Designing a calmer shopping hub around real user journeys

Journeys dashboard with personalized shopping modules

Problem

Online shopping involves multiple steps, platforms, and mental load. Users struggle to track their activity across products, retailers, and categories, and often feel uncertain about purchases, price drops, deals, and product discovery. The challenge was to create a central hub that simplifies shopping, helps users save money, and surfaces insights tailored to where they are in the journey.

Role & Collaboration

I collaborated with a principal designer as a mid-level designer on this project. My work included designing three user flow scenarios, interaction models, and feed-based versus static hub layouts. I worked closely with PMs, engineers, and researchers to prototype and iterate while keeping the experience calm, visually clear, and practical.

Approach & Features

We defined three journey stages. Early focused on discovery with highlights from recent activity, curated recommendations, insights on new brands or categories, recently viewed products, and buying guides. Mid focused on narrowing choices with price drops, top options with reasoning, product comparisons, tracked items, and store recommendations. Late and post-purchase focused on package tracking, pending cashback, complementary recommendations, Copilot prompts, and routine guides.

Key features I designed included activity summaries, recommendations with filters, insights modules, recently viewed items, buying guides, cashback and deals integration, and Copilot-powered chat prompts for follow-up questions. Feed-based layouts helped disperse dense information into a format that felt more digestible and easier to trust.

The work explored how a browser can surface holistic shopping intelligence that retailers alone cannot provide.

Journeys landing experience in Microsoft Shopping

Journeys exploration surface with discovery cards and notifications

EARLYMIDLATE / POST-PURCHASE

Journeys returning user view with personalized shopping context

Journey Stages

Journeys was structured around changing user intent. The system shifts from exploration and inspiration, to comparison and confidence-building, to post-purchase tracking and support. That framing made it possible to prioritize the right content at the right moment instead of treating shopping like one generic feed.

Journeys recently viewed surface with category and product ranking

Journeys high-information feed layout with dense recommendation modules

Feed-Based Clarity

A core design decision was testing feed-based layouts against more static hub models. The feed approach made recommendations, insights, tracked products, and follow-up prompts feel visually dispersed and easier to scan, which helped balance information density with clarity and reduced the sense of promotional overload.

Journeys exploration feed with category-led shopping discovery

Journeys purchase support view with savings and delivery insights

Outcome

The project was never flighted in Bing, but it informed the Journeys flows that later shipped in Microsoft Copilot. The work reinforced a broader product lesson: meaningful shopping assistance comes from combining content, context, and AI-driven insights in ways that do not look or behave like traditional retail surfaces.