journey. This is not a verbatim research participant or a statistically validated segment.
The guided shopper
Homeowner comparing custom window treatments and deciding whether to shop independently or get expert help.
Find an appropriate shopping path and move toward a confident decision.
NeedsUnderstand service options, compare products, and schedule help without searching through unrelated content.
FrictionMultiple competing entry points, unfamiliar product terminology, and crowded mobile navigation.
Customer journey map
Question: Where do I begin?
Design response: Clear entry points and categories.
Question: Online, showroom, or in-home?
Design response: Explain each path and its next step.
Question: How do I schedule?
Design response: Prominent booking and location tools.
Question: What happens next?
Design response: Clear progress, confirmation, and guidance.
Research evidence and validation
Existing journey review, project-reported analytics and outcomes, and cross-functional design context. Original research records are not provided in this package.
Can customers identify the right service faster? Can mobile visitors find booking and showroom tasks with fewer steps?
Task-based usability sessions, booking-funnel analysis, showroom-search completion, and comparable year-over-year conversion periods.
04 / THE E-COMMERCE EXPERIENCE
Designing around how customers actually shop.
Three connected journeys made the experience more actionable: book a consultation, find a showroom, and reach key tasks quickly on mobile.
I started with the moments that mattered most to customers.
Finding a service. Choosing how to shop. And getting to the next step without unnecessary friction.
01 — Make booking easy to find.
THE CUSTOMER NEED
Customers ready to book an in-home consultation shouldn't have to search for the next step.
MY DESIGN RESPONSE
I moved the booking action higher in the page hierarchy, keeping service information visible without letting it compete with the primary task.
Principle: Put the next action first. Let the explanation build confidence.
Make appointment scheduling easier to navigate.
I redesigned the scheduling journey around three clear steps: choose an available appointment, enter contact details, and confirm the booking. The visuals show the design rationale and intended benefits, not independently measured improvements.
02 — Design around shopping intent.
03 — Put essential tasks first.
05 / THE POS EXPERIENCE
A related challenge: simplifying store configuration.
In parallel, I helped simplify custom-product configuration for retail associates. The design grouped dependent options into a guided workflow, making product rules easier to follow. This operational work provides context for the broader system but is not the focus of this case study.
Product design · visual evidence
Product configuration, at a glance.
These views connect the product-listing experience with the more detailed choices customers make on a product page.
Exploring product atmosphere through motion.
I created this AI-generated video to explore how motion can enhance the e-commerce experience. As a product designer, I used AI to prototype a more immersive way to showcase products, communicate materials and textures, and help customers visualize how window treatments could look and feel in their homes.
06 / DESIGN SYSTEMS
Consistency is a product decision, not a finishing touch.
Shared components, tokens, and interaction rules helped align mobile, desktop, and operational experiences. The Figma system below illustrates the patterns used to communicate and maintain consistency.
Design system · interactive
A retail system, built in Figma like an enterprise would.
An interactive illustration of reusable retail UI patterns, tokens and components. Explore how shared design decisions can create consistency across experiences. This is a portfolio demonstration, not a claim that every example was shipped as shown.
Brand palette
BTG Red anchors action; a warm neutral ramp carries surfaces and text. Color is defined once at the token layer and inherited — never re-picked per page.
Type scale
An editorial serif display sits over a clean sans body — a 1.2 modular scale tuned for retail headlines and dense store data alike.
Tokens & layout grid
Spacing, radius, and color live as Token Studio variables — the contract between Figma and engineering. Everything composes onto a 12-column desktop grid and a 4-column mobile grid.
12-column reference grid · 32px gutters — every editorial hero and store-card row aligns to the same rhythm.
Component set
The real, adoptable parts behind every flow — modelled on the live retail UI: red action buttons, the promo banner, retail trust badges, the zip search, and a recognizable store card. Each ships with documented states.
Documented in Zeroheight, tokenized with Token Studio, and mirrored in Storybook — so the editorial team could update seasonal campaigns from shared components instead of one-off pages.
07 / FROM DESIGN TO DELIVERY
Designing within vendor-platform constraints.
This is a reconstruction of the type of trade-off involved, not a documented account of one specific vendor decision. Confirm the actual options considered and the final implementation before presenting it as a verified decision.
A representative technical trade-off: a highly customized product-discovery interface could offer precise control, but vendor-supported templates and reusable components could reduce maintenance effort and migration risk. The design approach was to prioritize high-intent interactions and define reusable behavior before requesting bespoke development.
I connected leadership goals to implementation, collaborating with Product, Engineering, and Experro development partners on the website migration. My work included design reviews, interaction specifications, QA, and decisions about what should be configurable versus fixed in the UI.
08 / THE RESULTS
Impact, measured against seasonal demand.
+40% reported mobile conversion improvement across the redesigned high-intent e-commerce journeys. The POS time reduction is a separate operational result and is not used to support this website conversion claim.
Because window treatments are seasonal, performance was compared year over year: equivalent periods in successive years rather than adjacent months. This helps reduce seasonal distortion, though it does not eliminate effects from promotions, traffic mix, pricing, or other concurrent changes.
Measurement definition to confirm: mobile conversion rate = mobile sessions completing the defined conversion event ÷ eligible mobile sessions. Compare the same date windows, conversion event, device filters, and analytics definitions across years.
To validate attribution, review year-over-year funnel progression for consultation booking, showroom discovery, and mobile navigation alongside traffic sources, campaign activity, and experiment results where available. The source dashboards, dates, and denominators are not included here.
09 / WHAT I LEARNED
What I learned: simplicity requires systems thinking.
Simplifying customer journeys required more than fewer interface elements. It meant connecting customer intent, product rules, reusable components, and vendor-platform constraints—then checking whether the changes improved real tasks.
This project taught me something important.
Sometimes, making an experience feel simple means understanding an enormous amount of complexity behind it.
For customers, the complexity was choosing the right product or service.
For employees, it was configuring that product correctly.
For the business, it was supporting both experiences within real operational and technical constraints.
The challenge wasn't to make all that complexity disappear.
It was to make sure people didn't have to deal with more of it than necessary.
I also learned how much good product design depends on collaboration.
A thoughtful interaction matters.
But so does understanding the business rule behind it, the engineering effort required to build it, and the feedback that tells you whether it worked.
That's the kind of work I enjoy most.
Taking something complicated, finding what matters, and making it feel surprisingly simple.