Reinventing Browse &
Discovery at Macy’s
Role: Lead Designer ∣ Teams: UX Design, Product, Analytics, Marketing, Merchandising ∣ Timeline: 1 year
I led the redesign of the product discovery experience for a high-value customer segment known as “The Snacker” — users browsing for inspiration without a specific purchase intent. The redesign increased repeat visits by 6%, browse revenue by 12%, and product listing page engagement by 15% YoY. The existing experience overwhelmed users with excessive product volume, ineffective filtering, and limited guidance, leading to low engagement and missed revenue opportunities. I led a multi-phase strategy that reimagined filtering, category navigation, and inspiration-driven browsing experiences designed to function like a digital store associate.
Increased
Repeat Visits
↑ 6%
Increased
Browse revenue
↑ 12%
Increased
Product listing visits
↑ 15%
Context and the problem
At Macy’s, a key customer segment known as “The Snacker” — users casually browsing for inspiration without a specific product intent — returns 9 times more frequently to the app. These users struggled with product discovery across the app and frequently reported feeling overwhelmed by the volume of products and the lack of relevant personalization, causing high drop-off rates and low engagement.
As a result, this high-potential customer segment remained significantly under-engaged, representing a meaningful missed opportunity for both retention and revenue growth.
Key issues
→ Search and filtering tools were ineffective at helping users navigate the large product catalog, often returning an overwhelming number of results with limited relevance.
→ The experience lacked inspirational content that could help users discover products organically.
→ Users with only a vague sense of what they wanted received little guidance or contextual support throughout the journey.
→ The information architecture for categories and filters had been optimized primarily around merchandising flexibility rather than customer mental models and shopping behaviors.
Discovery &
Research
To improve the experience for the “Snacker” segment, I started by examining product discovery as a full-system journey rather than isolated touchpoints. This required mapping every stage users interact with when exploring products, including shop pages, search, filtering, category navigation, and promotional entry points, to identify where fragmentation and drop-offs occurred. I partnered with analytics and user research teams to triangulate behavioral and attitudinal signals and surface core friction points in the experience.
Quantitative Analysis
We analyzed exit rates across key shopping surfaces, visits per user, and search query patterns. This helped identify where users disengaged most frequently and where discovery systems failed to support exploration at scale.
Qualitative Analysis
We reviewed session recordings, prior usability studies, and concept testing focused on “Snacker” behaviors. These insights clarified how users interpret inspiration and guidance when browsing and highlighted gaps in helping them form intent within a high-volume catalog.
A recurring theme across research was clear: users struggled to navigate complexity and lacked efficient ways to find relevant products
“I can’t find what I’m looking for, there are too many steps to browse and too many products”
User interview insight
As a strategic synthesis, I mapped user needs against business priorities to identify where alignment existed and where friction emerged:
Business goals
→ Reduce discovery abandonment
→ Increase engagement within the “Snacker” segment
→ Improve “Snacker” conversion rates
User goals
→ Reduce friction in filtering
→ Shorten the path to shopping
→ Surface more relevant product recommendations
Strategy &
UX Principles
It became clear that the experience needed to better support exploratory shopping behaviors by helping users reach relevant products faster, enabling more immediate and inspiration-led engagement instead of linear browsing, and providing stronger guidance throughout the discovery journey.
Design principles
I also defined four core shopping principles that shaped the end-to-end discovery strategy and served as a decision-making framework.
1
Reduce time and steps
required to reach relevant
products
2
Balance a large catalog
with progressive focus
and refinement
3
Optimize for user intent
over internal merchandising structure
4
Make discovery guided
rather than fully
self-directed
Strategic mapping
These principles were then used to identify the highest-impact moments across the “Snacker” journey and define a sequenced roadmap for design and release, ensuring effort was focused where it would most improve discovery performance and efficiency.This strategy translated into a phased set of experience enhancements across the discovery journey:
→ Filters. Redesigned as a first-class interaction aligned with user mental models, enabling users to refine results without losing context by keeping results visible within the same interaction flow..
→ Shop page. Re-architected to surface more relevant categories above the fold, reducing reliance on deep scrolling and improving initial discoverability.
→ Product listing pages. Introduced progressive, in-context filtering via smart category pills, allowing users to refine results without breaking flow or navigating to separate filter screens.
→ Guidance & inspiration surfaces. Designed dedicated discovery entry points that proactively guide users through curated, intent-building browsing experiences rather than relying solely on search or self-navigation.
Cross-Functional Leadership
A critical component of this initiative was driving alignment across multiple teams while managing sequencing, dependencies, and delivery timing. I worked across product, merchandising, engineering, and design teams to ensure roadmaps, assets, and implementation plans were coordinated without fragmenting the user experience or compromising the long-term vision for discovery.
