Driving 16% revenue growth through streamlined navigation and a frictionless checkout in an e-commerce platform.

Pola Club is a growing online retailer for instant cameras, film, and accessories. Adopting a rapid-launch strategy, the business planned to identify and resolve interface vulnerabilities post-launch based on real user feedback and analytics. While stakeholders knew the sales funnel was leaking, they needed UX expertise to uncover the root causes and fix the core flow to support business growth.

As the lead designer, I focused on researching and designing key stages of the funnel that had the greatest potential for improving business metrics specifically: search, filters, product pages, and the new step-by-step checkout process (all of which are described below, except for the product comparison feature, which was developed by another team member). While our design team concurrently tested other hypotheses, this case is solely focused on those interface solutions that directly contributed to revenue growth and reduced cart abandonment rates.

Despite operating in a booming market, the website was losing sales due to several critical roadblocks:

• Massive drop-offs: analytics showed significant user losses at every stage of the sales funnel, with the most severe drop-offs occurring specifically on the product pages, cart, and checkout stages.
• The hidden root cause: the business didn't know why users were abandoning their journeys. Our UX research revealed that buyers were deeply confused about film compatibility with different cameras. Furthermore, product descriptions were of poor quality, technical specifications lacked consistency, and critically important information about shipping and payment was completely missing. This caused severe hesitation, especially for new customers.
• A broken checkout flow: The ordering process punished users with long forms and a critical system bug that erased all their data if they made a single mistake.

These usability issues were actively driving potential buyers away. My goal was to fix these broken funnels and design a smooth, intuitive shopping experience to boost conversion rates.

To build a data-driven solution, I organized a workflow using the Double Diamond framework. Every research phase had a clear goal, not just to gather data, but to equip the team with the actionable insights needed to make the right design decisions.

To ensure speed and quality, we have implemented the following processes:

• Agile Management: I set up a Kanban board synchronized with the timeline of the "Double Diamond" framework. Each stage had clear boundaries and responsible parties, ensuring complete transparency of expectations. Daily stand-ups allowed for immediate identification and removal of blockers.
• Parallel Research: Instead of one person spending weeks on research, we distributed the workload. For example, we divided the list of respondents among team members and completed all 10 in-depth user interviews in just 2 days. At the same time, we conducted desk research in parallel, compiling the results into a single document at the end of each day.
• Co-creation Workshops: We created the most important strategic artifacts together. We collaboratively developed the customer journey map (CJM), hypothesis generation, and survey drafts during facilitated video calls. This ensured a deep immersion of the entire team in the user context.
• Continuous Feedback Loop: The quality of the final design and data was monitored through continuous iterations and my regular feedback (Design QA). This allowed us to move quickly without compromising quality standards.

Before designing anything, we needed to understand what holds buyers back. Our users are anxious about expensive mistakes, like buying the wrong film or wasting shots, so the new UI had to put buyer confidence first.

Pola Club couldn't always compete with giant indirect retailers (like Rozetka) on price or physical store presence. We conducted a feature-by-feature UI/UX analysis to find a strategic vulnerability in the market. We discovered a massive "UX Gap": every single competitor suffered from terrible filtering, chaotic categorization, and confusing technical specs. This was our "Aha!" moment—it proved that by building a frictionless, highly informative e-commerce experience, Pola Club could capture significant market share simply by making the purchasing process less stressful.

The interviews allowed us to look beyond dry analytics and truly understand why users were abandoning the site. By splitting the user list among the team, we conducted 10 in-depth interviews uncovering several critical issues:

Raw data and interview transcripts can be hard for stakeholders to empathize with. By consolidating our qualitative insights into a primary persona, we shifted the team's focus from abstract "users" to a real human being. This aligned everyone on who we were designing for and made our strategic decisions much more user-centric.

Synthesizing our interview results, we introduced Megan, a hobbyist photographer. She loves the tangible, authentic nature of analog film but gets easily frustrated by technical jargon, confusing compatibility rules, and hidden costs.

