Designing a Customer-Centric Product Catalogue
Mision
To empower customers by aligning e-commerce growth with human-centered design, ensuring that product discovery supports both business ambitions and customer ease.
Vision
To build a catalogue that feels natural, intuitive, and effortless. Turning the process of browsing into a moment of clarity rather than confusion.
SERVICES
Industry
E-Commerce
Size
Big Corp
Markets
EU
Timeline
3 Weeks
Team Member
1 Designer
Type of Project
External Collaboration
Need For Cange
To maintain usability and ensure sales momentum, the company needed to redesign how products were organised and named, making the catalogue not only larger, but smarter. The project was conceived to align business growth with customer clarity, ensuring that finding a product was as intuitive as choosing it.
Business Background
An e-commerce brand experiencing rapid growth was expanding its product portfolio to serve a wider range of customers. While the expansion opened opportunities, it also created a new challenge: the existing catalogue structure no longer reflected customer expectations or mental models.
Key Challenges
Existing catalogue structure does not reflect customer mental maps.
New product categories lack intuitive naming conventions.
Browsing experience leading to friction and drop-offs.
Risk of underutilising the potential of portfolio growth.
Objectives
Research customer mental models for product discovery to align catalogue structure with customer expectations and search behaviours.
Redesign the product catalogue structure to reflect customer expectations, simplifying product discovery to improve usability.
Define clear, intuitive names for each category to ensure new categories were named in a way that reflected customer language.
Improve browsing usability to enhance customer experience, looking to increase conversion rates by streamlining the buying journey, and reducing friction in navigation.
Overcoming Obstacles
Balancing business logic (inventory, supply chain) with customer mental models.
Managing internal resistance to renaming categories.
Ensuring consistency across multilingual or multi-market catalogues.
Lessons Learned
Language Matters – Naming categories in customer terms increases clarity.
Structure Is Experience – Catalogue organization directly impacts conversion.
Balance Both Worlds – Business logic must coexist with customer usability.
Impact
Customers being able to find products faster and more intuitively.
Increased add-to-cart and conversion rates.
Stronger alignment between business growth and customer needs.
Enhanced trust and satisfaction with the shopping experience.
Results
Clearer, customer-aligned catalogue structure.
Intuitive naming conventions reducing browsing confusion.
Faster product discovery and smoother navigation.
Sucess Metrics
Time to product discovery.
Add-to-cart and conversion rate improvements.
Reduction in customer support queries about navigation.
Customer satisfaction with browsing and usability.
Conclusion
Growth without clarity risks creating friction. By redesigning its catalogue with customer experience as the compass, the client transformed browsing into an intuitive journey, ensuring that expansion did not overwhelm, but instead empowered.
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