UX Strategy Case Study
Carstickers Website Redesign
Reducing uncertainty through thoughtful structure
Project Overview
Carstickers.com is a highly customizable e-commerce platform with hundreds of product variations, advanced ordering options, and a powerful online Design Tool.
That flexibility is one of the platform's greatest strengths.
It is also one of its greatest design challenges.
As the business grew, new products, features, and content were added continuously. While each addition solved a legitimate need, the experience became increasingly difficult to navigate. Customers could still accomplish what they came to do, but understanding options, finding products, and completing tasks often required more effort than it should have.
This project focused on creating a clearer, more consistent experience that helped customers move forward with confidence.
Role
CXO
UX Strategy
Design Lead
Responsibilities
UX Strategy
Information Architecture
Interface Design
Mobile UX Strategy
Content Strategy
User Testing
Stakeholder Alignment
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Project Goals
1
Help customers focus on their task
Reduce unnecessary effort during product configuration and checkout.
2
Help customers understand what they're seeing
Make information easier to scan, understand, and act upon.
3
Help Customers Find What They Need
Create a more predictable and discoverable experience across the platform.
The Opportunity
By this point, I had spent more than a decade helping Carstickers.com grow. What began as a Graphic Design role had evolved into a leadership position focused on customer experience, digital products, and the long-term health of the business.
During that time, the company expanded significantly, adding products, capabilities, and customer segments while growing from a small team into a much larger operation.
For the first time in nearly a decade, however, growth began to slow.
Competition was increasing, organic visibility was declining, and customer acquisition was becoming more challenging.
I cared deeply about the company's success and was constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience.
I began studying UX and UI principles to better understand how great digital experiences help people guide users through complex tasks.
As I studied usability, information architecture, cognitive load, and interaction design, I began seeing patterns throughout our platform that I had never fully recognized before.
The problem wasn't a single page or a single workflow.
The challenge was the cumulative effort required to navigate the platform.
Customers were being asked to work too hard to understand the experience.
Understanding Before Action
Understanding the problem was only the first step.
The larger challenge was helping others see it.
I created a presentation connecting observed issues to established UX principles and paired each problem with examples of how it could be improved.
The goal wasn't to sell a redesign, it was to create a shared understanding of the customer experience.
The presentation helped create a shared understanding of the problem and ultimately led to a larger redesign effort.
After presenting the findings, I partnered with our CTO to create a roadmap for modernizing the experience while preserving the flexibility customers depended on.
Visual: Increasing Conversions Through Reduced Cognitive Load Presentation
Building Alignment
Rather than immediately proposing solutions, I started documenting friction points throughout the customer journey.
While on vacation, I reviewed the website page by page, capturing examples, screenshots, and observations.
Over time, a pattern emerged.
Customers were being asked to:
- Process too much information at once
- Make too many decisions simultaneously
- Determine their own path through the experience
- Repeatedly relearn how different sections of the site worked
The products weren't the problem, the complexity surrounding them was.
Customers didn't need fewer options, they needed a clearer path through them.
That realization became the foundation for every design decision that followed.
Creating Structure
The redesign focused on one central idea:
Help people move forward with confidence.
To accomplish that, I focused on three areas.
Help People Focus
Many workflows asked customers to process too much information before they could make a single decision. Rather than guiding customers through the experience, the interface often asked them to determine where to look and what to do next.
I focused on reducing the amount of information and the number of decisions presented at any given moment. By simplifying layouts and introducing progressive disclosure, customers could focus on one task before moving to the next.
Product configuration pages used multiple columns, numerous options, and competing calls to action.
Moving to a single-column layout created a clear path through the page, allowing customers to focus on one decision at a time instead of dividing their attention across multiple sections.
The original checkout process presented every step at once, leaving customers to determine where to begin.
Breaking checkout into a guided, step-by-step workflow revealed only the information needed at each stage, making the process easier to follow.
The goal wasn’t to remove flexibility. It was to help customers move through the process with confidence.
Help People Understand
Many pages contained valuable information, but the way it was presented made it harder to understand than it needed to be. Long lines of text, inconsistent layouts, and weak visual hierarchy made information harder to scan and understand.
The content wasn’t the problem.
The presentation was.
Long paragraphs varied between centered and full-width layouts, making them harder to read and forcing customers to work harder to find their place.
I established consistent rules for typography and content layout, using narrower reading widths and left-aligned text to create a more comfortable reading experience.
The original design gave nearly everything the same visual weight. Headings, body text, and primary actions all competed for attention, making it difficult to quickly recognize what was most important.
I created a clearer visual hierarchy by establishing consistent rules for typography, spacing, and color. Instead of competing with one another, each element now had a defined role, making pages easier to scan and understand.
The content itself changed very little.
What changed was the effort required to understand it.
Customers could scan information more easily, focus on what mattered in the moment, and move through the experience with greater confidence.
Help People Navigate
As the product catalog grew, finding the right product became increasingly difficult. Similar products appeared in different formats, navigation patterns varied across the site, and customers could no longer rely on familiar paths to find what they needed.
I reorganized the site’s architecture so every product could be reached in three clicks or fewer, creating a simpler, more predictable path through the catalog.
I also standardized product presentation and navigation patterns across the site. Similar products were grouped consistently, allowing customers to rely on familiar patterns instead of relearning how different sections worked.
The result was a more intuitive experience that helped customers find products more quickly and move through the site with greater confidence.
Design System Foundation
As the redesign expanded across the platform, consistency became increasingly important.
Individual improvements gradually evolved into shared standards for typography, color, spacing, and interface patterns.
Those standards became the foundation of a larger design system.
Outcomes
Customer Experience
- Improved conversion rates (Insert Metric)
- Increased average order value (Insert Metric)
- Improved mobile performance (Insert Metric)
- Reduced friction throughout key workflows
- Improved readability and comprehension
- Improved product discovery
Team Impact
- Created a shared design language
- Improved cross-functional alignment
- Established standards for future improvements
- Created a scalable foundation for continued growth
Reflection
This project reinforced a lesson I’ve seen repeatedly throughout my career.
Complexity isn’t the enemy. Uncertainty is.
Good design helps people move forward with confidence.
Continue Exploring
The Philosophy
The ideas behind Atomic Pineapple grew from years of working in design, hospitality, leadership, and customer experience. This is where I explore the principles that continue to guide how I think & work.
The Work
Beliefs are only useful if they hold up in practice. These projects show how structure, clarity, empathy, and systems thinking helped solve real problems for customers, teams, and organizations.
The Story
Atomic Pineapple didn’t begin as a philosophy. It emerged from a career that unexpectedly connected design, teaching, hospitality, leadership, and systems thinking. This is the story behind the ideas.
Atomic Principles. Served with Aloha.