My Role
Title
Associate Director, UX Design at eSalon, a D2C eCommerce company
Timeline
2021 - 2023
TEAM
Three UX designers, led in a player-coach capacity
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Playbook UX, GA4, Mixpanel, Baymard Institute
Key Outcomes
Built eSalon's first formal UX practice from the ground up, establishing design as a strategic partner across product, engineering, and leadership teams for two brands.
Hired and coached eSalon's first UX team, establishing a collaborative culture with clear mentoring paths and competency frameworks that set people up for success.
Amplified design's reach across the organization by establishing our design system and embedding research into product workflows, transforming how teams collaborate and ship features.
Context & Challenge
Without formal UX processes, design was a service function driven by preferences,not evidence.
Over two and a half years, I built eSalon's UX foundation from scratch by introducing user research, assembling a lean team, and creating design systems that served two distinct brands.
When I joined eSalon, UX didn't formally exist. UI designers worked directly with PMs and founders without dedicated research or strategic guidance, often reworking entire flows based on shifting preferences.
The challenge I inherited was cultural. Design had been seen as a service function, brought in to execute stakeholder preferences rather than solve user problems. Without formal research or UX strategy, decisions had been based largely on opinions instead of evidence.
Baymard Institute, the leading UX research authority for e-commerce, warns against this approach. “You can’t afford to guess about your customers’ needs. The right kind of UX research can help you determine your users’ pain points and how they behave.”
By the time I left, UX had become integral to how teams worked, embedded in sprint planning, team rituals, and daily collaboration. What started as reactive design firefighting transformed into strategic, research-informed decision making with clear processes everyone could rely on.
Discovery & Strategy
I earned credibility through evidence-based problem solving, improving checkout conversion rates by 4%.
My first assignment was investigating drop-off in the Aura Haircare checkout, where PMs suspected inconsistent product naming was confusing users. Rather than just fixing the naming, I dug deeper with analytics and a full heuristic evaluation of the purchase flow.
What I discovered was much bigger than naming issues. At our order volume, this meant hundreds of missed orders monthly from:
- 66% of users abandoning somewhere in the lower funnel, half at checkout
- 30% leaving between two order summary pages after seeing their custom product pricing
- 25% abandoning during profile creation
I redesigned the checkout to consolidate steps and reduce the number of pages, eliminating unnecessary abandonment points. This improved conversion by ~4%. But more importantly, this early win shifted how stakeholders saw UX: from 'making things pretty' to strategic problem-solving. It opened the door for deeper research, design standards, and eventually building a full UX team.
Design Process
Collaborative design processes became the foundation for scaling UX influence.
One of my first hires was a hybrid UX researcher-designer, brought on to help formalize our research practice. When she started asking for a promotion, I had seen enough to know she had the chops for bigger challenges. I gave her a stretch project exploring how to enable subscriptions for all products directly from the homepage, expanding beyond our core custom color offering.
When she hit roadblocks unpacking the complex user flows, I set up a whiteboarding session where we mapped out the entire user journey together. This collaborative approach became our team norm, with whiteboarding as the tool for knowledge sharing and quality control.
By visualizing the flow's complexity and multiple entry points, we uncovered technical and UX challenges that had not been previously understood. When we presented these findings to stakeholders, they decided to scale back scope. This was a key moment where UX prevented costly development work through thorough due diligence.
Outcomes & Impact
UX influence expanded from project work to strategic leadership.
Team Growth
Built a UX team from zero to three designers with complementary skills, focusing on collaborative working styles that enhanced our collective impact.
Created promotion frameworks and competency matrices that enabled clear career advancement. One designer promoted to senior level during my tenure.
Process Impact
Created recurring UX rituals including async usability reviews and cross-team critiques that became integral to how all teams approached product decisions.
Created shared research libraries and artifact systems that saved teams from reinventing solutions and kept everyone aligned on what users actually needed.
Leadership Reflections
By leading with research, we changed the nature of feedback. Design critiques with executive stakeholders became more focused, more strategic, and less reactive.
This shift gave our small team genuine influence in roadmap discussions and the autonomy to make decisions stakeholders trusted. By grounding discussions in research, my team saved everyone time and focused conversations on what actually mattered for users and the business.
But I learned that perfect research doesn't guarantee perfect outcomes. A free-shipping progress bar backed by Nielsen Norman research and used successfully by competitors got killed because leadership worried it might hurt subscription renewals. I didn't agree with the decision, but I accepted it and learned that stakeholder priorities sometimes override user experience evidence.
The most valuable lesson? Design leadership isn't about having the best ideas. It's about changing how decisions get made. When you build evidence-based processes that people trust, you don't just improve the work. You give design a permanent voice in conversations that matter.
