Speculative / Portfolio · Product Design Strategist · 2026
Three pillars. Built for the way people actually buy.
Twenty years designing for systems where complexity is enormous and the margin for confusion is zero. Retail commerce is a different domain, not a different skillset. Shoebox is a speculative framework that takes platform-UX rigor into purchase-journey design. Customize. Confidence. Encourage.
Customize
predictive and explicit personalization
Confidence
purchase anxiety reduction
Encourage
behavioral nudges that respect the buyer
Background
Most portfolio pieces get retrofitted to a job posting. Shoebox is the opposite. It's a working point of view on retail UX, built as a speculative engagement so the conversation with a prospective client can start at strategy instead of style. The premise is that the same principles that make an enterprise IoT platform feel coherent under user load also make a $200 sneaker purchase feel inevitable. Different surface, same physics.
A $200 sneaker purchase and a $2M enterprise contract feel different at the surface and identical underneath. Both come down to confidence at the moment of decision.
The framework
Customize. Prediction and curation based on observed and explicit preferences, so the catalog feels personally curated without feeling surveilled. Confidence. Reducing purchase anxiety through social proof and intelligent insights that answer the questions buyers don't know they have. Encourage. Behavioral nudges that move buyers toward action through loyalty mechanics, recency signals, and smart cart behavior, without crossing into manipulative territory.
Key features
Personalized homepage and product headers segmented by user type. Limited drops for collectors. Performance gear for athletes. The same store, four different first impressions. Profile + Filter for Me, a one-tap filter that uses explicit and behavioral preferences to cut a 4,000-product catalog to the 30 that matter. AI Review Summary + Fit Data, synthesizing the long review tail into structured insights and searchable fit gauges. Loyalty Status at Checkout, a progress indicator that turns every purchase into a step toward elite status.
Approach
Shoebox is a point of view, not a redesign spec. The prototype is built to support strategic conversation, not passive portfolio scrolling. Delivered as an interactive Figma prototype with live interactions and a presentation deck covering the strategic rationale. The work it does is the conversation it starts.
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