Petsutra Website Redesign
Context & Problem
Petsutra had no order tracking within the site itself and no lifecycle emails; no "order placed", "shipped", or "delivered" confirmations, the baseline that Amazon had trained every e-commerce user to expect.
Status updates were manual, done by hand by site managers. Serving 25,000+ active users, this gap was the primary driver of support call volume.
Results & Impact
My Role
I led the redesign, working with a cross-functional team of ~10 across product, engineering, and content. I started with a heuristic evaluation of the existing site, identifying transparency gaps in order fulfillment, product overviews, and general usability, then ran a competitive review of leading pet e-commerce brands (Dogspot, Heads Up for Tails, Royal Canin) to benchmark against category standards.
I built and maintained the Petsutra design system, and reported progress through quarterly roadmaps tying design decisions to business KPIs.
Research & Discovery
Research combined surveys, analysis of 50+ support interactions, and analytics/SEO data. The clearest signal: treating user and customer as the same person was flattening the experience for both — the real end user was often the pet, not the purchaser.
That reframe drove the redesign: we rebuilt the profile around pet data (breed, age, food preferences) tied to loyalty rewards, built automated order tracking and lifecycle emails from scratch to replace manual updates, merged the wallet and loyalty program into one system, and moved the pet profile to the top of the hierarchy once testing showed it mattered more than cart or account.
That distinction shaped two personas: Premium Pet Parents (20–35, digitally active, treat pets like family) and Amazon-Focused Shoppers (convenience-driven, motivated by fast/reliable shipping) — used to prioritize loyalty and engagement work against pure transactional efficiency.
Ideation & Design Process
The core problem: Petsutra's "My Profile" was functional but generic; no personalization, no behavioral insight to build on.
The pivot: the actual end user wasn't the purchaser, it was the pet. We rebuilt the profile around pet-specific data (breed, age, activity level, food preferences) enabling real personalization instead of generic recommendations, and tied profile completion to PetFirst loyalty points as an immediate incentive.
Key decisions that followed from that pivot:
Order tracking, built from scratch: replaced manual status updates with automated order-placed/shipped/delivered tracking and lifecycle emails
Wishlist & cart persistence: saved items with visible savings, designed around actual return-shopping behavior rather than single-session checkout
Unified wallet: merged the Pet Wallet and loyalty program into one system, cutting cognitive load at checkout
Proactive support: moved help resources higher in the nav hierarchy
Initial wireframes followed standard e-commerce hierarchy (cart/account-first). Competitive analysis and testing showed this buried the thing users actually cared about, so we moved the pet profile to the top and kept loyalty points visible throughout the flow, not just at checkout. Reusable components across profile, wallet, and checkout kept the system scalable for future iteration.
Solution
The result reframed Petsutra as a connected ecosystem rather than a series of pages — profile, tracking, and wallet shared interaction patterns so each part reinforced the next. Visual direction stayed warm and clean, matching the emotional register of pet ownership without sacrificing e-commerce clarity: modular cards and a lightweight component system let the site scale without visual drift.
What I'd do differently now…
One structural constraint worth naming: navigation stayed bound to existing SEO architecture, so it never fully matched user mental models — a tradeoff between technical continuity and discoverability that a full IA rebuild would have addressed.
