Sanderson Design

Sanderson Design Group sells archive fabric and wallpaper collections through the Archive e-commerce website — a catalogue-heavy store where browsing and discovery quality directly affect whether design-led shoppers find, fall for, and buy a product. The site had grown over time, layering collections, pattern data and purchasing flows on top of each other. The Digital Manager wanted an independent, evidence-based view of the user experience: where it was losing customers, why, and what to fix first.

Conduct a comprehensive UX audit of the Archive website with three goals:

• Assess the current user experience across the whole journey — from first arrival to purchase and beyond.
• Identify usability issues and areas for improvement with evidence, not opinion.
• Recommend a prioritised roadmap to improve usability, customer satisfaction and conversion rates.

I was the lead researcher: I designed the audit approach, ran the methods, analysed the outputs and owned the recommendations.

I ran the audit as a systematic, multi-method evaluation rather than a single heuristic pass, so that every recommendation was triangulated from at least two sources:

• Qualitative user research — interviews, surveys and usability testing with shoppers to understand needs, expectations and where they struggled.
• Heuristic evaluation — assessed the site against established usability heuristics and best practice: navigation, information architecture, consistency, error prevention, and the classic interaction principles.
• Content analysis — evaluated product and collection content for clarity, relevance, consistency and readability against user expectations.
• Interaction design evaluation — analysed user flows and task completion, looking at visual affordances, feedback mechanisms and error handling across key journeys (browse → product → basket → checkout).
• Information architecture analysis — mapped the site structure to surface navigational dead-ends and recommend a more intuitive organisation.
• Analytics analysis — mined behavioural and conversion data to see where users dropped off, complementing the qualitative picture and helping prioritise what mattered most.
• Synthesis — consolidated everything into a prioritised findings report and a step-by-step implementation roadmap the internal team could execute.

The audit delivered an evidence-backed roadmap aligned to user expectations and industry best practice — giving the design and digital teams a clear order of operations instead of a list of symptoms. The work directly supported the site's UX alignment programme; per the client:

"Working with the team on our UX alignment was a pleasure. We came together as a team and developed solutions that were both practical and detailed while reflecting the brief perfectly. As a result, we were able to improve conversion rates, from when the user first arrives to when they purchase, and beyond, enhancing customer loyalty." — Ryan Marsh, Digital Manager, Sanderson Design Group

This project reinforced the value of a holistic audit: each method alone would have produced partial answers, but combining qualitative insight with heuristic, content and analytics review meant recommendations were grounded in observed behaviour, not assumptions. I also learned how much impact clear prioritisation has — a roadmap the team can execute in order is far more useful than a raw findings list, and that's what made the difference to this client relationship.