From Cluttered to Converted

Ashley Furniture is one of the largest furniture manufacturers in the world. But their digital experience was not built like it. With 85% of traffic arriving on mobile and conversion rates stubbornly low, a fragmented brand identity across premium and outlet lines, and an ambitious five-year revenue target of $16.5B on the table, they needed more than a redesign. They needed a complete rethinking of how a global furniture brand shows up online.

I led the design stream as Experience Consultant and Design Lead, managing a team of eleven across UX, visual design, content, and design systems, and drove the work from strategy to prototype.

Ashley's challenges were not cosmetic. They were structural: a compounding set of issues that no single sprint could solve.

• Mobile was the experience, and the experience was broken. 85% of visitors arrived on a phone. Pages auto-zoomed, tap targets were undersized, and the product discovery flow was built for a desktop mindset that most users no longer had.
• The brand was pulling in two directions. Ashley's premium and outlet lines carried conflicting visual identities. To a user moving between them, it felt like two different companies, neither of which fully earned trust.
• Segmentation data existed but sat unused. Third-party agencies had delivered rich customer segmentation work. The client had the data and did not know how to apply it to design decisions.
• A major technology migration complicated everything. Ashley was moving from Salesforce to CommerceTools. Every recommendation had to account for where the technology was going, not just where it was.
• No design system. With a team of eleven designers working across a global platform, design inconsistency was not a risk. It was a certainty without a system to govern decisions.

Before a single pixel was designed, the team needed to establish shared understanding of what this project actually was. Not everyone in the room was solving the same problem, and that misalignment, left unaddressed, would surface later as conflict, rework, and scope creep.

I designed and facilitated an Experience Elaboration Workshop to align stakeholders across business, design, and technology on goals, success criteria, and guiding principles. The anchor exercise was one I call the Altitudes Exercise: a strategic thinking tool that asks teams to hold the same project at four different heights simultaneously.

• 100,000 ft: Business Transformation. What is the north star? What does this platform need to be to transform the business, not just improve the website?
• 50,000 ft: Holistic Shopping Experience. What new tools could fundamentally rethink how a customer experiences furniture shopping online?
• 15,000 ft: Experience Layer. What design research-backed features can we introduce without significantly disrupting existing systems?
• 5,000 ft: Incremental Enhancement. What can we improve right now, within current technology constraints, that will have immediate impact?

This framework gave every stakeholder a way to see their priority without invalidating anyone else's. The person who wanted a five-year vision and the person who needed a quick win could both be right, just at different altitudes.

The exercise generated the clarity needed to define the MVP focus and move into discovery with shared intent.

"Zoom out for perspective, zoom in for precision."

MVP Goals and Focus: Enable a new best-in-class global eCommerce platform focused on the US and scalable to international markets, beginning with Canada.

• Modernize eCommerce in the United States and accelerate revenue growth in Canada
• Build baseline global eCommerce architecture to support future expansion to other international markets
• Create a sustainable, self-service marketing and commerce platform for licensees
• Support implementation of a component-based, iterative solution development process
• Validate business value for eCommerce modernization in Canada
• Ensure organizational readiness to support the new eCommerce platform

I started outside the furniture category entirely. Ashley's real competition is not just other furniture brands. It is every digital experience a customer has ever had. Amazon's checkout set the expectation. Airbnb's photography raised the bar for lifestyle imagery. Apple's mobile navigation became the standard for intuitive touch interfaces. Consumers do not grade on a curve just because a category is complex.

I analyzed patterns across culture, technology, and business to surface what customers were already expecting from digital commerce, and mapped those expectations against what Ashley was delivering.

"Ashley Furniture isn't just compared to direct competitors. Consumers have higher digital expectations, deeply shaped by broader trends and their comprehensive mobile experiences."

The trend analysis covered shifting lifestyle content expectations, the rise of social commerce, and the growing consumer expectation of personalized, intent-driven discovery. Each trend was mapped against Ashley's current capability and used to prioritize where investment would have the highest return.

Trend analysis was conducted across multiple dimensions: content format shifts, platform behavior changes, purchase journey evolution, and the rising expectations set by best-in-class non-furniture digital experiences.

The synthesis brought every trend into a single, navigable view, giving the team and client a shared reference point for which directions to prioritize in the experience strategy.

