Brand ambition within platform constraints.

A national fashion retailer migrating platforms

XTI is a Spanish footwear and fashion brand with a national retail presence and a significant direct-to-consumer digital operation. The redesign was scoped to coincide with a platform migration to Magento — which meant the design work had to operate within the constraints of what Magento could deliver, not an ideal technical canvas.

This is a common and underappreciated challenge in e-commerce design: the platform you're building on is not neutral. Its component model, its URL structure, its filtering logic — these shape what's possible in the UX before a single design decision is made. Understanding those constraints upfront is essential to delivering something that can actually be built.

Behavioral data first

The discovery phase used Hotjar session recordings, heatmaps, and funnel analytics from the existing site — alongside a structured competitive analysis studying how fashion category leaders like Zara and Adidas handled navigation, filtering, and product presentation. The goal was to understand where XTI's existing experience was losing users and why, before proposing any changes.

Information architecture testing was also part of the process: card sorting and tree testing exercises conducted in Optimal Workshop to validate the proposed category and navigation structure before committing to high-fidelity design. IA problems discovered in testing are much cheaper to fix than IA problems discovered in live user data — especially on a Magento migration where structural changes post-launch carry significant development cost.

Balancing brand and conversion

Fashion e-commerce design involves a tension that doesn't exist in the same way in other sectors: the brand wants editorial presence, visual impact, and a sense of aspiration. The conversion case argues for clarity, prominent product imagery, and frictionless purchase paths. The best fashion e-commerce experiences hold both — but it requires deliberate choices about where brand expression earns its space and where it defers to function.

For XTI, the design decisions focused on the product listing page and product detail page — the two highest-traffic, highest-drop-off stages in any fashion funnel. Filtering and sorting UX, product image presentation, size selection, and the add-to-cart interaction were all redesigned with conversion data as the primary success measure.

The creative direction took cues from fashion editorial — clean layouts, generous whitespace, typography-led hierarchy, and product photography given room to breathe. That register was achievable within Magento's constraints because it relies on restraint rather than technical complexity. Developer collaboration was embedded from the start: involving the technical team early meant understanding what would perform within Magento's template model and avoiding patterns that would require expensive custom development.

Platform constraints are a design brief, not an obstacle

The experience of designing within a specific platform constraint — knowing what's possible and what isn't before starting — is valuable in a way that isn't obvious until you've done it. It eliminates a large category of wasted design work: the elegant solution that can't be built, the interaction pattern that the platform doesn't support.

It also sharpens the creative problem. The question shifts from "what's the ideal UX for this?" to "what's the best possible UX within these constraints?" — which is, in most real-world contexts, the more useful question to be answering.

Specific performance data for this engagement is subject to NDA.