A Customer-Centric Product Catalogue for an E-Comm
Introduction
Project Details
Industry :
Comms
Size :
Big Corporate
Timeline :
4 Weeks
Business Background
A fast-growing e-commerce company was expanding its product portfolio to serve a wider range of customers.
While the expansion opened opportunities, it also created a new challenge: customers were finding it harder to locate products, navigate categories, and make confident purchase decisions.
The company needed to go beyond internal logic. It was critical to understand how customers mentally mapped their shopping journey, how they expected product categories to be named, making the catalogue not only larger, but smarter.
We defined a research process combining Architecture Check, Jobs to Be Done Interviews, Usability Lab Validation, Churn & Retention Analysis, and a Concept Reality Check to ensure the new catalogue structure reflected customer truth, increased conversion, and supported long-term growth.
The project was conceived to align business growth with customer clarity, ensuring that finding a product was as intuitive as choosing it.
Key Challenges
Existing catalogue structure not reflecting customer mental maps.
A growing catalogue without a clear structure.
Product categories named from an internal perspective, not customer language.
New product categories lacking intuitive naming conventions.
Lack of insight into how customers mentally organize products.
Browsing experience leading to friction and drop-offs in the path to purchase.
Churn and retention signals indicating declining loyalty.
Risk of underutilizing the potential of portfolio growth.
Project Impact
Customers able to find products faster and more intuitively.
Stronger alignment between business growth and customer needs.
Enhanced trust and satisfaction with the shopping experience.
Need for a change
01
Redesign the catalogue to follow customer expectations, search behaviours and mental models.
02
Conduct Usability Lab Validation to test navigation flows.
03
Use Jobs to Be Done Interviews to validate what customers really aimed to achieve and simplify product discovery to improve usability.
04
Apply an Architecture Check to assess and redesign the structure and ensure new categories were named in a way that reflected customer language.
Challenge & Impact
The catalogue structure is more than a backend detail. It is the front door to customer experience. The lack of a clear and intuitive structure could directly impact revenue and customer loyalty:
Customers struggling to find products quickly, causing customer frustration.
Confusion due to unclear category names.
Poor usability leading to abandoned carts, increased drop-offs during browsing.
Growing churn as competitors offered clearer and simpler shopping flows.
Missed opportunities to drive higher retention through an intuitive experience despite traffic growth.
The impact of inaction would have been lost sales, higher acquisition costs to compensate for churn, and erosion of trust in the shopping experience.
If left unresolved, these gaps could compromise both conversion and customer satisfaction, diluting the impact of the brand’s portfolio expansion.
Strategy Pillars
Customer Research into Mental Models & Navigation Patterns with Customer-Centric Discovery (Jobs to Be Done Interviews, Churn & Retention Analysis)
Structural Redesign for Usability & Growth (Architecture Check)
Intuitive Category Naming to Reflect Customer Language by a Usability Validation process (Usability Lab Validation)
Objectives
01
Understand customers’ mental models and decision-making process through Jobs to Be Done Interviews for their product shopping journey.
02
Audit and restructure the product catalogue structure to reflect customer expectations, via Architecture Check.
03
Define clear, intuitive category names aligned with customer expectations.
04
Test usability and navigation through Usability Lab Validation to enhance customer experience.
Overcoming Obstacles
Balancing business logic (inventory, supply chain) with customer mental models.
Aligning technical and design feasibility with customer-first insights.
Managing internal resistance to feature deprioritization.
Lessons Learned
Customer Language Wins
Category names must reflect user vocabulary.
Architecture Drives Experience
Catalogue design is as strategic as branding and it directly impacts conversion. Structure is experience.
Validation Prevents Missteps
Testing avoided assumptions leading to poor usability.
Balance Both Worlds
Business logic must coexist with customer usability.
Empathy in Action
We dig deep to understand humans at all levels and translate insight into meaningful direction.
Results
Clearer and more intuitive customer-aligned catalogue structure.
Intuitive naming conventions reducing browsing confusion and reflecting real customer language.
Faster product discovery and smoother navigation with improved usability scores from Usability Lab Validation.
The Outcome
Growth without clarity risks creating friction. This project showed how customer-centric research can transform complexity into clarity. By redesigning its catalogue with customer experience as the compass and applying Architecture Check, Jobs to Be Done Interviews, Usability Lab Validation, Churn & Retention Analysis, and a Concept Reality Check, the client created a product catalogue that not only supported business growth but also elevated customer experience transforming browsing into an intuitive journey making the experience efficient, and pleasurable, ensuring that expansion did not overwhelm, but instead empowered.
Lasting Change & What Might Comes Next
This section defines how the internal team can carry the impact forward once our project concludes.
By embedding these methods into regular processes, the client can transform research from a one-time exercise into a continuous engine of better decisions, building stronger customer connections, and sustainable growth.
Sustainability
Build and maintain governance for ongoing catalogue updates, as well as to ensure growth aligns with clarity
Embed customer research into every expansion cycle, as well as usability checks into quarterly reviews.
Maintain a feedback loop to adapt to evolving customer expectations.
Future Outlook
Apply the same methodology to search and filtering functions.
Use the new catalogue framework as the portfolio continues to expand.
Integrate Jobs to Be Done and Usability Labs into future product launches.
Extend insights to omnichannel catalogues (mobile, in-store kiosks).
Regularly refresh Churn & Retention Analysis to stay ahead of loyalty risks.
Refresh structure and naming conventions regularly as the portfolio evolves.