Given the scale of stakeholders involved, I established and led a structured operating rhythm to maintain transparency and execution consistency across teams. It included:
→ Recurring design reviews
→ Cross-functional alignment sessions
→ Collaborative working workshops
→ Clear documentation with decision tracking
Design Execution
The design exploration focused on reimagining discovery as a connected, end-to-end browsing system rather than a collection of isolated features. The work spanned both information architecture and UI strategy, redefining how users navigate a large retail catalog while balancing business, merchandising, and user needs. The exploration introduced a phased framework across filtering, navigation, product listing experiences, and guidance-driven browsing surfaces, all designed to reduce friction, support exploratory shopping behaviors, and help users reach relevant products faster.
Information Architecture
In partnership with the merchandising team, I redesigned the information architecture to better reflect how users naturally explore the catalog, shifting from an internal merchandising structure to a user-centered discovery model. This structure enabled a clearer progression from exploration to specificity, aligning catalog navigation with user intent rather than internal organizational ownership. The system introduced a four-layer hierarchy designed to progressively support different levels of intent:
L1 (Core categories): High-level discovery buckets representing broad shopping intent (e.g., Women).
L2 (Subcategories): Navigable sections with enough depth and relevance to function as primary entry points (e.g., Women’s Clothing).
L3 (Intent filters): Granular categorization for more targeted browsing, supporting users with clearer intent (e.g., Women’s Dresses).
L4 (Specific attributes): Highly detailed descriptors for users with precise product expectations (e.g., Formal).
UI
I designed these enhancements as a unified discovery system while structuring them into a sequenced release plan to align with multiple team roadmaps, balance engineering and design capacity, and mitigate risk to core business KPIs. This required end-to-end ownership of strategy, prioritization, and cross-functional execution across product, merchandising, and engineering.
1. Filters
The first release focused on filters due to both their business impact and their role as the primary way users narrow down product listings within their mental model of shopping. I prioritized continuity of user flow by enabling in-context filtering directly within the product listing experience, avoiding disruptive modal transitions. I also restructured exposed filter interactions and refined the UI to reduce cognitive load while maintaining strong usability at scale.
2. Shop page
The second release focused on redesigning the primary browsing entry point to improve scanability and category discoverability, which directly impacts business revenue. I optimized layout density to surface more L1 categories above the fold and introduced imagery to improve recognition and decision speed. This also created additional high-visibility real estate for merchandising teams to showcase L2 categories in a more structured way.
3. Smart category pills
The next phase was to introduce progressive, intent-aware filtering through smart category pills embedded within the browsing experience. This reduced dependency on linear navigation paths and prevented drop-offs caused by users needing multiple clicks to reach highly specific (L3 and L4) categories.
4. Enhanced Product Pages
The final release defined and delivered a new page paradigm—“Enhanced Product Pages”—combining transactional browsing with curated, guidance-driven content for L1 and L2 categories. These surfaces supported users in forming intent while strengthening engagement in high-volume category areas, while also enabling richer storytelling for business stakeholders without compromising usability.
This final phase required the highest level of cross-functional leadership due to its introduction of a new navigation and content model. I led alignment across teams through workshops, working sessions, and structured documentation to secure agreement on experience direction and implementation.
Reflection
My role
I owned the end-to-end UX strategy for the product discovery experience across the Macy’s app and partnered with the web team to ensure a cohesive, cross-platform browsing experience. I also drove alignment across merchandising, marketing, product, engineering, and analytics to secure shared ownership of the experience and ensure consistent execution.
My responsibilities
→ Define the discovery UX strategy beyond the product listing page
→ Lead cross-functional alignment across product, marketing, merchandising, analytics, and engineering stakeholders. Facilitating working sessions and design critiques between all the teams
→ Facilitate working sessions and design reviews between the App and Web team
→ Drive prioritization decisions to sequence releases against broader business outcomes
→ Driving prioritization decisions around permissions and onboarding sequencing
→ Ensure success metrics were embedded into the experience from the outset, tying design decisions directly to measurable impact
A significant part of the work involved balancing competing priorities:
→ Merchandising teams optimizing for internal category ownership and revenue
→ Merchandising teams ownership of the Information architecture with an internal team efficiency lens first, user second
→ Marketing pushing revenue-driven placements
→ Users expect personalized, intuitive discovery aligned to their mental models rather than internal taxonomy
Learnings
A stronger approach would have been to define more realistic success guardrails for each individual release. The original measurement model assumed significant performance gains only once the full set of enhancements was deployed, which limited the ability to accurately assess the impact of intermediate releases. A more effective strategy would have established clearer, phase-specific benchmarks to evaluate incremental value while still accounting for the compounding effect of the end-to-end experience.
In parallel, I built strong cross-functional partnerships across product, merchandising, analytics, and engineering teams, which are strategic to sustain and scale a long-term discovery experience focused on helping users, reliably, reach the right products.