After gaining a holistic view from the Customer Journey Map, our team didn't jump straight into drawing mockups. As a lead, it was critical for me to avoid "designing for the sake of design." We transformed every identified problem into a clear, measurable business hypothesis.

Working in a startup environment or with limited resources often requires flexibility. Since we couldn't conduct A/B testing on a live site, I needed a quick and inexpensive mechanism to validate our hypotheses before the team spent time developing a prototype.

To minimize risks, we created a quantitative survey and distributed it among our target audience (particularly through the existing community). The survey results gave us a clear signal: users really needed a step-by-step checkout and comparison feature. This gave us the confidence ("green light") to move on to the high-fidelity mockup stage, knowing we were addressing the right problems.

Equipped with our hypotheses, we developed a high-fidelity prototype and conducted a series of moderated user tests. My goal was not just to assess visual appeal, but to ensure that the new solutions genuinely alleviate cognitive load and address critical system errors. Below are the key interface transformations based on iterations after user testing:

During our initial usability testing, we observed a critical friction point: users who arrived with a specific product in mind were completely ignoring the search function. Because it was hidden behind a small, easily overlooked icon, buyers were forced to dig through frustrating category menus to find what they needed.

Our initial research revealed a major architectural flaw: inventory was chaotically scattered across siloed brand categories (e.g., separate pages for Polaroid and Instax). This forced users to endlessly navigate back and forth, opening multiple browser tabs just to see what cameras were actually available.

Once users found a camera, they faced a major evaluation hurdle: legacy product pages lacked clear technical specifications and, most critically, failed to explain which film was compatible with which camera. They also lacked critical payment and delivery information, which eroded trust and halted the purchase process. If buyers weren't 100% confident the film would fit, they abandoned the purchase entirely to avoid making a costly mistake.

While the new Product Detail Page improved individual product evaluation, users still struggled to weigh multiple options against each other. During testing, we uncovered a major misconception causing purchase hesitation: many casual buyers assumed all instant cameras used the exact same standard "square" film.

The legacy checkout form was a massive cognitive overload, cramming every single input field into one chaotic block. Furthermore, our interviews revealed a major missed opportunity (for registered users): the platform's loyalty program offered a "1% discount," but this abstract number failed to motivate users because they couldn't visualize the actual savings.

While my team focused on the findings, I conducted a manual heuristic walkthrough of the live platform to ensure our design solutions would actually survive the technical environment. During this audit, I uncovered a massive usability disaster that usability testing alone didn't catch: The Login-Redirection Bug.

This wasn't just a minor UI glitch; it was a technical trap actively driving high-intent buyers away at the most critical moment in the funnel. I documented this critical flaw with visual annotations and flagged it in our final stakeholder report as a top-priority engineering fix.

By identifying this hidden technical leak and combining it with our logical UI restructuring, we protected the checkout funnel, which directly contributed to the overall 7% reduction in checkout abandonment.

This project was more than just a UI redesign; it was a crash course in team operations and cross-functional alignment. Reflecting on the 1-month sprint, my two biggest takeaways were:

• Structuring Teams: The greatest challenge wasn't the design itself, but organizing the workflow for three junior designers who had never worked together. By implementing a strict Kanban board and daily stand-ups, I learned how to rapidly align a new team, delegate effectively, and monitor execution to hit aggressive deadlines.
• Continuous Stakeholder Alignment: In hindsight, I saved our major research findings for the final presentation. If I were to do this again, I would flag critical user insights and involve key stakeholders right at the beginning of the process to ensure absolute strategic alignment from day one.

While we successfully streamlined the core buying journey, design is an ongoing process. Based on our user surveys and business goals, my strategic roadmap for the platform includes:

• Short-Term: Monitor the live analytics on the new checkout flow to ensure the login-redirection fix holds steady under high traffic.
• Long-Term: I recommended that all other findings and feature concepts (such as adding filters, changing categories, or a new comparison feature) be evaluated and prioritized based on long-term business goals and available development resources.