Problem
A large national retailer's e-commerce platform had grown quickly but unevenly. Years of A/B tests, feature additions, and platform migrations had left the shopping experience technically functional but experientially inconsistent. Conversion rates on key flows (product discovery, cart, and checkout) were below industry benchmarks, and mobile performance was significantly worse than desktop despite mobile accounting for the majority of traffic.
At the same time, leadership wanted to explore what the brand's digital experience could look like in three to five years: how it might differentiate beyond price and selection in a market where those advantages were increasingly hard to sustain.
The engagement had two distinct mandates: fix what's broken now, and imagine what's possible later.
Strategy
We scoped the immediate work by running a heuristic evaluation and conversion funnel analysis across the top ten customer journeys by volume. This gave us a prioritized list of high-impact, low-ambiguity improvements we could pursue in parallel with the more exploratory future-vision work.
For the future-vision track, we used a "signals and seeds" framing: identifying emerging behaviors and expectations (from retail, adjacent industries, and cultural shifts) that would likely shape customer expectations within the planning horizon, then using those signals to stress-test the current experience and generate concept directions.
Keeping the two tracks parallel but connected was intentional. The future-vision work kept the optimization track from becoming purely reactive, while the real-world constraints of the optimization work kept the future-vision work from drifting into fantasy.
Process
The optimization track moved in two-week cycles: audit, prioritize, design, prototype, test, and ship. I worked closely with a product manager and two front-end engineers to maintain a tight feedback loop. Usability testing was conducted remotely with recruited participants, with a focus on task completion and moment-of-friction identification.
The future-vision track was more expansive. I facilitated a series of cross-functional workshops with the client's merchandising, marketing, and technology leadership to surface assumptions and explore possibilities. We then developed three distinct concept directions, each representing a different bet on where customer expectations were headed, and pressure-tested them through concept testing with customers.
The two tracks shared a weekly sync where findings and decisions informed each other. Several future-vision concepts ended up influencing near-term optimization decisions, particularly around personalization and product recommendations.
Solution
The optimization work shipped incrementally over eight months. Key improvements included a redesigned product detail page that reduced cognitive load and surfaced decision-relevant information more efficiently, a simplified checkout flow that reduced steps and addressed the most common drop-off points, and a mobile navigation redesign that improved discoverability of high-intent categories.
The future-vision work produced a strategic concept document and prototype presenting three directions for the brand's digital experience, ranging from incremental evolution to a more transformational reimagining of how the brand could engage customers across digital and physical touchpoints. This became the centerpiece of a leadership offsite and shaped the product strategy for the following fiscal year.
Reflection
The dual-track structure was both the strength and the challenge of this project. At its best, it kept the team thinking at multiple horizons simultaneously, which is rare and valuable. At its most difficult, it created tension between the urgency of shipping improvements and the open-endedness required for good explorative work.
Managing that tension well required deliberate communication: being clear with the client and team about which mode we were in at any given moment, and creating space for both kinds of thinking rather than defaulting to whichever felt most urgent. That's a skill I've continued to develop, holding the near and far in productive relationship rather than letting one crowd out the other.