WorkE-Commerce

Reimagining the ALDO Cart

A multi-brand e-commerce funnel was losing 61.1% of engaged shoppers at the cart. Over two and a half years I led the redesign across four brands, timing the launch with the Shopify platform migration.

RoleLead Product Designer
TimelineMay 2023 – Oct 2025
PlatformShopify · 4 brands
Live Oct 2025
0.0%
Initial cart abandonment
0
Monthly session starts
0%
Faster with Silhouette DS
01The Leaky Funnel

Where the funnel was actually breaking

Data from May 2023 showed a steep drop-off in the purchase funnel. Despite over a million monthly sessions, fewer than 3% of users ever reached checkout. The same pattern showed up across every brand.

61.1%
Of users who added items to cart never started checkout. Same Current State abandonment rate across all three brands at the time (Aldo Shoes, Call It Spring, Globo).
Step 1
1.1M
Session Starts
7.2% added to cart
Step 2
79K
Added to Cart
39.2% started checkout
Step 3
31K
Started Checkout
02Voice of the Customer

Why were users walking away?

VoC surveys, CS reports, and quarterly user testing (screened for each brand's target consumer) surfaced three patterns. The same ones showed up across the three brands ALDO Group owned at the time: Aldo Shoes, Call It Spring, and Globo.

Pain Point 01

Unintuitive Layout

Users described the experience as “cluttered.” Key CTAs were buried or competing with secondary elements. The path to checkout wasn’t clear at a glance.

Pain Point 02

Missing Core Features

Market-standard functionality like “Save for Later” was absent. Users expected it, didn’t find it, and left, often to a competitor that had it.

Pain Point 03

Lack of Clarity

Promotions without clear eligibility labeling made users feel “tricked” when discounts didn’t apply. Trust took a hit at exactly the wrong moment.

Before the revamp

The cart users were seeing

A snapshot of the legacy bag overlay and edit panel. This is the experience that surfaced these pain points.

View 01Bag Overlay
Mobile · Full-screen
Desktop · Side panel
View 02Edit Item
Mobile · Full-screen
Desktop · Side panel
03Research & Strategy

Benchmark the bar, then build toward it

Rather than guess at solutions, we initiated a structured discovery phase grounded in competitive intelligence, flow mapping, and system integration.

  • Competitive Benchmarking. Analyzed 100+ global brands to identify gold-standard patterns in cart UI, promotion feedback loops, and checkout entry points.
  • Flow Redefinition. Redrew the complete user flow for our key demographics, with a clearer path from product detail to checkout start.
  • System Integration. Built on the Silhouette Design System, which removed the component-scaffolding overhead and compressed the production timeline.
100+
Global brands benchmarked

Silhouette multiplier. By building on the headless design system architected for the ALDO Group portfolio, production time was reduced by 93%. The team focused on UX logic, not component scaffolding.

Read Project Silhouette

Flow redefinition

Rebuilt around what the market expects

The optimized flow folds in patterns surfaced by the benchmark: promo and shipping eligibility triggers, quick-add and coupon overlays, OOS recovery paths, and a checkout overlay that handles guest, member, and express options.

Flow 01Initial
Initial flow · pre-research baseline
Flow 02Optimized
Optimized flow · informed by 100+ brand benchmark
04Iteration & Validation

The road there

Many rounds to land the right cart

Layout, hierarchy, promo treatment, Save for Later affordances. Every flow was tested, redrawn, and stress-tested across the four brands before anything got handed off.

Validating before shipping

Multiple rounds of high-fidelity prototyping and user testing, screened for each brand's target consumer. Every session focused on three core objectives.

  • 1Evaluate visibility and accessibility of the Checkout CTA
  • 2Test clarity of new promotion eligibility labels
  • 3Measure success rate of the Save for Later feature
MetricBeforeAfter
Task Completion (Add to Cart)72%96%
Clarity of Promotions3 / 109 / 10
Time to Checkout Start45 sec18 sec
05Stakeholder Alignment

From validation to roadmap

After validation I ran a cross-brand workshop with Brand Leads to align on a Feature Prioritization Matrix, balancing user needs against the technical constraints of the Shopify platform migration.

MVP
Intuitive layoutClear promo eligibility labelsPrimary checkout CTA
Brand Favorites
Brand-specific aesthetic accentsRecommended for You carousels
Fast-Follows
Cart holding (Save for Later)Estimated shipping calculator
Nice-to-Haves
Gift messagingLoyalty point integration
Not Feasible
Real-time inventory countdown (legacy backend can't support it)
06The Hand-Off

After the revamp

Four brands, every state covered

The final Figma hand-off covers Aldo, Call It Spring, Sperry, and GH Bass, with empty, loading, error, and promo-eligibility states all wired to the Silhouette token graph.

The redesigned cart, final mockup
Variants in motion4 brands · every state
07Launch & Outlook

Live across all four brand sites

Timed to the 2025 Shopify platform migration, the redesigned cart launched in October 2025 across all four brands at once: Aldo Shoes, Call It Spring, Sperry, and GH Bass.

Production analytics weren't available at launch, so post-launch impact hasn't been measured yet. Heatmaps and A/B tests are slated to come once the post-migration tracking stack is in place. The goal: validate Save for Later adoption and confirm no new friction emerged from the platform migration.

Live · October 2025
Deployed across
Aldo Shoes
Call It Spring
Sperry
GH Bass
What's next
  • Stand up the post-migration analytics stack across all four brands
  • Introduce heatmaps to gauge Save for Later adoption
  • Run A/B tests to isolate conversion deltas against the legacy cart

"Designing on top of a system is just designing more, faster."

UX/UI Designer · ALDO Group