An end-to-end redesign of a large promotional-merchandise store. A buyer looking for 500 branded pens had to work past nineteen sidebar categories and fifteen undifferentiated product tiles before reaching anything they could enquire on. The catalogue was sound. Getting through it was the work.
The old homepage gave equal weight to every category it had, so the products that sold were indistinguishable from the ones that did not. Best sellers appeared below two long blocks of sales copy. The enquiry path competed with a phone number, an e-guide, a blog teaser and a best-value badge, none of which led anywhere a buyer needed to go.
On a phone it was worse. A fixed-width desktop layout with cursor-sized buttons, carrying the same nineteen-link sidebar. The buyers were procurement and marketing staff ordering in volume, often from a desk they had already left.
A heuristic evaluation and an analytics review decided the structure. Search and page data settled which categories earned a place on the homepage and which belonged a level down, and showed where buyers were dropping out. That produced a restructured information architecture, then mobile-first wireframes, then a component library the developers built from.
The legacy site is gone, and with it the sidebar of nineteen links and the wall of copy above the products. What replaced it is a structure built from what buyers were already searching for, shipped as a component library the team extends without a designer in the loop.
