Koala T Herbals
End-to-end ecommerce product design & build
Role: Product Designer
Timeline: 2025
The Problem
Koala T Herbals operates in a high-risk ecommerce category where standard platforms and payment solutions are either restricted or unreliable. Off-the-shelf tools weren’t designed to support the regulatory, compliance, and operational realities of the product.
The challenge was to design and build a trustworthy, conversion-focused ecommerce experience from scratch—without relying on traditional CMS or ecommerce platforms—while balancing usability, compliance, performance, and scalability.
Goals & Constraints
Goals
- Create a simple, friction-free purchasing experience
- Optimize checkout for clarity, trust, and conversion
- Ensure fast performance across desktop and mobile
- Build a flexible foundation that could evolve with the business
Constraints
- High-risk product category with strict platform and payment limitations
- Could not rely on off-the-shelf ecommerce, CMS, or CRM solutions
- Required careful balance of compliance, trust signals, and usability
- Solo build with full ownership across design, build, and systems
My Role
I owned the product end-to-end, from initial strategy through design and implementation.
- UX & interaction design
- Visual design & branding
- Information architecture
- Frontend implementation
- System and data flow design
- SEO and performance optimization
- Brand character and mascot design (Truman)
- Marketing and conversion support assets
Process
The process focused on balancing user simplicity with the realities of a high-risk ecommerce product. Research and design decisions were guided by real-world constraints around trust, compliance, and conversion.
Research & Discovery
Reviewed direct and adjacent competitors to identify common trust issues, checkout friction, and patterns that negatively impacted conversion.
Experience Definition
Defined a simplified information architecture centered on core user actions: learning, selecting a product, and completing checkout.
UX Flows
Mapped critical user flows from entry to purchase, removing unnecessary steps and reducing points of hesitation throughout the checkout journey.
Annotated flow highlighting intentional removal of friction and common ecommerce patterns to support trust and conversion.
Design & Build
Translated UX decisions directly into UI and frontend implementation, allowing design and build to evolve together with a focus on performance and clarity.
Checkout UI showing form hierarchy, trust signals, and pricing clarity designed to minimize hesitation at the point of purchase.
Solution
The final solution was a custom-built ecommerce experience designed specifically for a high-risk product category. Rather than forcing the business into existing platforms, the product was built from the ground up to support compliance, performance, and long-term flexibility.
The experience prioritizes clarity and trust at every step, with a streamlined information architecture, simplified checkout flow, and performance-first frontend implementation. Design, branding, and system decisions were intentionally aligned to reduce friction, improve conversion, and establish credibility with first-time customers.
Results
The project resulted in a fully functional, production-ready ecommerce platform tailored to the constraints of a high-risk product category. The system supports a streamlined purchasing experience while maintaining performance, usability, and flexibility for ongoing iteration.
By reducing checkout friction and aligning design decisions around trust and clarity, the product established a solid foundation for conversion and long-term growth. The platform was designed to scale over time without requiring a full rebuild as business needs evolve.
Reflection
Designing and building Koala T Herbals reinforced the importance of adapting process and tooling to real-world constraints rather than forcing solutions to fit familiar platforms. Working within a high-risk product category required a deeper focus on trust, performance, and long-term flexibility than a typical ecommerce project.
The experience strengthened my approach to systems-level thinking— balancing UX, technical decisions, and business realities—while reinforcing the value of keeping user flows simple, intentional, and scalable from the start.