Industry
E-commerce
Client
Trent Limited, TATA (Westside)
Leading a Full-Scale UI - UX Transformation: How Strategic Design Repositioned Westside to Achieve a ₹500 Cr Revenue Goal
My Team
Sarandha P (E-com Head), Shailina P(COO)
Tools
Figma, Microsoft Suite
Timeline
6-8 Months (From Conception to Deployment)
This was a strategic initiative to lead a full UI-UX transformation , turning widespread user friction into a scalable platform designed to capture a ₹500 Cr market opportunity.
Brief
Westside, a premium fashion brand under TATA Enterprise , faced a critical challenge where its fragmented digital experience and significant user friction threatened an ambitious ₹500 Cr revenue goal. To address this, a full-scale UX transformation was initiated, beginning with a comprehensive platform audit to identify and prioritize core issues across all digital touchpoints. This strategic overhaul involved establishing the company's first formal product design lifecycle , instituting data-driven research processes, and developing a new, scalable design system to secure C-suite buy-in. As a result, the new standardized processes have already begun to improve user satisfaction metrics , successfully aligning the product roadmap with the company's primary financial target and creating a durable foundation for future growth.
Problem Westside aimed to capture a ₹500 Cr online revenue target from 200 Cr, but its digital platforms were fundamentally misaligned with this ambition. A poor and fragmented user experience was not only creating widespread customer frustration but was directly putting this critical business objective at risk, eroding the trust of a loyal customer base. Users navigated a maze of inconsistent journeys and critical friction points that directly damaged conversion rates and the brand's online reputation. The root of this issue was systemic: a complete lack of a formal design process or a scalable design system, making it impossible to innovate or build the high-quality experience needed for growth. My role As the Product Design Manager, I was entrusted with full ownership of the user experience, tasked with transforming a high-potential but underperforming digital platform into a revenue-generating powerhouse. My role was a blend of strategic leadership, hands-on design, and cross-functional orchestration. Strategic Audit & Team Leadership: I led a team of three junior UI/UX designers, initiating a comprehensive UI/UX audit using heuristic evaluation and internal user testing. This foundational step allowed us to create a data-backed roadmap of critical usability issues and prioritize them based on potential business impact. Cross-Functional Orchestration: A core responsibility was to act as the central design authority, driving alignment and securing buy-in across diverse stakeholder groups. I worked in lockstep with Marketing, Visual Design, Buying, and Merchandising teams, presented strategic design proposals to the COO, and maintained a critical partnership with the IT team to ensure flawless execution from development to deployment. Execution & Validation: I directed the end-to-end design execution in Figma, establishing a robust workflow for my team while contributing hands-on to key UI solutions. This process extended beyond design, as I oversaw the entire validation pipeline—from rigorous testing on staging servers to post-launch impact analysis on production using Google Analytics and Shopify data to measure success against our business KPIs.
Our Approach: A Two-Track Design Process
To tackle a challenge of this scale, we adopted a pragmatic two-track process: simultaneously addressing immediate usability issues while architecting a long-term, scalable solution.
Phase 1: Audit & Triage:
We initiated a comprehensive UI/UX audit, combining heuristic evaluation with internal usability testing to rapidly identify and document critical user pain points across the platform.
All findings were synthesized into a prioritized backlog. This shared document became our single source of truth for tracking issues and collaborating with the IT team to deploy quick, high-impact fixes.
Phase 2: Strategic Redesign & Collaboration:
In parallel, I led my team in designing a full platform revamp in Figma. Every new layout was data-driven, directly incorporating the insights and solutions identified during the audit phase.
As the design leader, my role was to provide strategic direction, mentor my team, and drive alignment across all stakeholders—from marketing to merchandising to the COO—using high-fidelity prototypes to visualize the future state.
Phase 3: Phased Rollout & Early Impact:
The major redesign is currently in the development stage, managed through a close, agile partnership with the IT team.
Crucially, the initial batch of smaller usability fixes we pushed live has already made a tangible difference, showing a positive impact on user satisfaction metrics and validating our data-driven approach.
The following examples showcase key areas of the platform that were redesigned. Each solution was born from the insights gathered during the UI/UX audit and was designed not just for aesthetic improvement, but to directly address user friction and drive business goals.
The design strategy focused on translating the audit's findings into a tangible and visually compelling user experience, executed by a team of two designers under my strategic guidance. To combat the homepage's carousel overload and 'banner blindness', the new proposed layout seen in the image adopts a sophisticated, editorial style. This curated approach replaces generic banners with a magazine-like composition, using strong typography and high-quality imagery to build a premium brand narrative. Similarly, to solve the frustrating 'pogo-sticking' caused by the old text-heavy menu, the redesigned navigation introduces a clean, visual mega-menu. As the new layout shows, this uses images for each sub-category, enabling at-a-glance visual browsing that turns product discovery into an engaging experience. These foundational changes are part of a wider strategic overhaul, with redesigned filter layouts, new blog pages, social media integration, and a customer review system also in the development pipeline to create a truly holistic brand ecosystem.
Challenges & Solutions
The primary challenge was navigating a complex environment with no pre-existing design structure. This involved synthesizing numerous stakeholder opinions into a cohesive vision while managing dependencies on a third-party IT team. To bridge the technical gap, design handoffs were expanded to include detailed front-end and Shopify back-end integration solutions, ensuring a clear and actionable path to development.
Impact & The Road Ahead
Although the full redesign is still in development, the initial high-impact fixes have already yielded a positive, measurable impact. Using data from Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, and Shopify, we are observing improved user behaviors that strike a better balance between customer needs and the business's ₹500 Cr revenue goal. The future focus is on rolling out the large-scale redesigns and continuing this cycle of data-driven iteration to build on these early successes.