Using the existing Baymard report as a foundation, I conducted a thorough audit of Ashley's 2020 redesign across multiple sections of the experience. The goal was not to criticize. It was to produce a prioritized, actionable list of improvements that could be sequenced against effort and impact.

The Baymard Institute's benchmarks gave the audit a credible, defensible foundation. Every finding was grounded in established eCommerce research, which made the case for change easier to make in executive presentations.

"In order to capitalize on existing behaviors and expectations, the Ashley Furniture digital experience should be seamless from start to finish, easy to navigate, device agnostic, and accessible to all."

The expert evaluation went deeper, examining specific interaction patterns across mobile navigation, product pages, filtering, cart, and checkout. Each finding was categorized by severity and mapped to a user impact level.

Product page findings revealed a consistent pattern: the information architecture reflected how the back-end was structured, not how users actually thought about furniture. Filtering, sorting, and cross-sell all needed to be rebuilt from the user's mental model outward.

Cart and checkout evaluation exposed the gap between where users were dropping off and why. Generic error messages, unclear progress indicators, and missing availability information were quietly killing conversion at the final step.

The fourth evaluation pass focused on brand cohesion across the premium and outlet lines. The visual and tonal inconsistency between the two was not a brand team problem. It was a conversion problem. Users who felt confused about who they were shopping with did not convert.

From the full audit, the team synthesized a prioritized quick-wins list. These were not exotic ideas. Every one of them was a known friction point that was quietly killing conversion every day and could be addressed immediately without waiting for the full platform overhaul.

Mobile Quick Wins

• Improve overall scannability of pages
• Optimize pages and avoid auto-zoom
• Show appropriate keyboard layouts for input fields
• Minimize horizontal scrolling in favor of more mobile-friendly navigation
• Ensure all elements have appropriate tap-target sizes
• Simplify calls-to-action and emphasize one primary action
• Be cautious with pop-up modals to avoid user disruption
• Ensure images, swatches, and thumbnails are visible in the same viewport on product pages

Product Quick Wins

• Minimize ad-looking content and avoid placing ads in prime content locations
• Provide relevant filtering options and allow users to filter by product availability
• Avoid showing out-of-stock items without context; provide expected delivery dates instead
• Product list sorting should be diversity-based and representative of the full offering
• Use load more instead of pagination
• Emphasize both relevant cross-sell and companion pieces

Cart and Checkout Quick Wins

• Indicate product availability status clearly (in stock vs. back-ordered)
• Improve scannability of checkout pages
• Set user expectations by displaying checkout steps and using descriptive CTAs
• Include a cart summary during checkout to clarify which items are being ordered
• Simplify delivery and payment options
• Indicate erroneous fields clearly
• Use adaptive error messages to best match the user's situation

I audited nine competitor sites and a curated set of best-in-class digital experiences that had nothing to do with furniture, because the standards that shape user expectations do not respect category boundaries.

"When it comes to meeting shoppers' digital expectations, the competition is far ahead and Ashley Furniture needs to catch up."

The benchmarking did not just reveal gaps. It revealed the specific moves that were working: logical content groupings tied to customer intent, strategic placement of social proof, and immersive product storytelling that moved users from browsing to believing.

The competitor grid mapped each brand across key experience dimensions: mobile optimization, product storytelling, navigation depth, personalization capability, and checkout experience. This gave the team a clear, comparable view of where Ashley was strong and where the gap was widest.

Individual competitor deep dives gave the team specific, actionable reference points rather than abstract competitive ratings. Each was analyzed for what it did well, what created friction, and what Ashley could adopt, adapt, or deliberately surpass.

The second competitor deep dive focused on lifestyle storytelling and how leading brands built emotional context around furniture products, moving the experience from transactional to aspirational.

Room visualization and package selling emerged as a consistent differentiator among leading competitors. The ability to see furniture in context, rather than as isolated products on a white background, directly influenced purchase confidence and average order value.

Mobile checkout optimization was a standout area across top performers. The best experiences treated mobile checkout not as a stripped-down desktop flow, but as a purpose-built journey designed for a single hand, a small screen, and a distracted user.

Personalization mechanics, including quiz-driven discovery tools and preference-based filtering, were helping competitors guide users through large catalogs without overwhelming them. For a brand with Ashley's product breadth, this was a particularly high-leverage opportunity.

