Year
2024-2025
Scope of work
Product Design
User Research
Stakeholder Alignment
Figma
Prototyping
Domain
E-Commerce
Role
Sr. Product Designer
Duration
3 months
Orly Beauty is a well-known nail care brand with high-quality polishes and treatments. They asked me to update their old website.
Seeing an opportunity to make a lasting impact, I couldn't wait to get started.
For three months, I learned about their brand, culture, and business goals. In the end, I created a user-friendly site that increased sales and gave their online brand a fresh new look.
Orly was facing several issues.
The site had become outdated & overly complex, with UX elements that hinder user flow.
Many of Orly's competitors & 3P vendors were offering a more contemporary & familiar shopping experience and Orly felt their customers were preferring to shop elsewhere.
The design system was not consistently followed across the entire site.
Before fixing navigation or product discovery, I needed to really understand Orly’s products and how they were organized. With so many products, so it’s easy for both shoppers and staff to get confused without a clear system.
To solve this, I made a spreadsheet listing every product, this helped me:
See the full range of Products I could spot which products were similar, which were missing, and how big each category was.
Find problems I noticed where the current system was confusing or could be improved.
Plan better navigation With everything organized, I could design menus and categories that match how customers actually search—by color, finish, or type. This makes it much easier for people to find what they want.
To group Orly’s products better, I needed to know how real people see and sort them.
I didn’t have a lot of time or resources for deep research. So, I made a simple card sort activity using Miro on my iPad. I talked to people in stores and malls who matched Orly’s main shoppers:
Women 30-55+
Care about healthy, cruelty-free
value affordable products.
I asked each person to put different product types into set categories. Each interview took 7-10 minutes, and I gave each person a $25 gift card as a thank you.
After talking to 10 people, I had enough feedback to help organize Orly’s products in a way that made sense to shoppers.
I found problems with how Orly’s products were organized, I set up a meeting with the company’s leaders to talk about fixing it.
At first, there was a lot of pushback. Leadership didn’t want me to spend time on product organization while I was also working on the website redesign. They didn’t see why this was important and wanted me to focus only on the new website look.
I tried to explain why fixing product organization was key for a successful redesign, but they still weren’t convinced.
So, I made two simple wireframes and asked them one question:
“How would we decide which colors show up in the swatches?”
Without a category like ‘Toppers,’ how would we pick which colors show up in the swatches? And how would we keep this organized as we add new products?”
This example made it clear to leadership why fixing the way products are organized is important. It helped them see that we needed to focus on the whole product catalog, not just the website’s look.
After this, they understood why my role needed to include improving the product organization.
Once leadership agreed and the back-end issues were fixed, I started working on ideas for color swatches—how they would look, feel, and work.
But first, I needed to understand what matters most to Orly’s customers when they shop. I found that shoppers care about three main things:
• Color
• Finish
• Formula
To help users choose with confidence, I made sure all images and previews were big and clear. After testing different options, I found that using a modal or a carousel worked best. This way, customers could easily see all the details they needed before buying.
Wireframes of the Product Display Page (PDP) with variations of how color swatches could look and function
Follow up user testing between the existing site and the new designs saw an overall increase in CSAT. Users were pleased with the new layout, ease of discovering new products and felt the site had a fresh new look.
Other key metrics also saw significant improvements:
+47%
CSAT Score
+18%
Average Order Value
-88%
Reduction in search results
+26%
Conversion Rate
