Redmond — Redesigning a health-based e-commerce
A UX capstone project where I redesigned the product page and checkout for an online wellness store, using Figma and five rounds of user interviews to make sizing and shipping costs less confusing.
Role
UX Design Student · Capstone Project
Timeframe
Team
Maya Chen — Capstone mentor, gave feedback every week
Luis Ortega & Priya Nair — Peer reviewers from my cohort
5 volunteers — Friends and family who tested my prototype
Problem
For my UX design certificate capstone, I picked a real online store I shop at myself: Redmond Life, which sells salt, clay and other natural wellness products. Quick disclaimer — this is a self-initiated student project, I'm not affiliated with Redmond Life in any way.
I started with the Double Diamond process, so before sketching anything I ran 5 remote interviews with people who buy wellness products online, and made a quick empathy map in FigJam to organize what I heard. The patterns that came up again and again:
Sizing confusion: people couldn't tell how much product they actually needed, or how long a size would last.
Surprise shipping costs: almost everyone wanted to see shipping before checkout, not after.
Forced account creation: nobody wanted to make an account just to buy salt.
I turned this into my problem statement: how might we help first-time buyers feel confident choosing a product and finishing checkout?
Challenge
This was my first end-to-end UX project, so a lot of it was learning by doing. I gave myself eight weeks, had zero budget for recruiting, and no access to Redmond Life's real analytics — so I leaned on free tools (Google Forms, FigJam, Maze) and friends-of-friends for interviews and usability testing.
Scoping was the hardest part. My first plan was way too ambitious — I wanted to redesign the entire site. My mentor pushed me to pick one flow and go deep instead of wide, so I narrowed it down to just the product page and checkout. That single piece of feedback probably saved the whole project.
5 remote interviews with people who shop for wellness products online
A quick competitive audit of 4 similar D2C stores
Paper sketches first, then mid-fidelity wireframes in Figma
Solution
I designed the product page and checkout as a clickable Figma prototype, using a component library I built from scratch (my first time doing that!). The main changes were:
A size guide next to the size selector, with a simple “How long will this last?” estimate.
Shipping costs shown right on the product page, before checkout even starts.
Guest checkout as the default, with an option to create an account after ordering.
A three-step checkout with a visible progress bar, instead of one long form.
I kept the visual design intentionally simple — lots of white space, earthy colors pulled from the brand — so that when I ran usability tests, people would react to the flow and not get distracted critiquing a new visual style.
Impact
I tested two rounds of the prototype using Maze, with five participants each. In round one, only 2 out of 5 people finished checkout without me stepping in to help. After a round of changes, all 5 did in round two, and the average time to check out dropped from about four minutes to just under two.
My biggest takeaway as a junior designer: test earlier, with much rougher designs. I spent almost two weeks polishing screens that ended up changing completely after my first usability test. Next time, I'd put paper sketches in front of real people in week one instead of week four.
participants finished checkout unaided in round two, up from just 2 of 5 in round one
5 of 5
average checkout time, down from about 4 minutes before the redesign
Under 2 min
of moderated testing in Maze — my first time using a remote testing tool
2 rounds