The final competitor review examined brand coherence across multi-line portfolios. How leading brands managed the visual and tonal relationship between premium and value lines without diluting either was directly applicable to Ashley's premium and outlet brand challenge.

The competitive synthesis brought every individual finding into a unified strategic view, identifying the patterns worth adopting, adapted to Ashley's brand and customer base, and the moves that were table-stakes for category credibility.

Beyond conventional competitive analysis, I tracked emerging technologies and experience patterns that were not yet category standards but would be soon enough to matter in a five-year transformation roadmap. The question was not whether Ashley should adopt all of these immediately. It was which ones belonged on the roadmap and when.

"Analyzing emerging trends and technologies to anticipate future customer needs and stay ahead of the competition."

Four emerging directions shaped the trendspotting output: animations and livestream commerce, immersive AR and AI-assisted storytelling, seamless virtual and remote omnichannel experiences, and personalization through quiz-driven catalog discovery. Each was mapped against Ashley's five-year roadmap and technology migration timeline.

Augmented reality and AI-assisted visualization were moving from novelty to expectation. Letting shoppers see furniture in their actual space before buying directly addressed the single biggest barrier to online furniture purchase: uncertainty about how something would look and fit.

Livestream commerce and real-time engagement were reshaping the expectation for interactive shopping, particularly among younger buyer segments. The format created urgency, social proof, and a sense of discovery that static product pages could not replicate.

Omnichannel continuity, seamless handoffs between in-store, online, and remote sales that treated the channel as invisible, was becoming the standard in furniture retail. Customers who moved between channels expected their context to move with them.

The trendspotting summary brought all four emerging directions into a single strategic view, sequenced against Ashley's roadmap and technology migration timeline. Each trend was rated by near-term viability, long-term importance, and relevance to Ashley's specific customer base.

Everything the research surfaced pointed toward a single strategic shift. Ashley Furniture must move from a busy, confusing, and cluttered experience to one that allows users to intuitively explore, envision, and shop on their own terms, led by a best-in-class mobile experience that creates memorable, repeatable moments and drives conversion.

That sentence became the filter for every subsequent design decision. The strategy was not just a vision statement. It was operationalized into guiding principles that gave eleven designers across multiple workstreams a consistent north star.

• Mobile-first, device-agnostic. Design for the experience where most users actually are, then scale up with intelligence.
• Clarity over cleverness. Every interaction should reduce uncertainty, not introduce it.
• Earn the upgrade. Premium features and tier differences should be felt, not just stated.
• Connect the dots. Users should not have to work to understand what is relevant to them.

The strategic recommendations were sequenced against effort and feasibility: immediate improvements within current technology, mid-term investments aligned with the CommerceTools migration, and longer-horizon capabilities tied to the trendspotting roadmap. This sequencing prevented the strategy from becoming an unactionable wish list.

With the strategy approved by client stakeholders and the executive team, the design team translated the vision into a tangible picture of what the future Ashley experience could look like. This approval sequence mattered: sign-off at the vision stage prevented the late-stage misalignment that derails most redesign projects.

The design language remained consistent across all three device types. Not identical, consistent. The brand felt like one brand regardless of the device in hand.

Desktop earned immersive storytelling, rich product detail, and the visual space to make a $3,000 sofa feel worth it. Navigation could afford depth. Photography could lead.

Tablet was designed for touch-first interaction without sacrificing the visual richness that makes furniture shopping emotionally resonant. Gestures replaced hover states. Navigation simplified without disappearing.

Mobile, the most critical surface given 85% of traffic, prioritized speed, scannability, and minimum taps. Content was concise. Actions were singular and clear. Load performance was treated as a design constraint, not a developer concern.

Mobile product discovery was rebuilt from the user's mental model outward. Browse flows were reorganized around how shoppers actually think about furniture: by room, by style, by budget, and by the lifestyle they were designing toward, not by the SKU taxonomy of the back-end catalog.

Room package selling was redesigned to feel curated and contextual rather than transactional. The experience guided users toward complete room solutions while giving them meaningful control over customization, resolving the tension between editorial curation and personal expression.

The full design vision brought every thread together: mobile-first architecture, unified brand language, immersive storytelling, and a coherent experience that worked for both the premium shopper and the value-conscious buyer without making either feel like a second-class citizen.