Rethinking the Sales Path for a Complex DTC Product
Role: UX/UI Designer & Project Lead Timeline: 3 months (2021)
I led the redesign of an outdated e-commerce site for a glass railing company that was struggling to convert. Even though the site ranked high on Google, bounce rates were high, conversions were low, and the sales team was frustrated. The site wasn’t designed for real people—it was built for search engines back in 2010 and hadn’t changed much since.
My role was to bring structure to the redesign, manage the process, and handle everything from research and testing to visual design and stakeholder communication. The main goal was to make the site easier to use, more helpful to the sales team, and clearer for people who were shopping for something complicated and expensive.
The Challenge
The product itself is tricky—glass railing is expensive, not something you buy often, and not easy to understand unless you’ve installed it before. The old site didn’t reflect that. It felt cluttered, hard to read, and overwhelming. People were dropping off fast, and the ones who did fill out the estimate form often left out important info—making the sales team’s job harder.
The company was ranked #3 for “glass railing systems,” but they weren’t seeing results from that traffic. They needed a site that would:
Help homeowners understand what they were looking at
Make it easy for serious buyers to get what they needed
Filter out users who weren’t ready, without overwhelming the ones who were
Process
I started by doing an audit of the current site with the help of a Yahoo! rep. I used Hotjar to watch how people were interacting, set up user surveys, and reviewed analytics to get a better sense of who was visiting and what they were doing.
I discovered two main user types:
“I don’t know what I want” — people who needed photos, simple language, and help figuring it out
“I know what I need” — people who just wanted parts, specs, and a fast path to order
From there, I:
Cleaned up the layout and made it more visual, using photos to guide people through
Reorganized the navigation and content so it felt less overwhelming
Redesigned the estimate form so it was easier to fill out and less intimidating
Used feedback from early tests to fix things like button hierarchy, contrast issues, and unclear CTAs
I also worked closely with the sales and marketing team, plus a handful of developers and support staff, to make sure what we were designing matched how people actually bought.
Impact
After launch, I compared data from the month before and after. Here’s what changed:
Conversion rate went from 1.7% to 2.8%
Sales team conversion jumped from 10% to 30% once better leads started coming in
Fewer incomplete estimate forms, and clearer questions from potential buyers
The site started doing more of the heavy lifting—so sales could focus on closing, not educating
This project started as a simple form redesign, but turned into a full site overhaul. It pushed me to balance research, business goals, and design constraints—all while learning how to make a high-consideration product feel approachable and shoppable.