CHARACTER-DRIVEN
COMMERCE:
Transforming PLUI’s shopping experience into an interactive journey
Overview
PLUI E-Commerce Redesign
PLUI is a children’s clothing brand known for its nature-inspired characters. I redesigned their e-commerce platform to transform shopping into a playful storytelling experience for parents and kids.
Through stakeholder interviews and user testing with parents and wholesale buyers, I identified key pain points, including confusing sizing, overwhelming product listings, and outdated stock information.
To address these, I introduced:
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Character-Based Navigation that lets families explore products through their favorite characters, making browsing engaging and intuitive.
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Interactive Size Guides offering personalized fit recommendations and visual comparisons to reduce guesswork and returns.
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Bulk Ordering Tools with real-time stock indicators and dynamic pricing, streamlining the process for resellers.
The result is a joyful, user-friendly website aligned with PLUI’s brand values, improving the shopping experience for both individual customers and wholesale partners.
My Role:
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UX/UI Designer
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Researcher
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Prototyper.
Responsibilities:
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User research, usability testing, information architecture, wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, design system creation, collaboration with developers.
The Problem
PLUI’s e-commerce platform failed to capture the brand’s playful identity and meet the practical needs of its users. While the clothing line is rich in character and storytelling, the digital experience fell short—leaving parents frustrated and disengaged. Many clients preferred to order by phone rather than use the website, finding the online catalog confusing to navigate. They struggled to understand product sizing, availability, and overall organization, which led to lost sales, high return rates, and missed opportunities to create meaningful emotional connections with clients.
Project Research
STAKEHOLDERS INTERVIEWS
I conducted stakeholder interviews with the brand owner, three recent clients, and two distributors to uncover key goals for the website redesign, clarify user expectations, and identify pain points across the customer journey.
The site failed to reflect PLUI’s storytelling mission. The design didn’t support the emotional connection the brand wanted to create with families.
Parents found it hard to identify the right product due to vague sizing and a cluttered catalog, often leading to frustration or incorrect orders.
Distributors struggled with outdated stock info and manual bulk ordering, which slowed down operations and created inventory issues.
BENHCMARKING COMPETITOR PLATFORMS
Goal: Learn how other successful children's brands help users choose the right size and present product information.
INSIGHTS FROM EXISTING RESEARCH:
Many customers—especially those with dietary restrictions or health concerns—face real barriers when grocery shopping. Research shows that:
User Pain Points
PLUI featured over 20 character-themed items, but the original site made it difficult for users to browse by character or theme. Parents struggled to find what their children liked, often abandoning searches out of frustration.
The sizing system only listed recommended ages, without visual aids or measurement charts. This caused confusion—especially for parents with children who fell outside average size ranges—resulting in high return rates and customer dissatisfaction.
PLUI’s wholesale clients had to place orders over the phone due to a lack of bulk ordering tools and live inventory updates. This manual process led to inventory mismatches, delays, and missed sales opportunities.
The Challenge
Make it easy for parents and kids to explore items by character, reducing decision fatigue and increasing engagement.
Provide intuitive size guides and visual comparisons to help parents choose the right fit confidently and reduce returns.
Enable resellers to place larger orders quickly with real-time pricing and stock updates. improving business efficiency.
Overcoming customers’ challenges
A fun, story-driven approach that transforms product browsing into a playful journey:
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Engages children by letting them choose clothes through their favorite characters.
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Supports parents with intuitive filtering that connects each character to product values (e.g., eco-friendly, cozy, durable).
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Reinforces brand identity by embedding storytelling directly into the shopping experience.
Designed to build trust and reduce returns by offering personalized, visual guidance:
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Smart fit recommendations enable parents to input their child’s measurements, guiding them to the best-fitting size—minimizing guesswork and increasing confidence at checkout.
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Side-by-side comparisons allow users to easily see differences between sizes across age ranges.
Optimized for resellers and high-volume buyers with efficiency in mind:
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Dynamic pricing display shows discounts and pricing tiers based on quantity.
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Live stock indicators prevent over-ordering and eliminate back-and-forth communication.
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Streamlined interface reduces the time it takes to place a bulk order from minutes to seconds.
Refining the Design
PROTOTYPE & TESTING
This is a comparison between the first iteration and the final solution, improved based on feedback from testing multiple times with 6 users.
Previous design
Redesign
Interviews with parents and the brand owner revealed a strong emotional connection to the characters, inspiring the initial character-focused design.
However, user testing revealed two key improvements:
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Link characters directly to products to speed up navigation and make the shopping experience more intuitive.
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Include conservation facts (e.g., animal protection) to add emotional value and highlight the brand’s purpose-driven identity.
The feature was significantly improved based on testing feedback with the introduction of Progressive Disclosure—a step-by-step layout where each section unlocks only after the previous one is completed. This keeps the experience simple and focused.
Clear flow: Select product → (Optional) Enter measurements → Get recommendation → Confirm size.
The updated interface supports multiple user paths:
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Manual Input: For users who prefer to enter their child's exact measurements.
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Quick Comparison: For users who want to compare general size options based on age and the standard chart.
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Card Layout Product cards follow a consistent, structured format with strong spacing and legibility.
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The “Bulk Order Price Calculator” features intuitive quantity controls and informative icons, providing users with clear visibility into bulk pricing changes, stock availability, and shipping timelines—all within each product card.
Expected Outcome
Bulk order calculator and real time inventory visibility
Guided measurements to reduce guesswork
Visual storytelling and guided shopping paths
Next Steps
Reflection
Redesigning PLUI’s e-commerce experience was a rewarding challenge. From the beginning, I saw an opportunity to transform a cluttered and transactional site into something that felt meaningful, intuitive, and fun for both parents and children. What really stood out to me was how deeply storytelling could enhance usability—especially in a children’s brand. I learned how to translate whimsical character identities into functional pathways, creating a shopping journey that felt more like play than a task.
Conducting interviews with parents, the brand owner, and wholesale clients gave me powerful insight into their frustrations—unclear sizing, poor navigation, and a lack of efficiency for bulk ordering. Those pain points became my design anchors. I pushed myself to go beyond clean wireframes and ask: how can this interaction spark joy? How can this page make someone smile and also make their life easier?
One of my proudest moments was seeing users engage with the prototype and immediately connect with the character-based flow—it proved that thoughtful UX can bridge business goals and emotional design. This project sharpened my ability to balance structure with creativity, and to lead design decisions with empathy and research. Most importantly, it reminded me why I chose this path in the first place: to design experiences that not only work—but matter.