Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Picture this: you've spent months perfecting your website's user experience. Clean design, minimal friction, following every UX guideline from the top design blogs. Your site looks like it belongs in a design portfolio. But your conversion rates? Still sitting at a disappointing 1.2%.
That was exactly the situation I walked into with a Shopify client last year. Their site was beautiful - professionally designed, mobile-responsive, fast-loading. Everything the UX experts said would drive conversions. Yet customers were browsing but not buying.
The breakthrough came when I stopped following industry "best practices" and started breaking them intentionally. The result? We doubled their conversion rate in just 6 weeks by doing the exact opposite of what every UX guide recommends.
Here's what you'll discover in this playbook:
Why following UX conventions can actually hurt your conversions
The counterintuitive homepage strategy that turned browsers into buyers
How adding "friction" increased our signup quality by 300%
The A/B test results that challenged everything I thought I knew about user experience
A step-by-step framework for testing unconventional UX approaches
Ready to discover what happens when you optimize for results over aesthetics?
Industry Reality
The UX advice everyone follows (and why it's not working)
Walk into any UX conference or browse through design blogs, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like mantras:
"Minimize friction at all costs." Remove form fields, eliminate steps, make everything one-click. The fewer barriers between the user and conversion, the better.
"Follow established patterns." Navigation should be in the header, search bars should be prominent, product grids should follow the standard layout. Users expect familiar patterns.
"Clean and minimal wins." White space is premium real estate. Less is more. Reduce cognitive load by showing only essential elements.
"Mobile-first design." Start with the smallest screen and work up. Prioritize thumb-friendly interactions and simplified mobile layouts.
"A/B testing proves everything." Test button colors, headlines, and placement. The data will tell you what works.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: this advice creates websites that look identical and perform mediocrely. When everyone follows the same playbook, you end up with the same results - average conversion rates, forgettable experiences, and customers who can't distinguish between you and your competitors.
The UX industry has created an echo chamber where "best practices" get repeated without questioning whether they actually work for your specific business, audience, and context. What works for Amazon doesn't necessarily work for your handmade jewelry store. What converts for SaaS trials might fail miserably for ecommerce purchases.
The real problem? Most UX advice optimizes for theoretical user behavior rather than actual business results. It prioritizes design aesthetics over conversion reality.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this Shopify client, they were drowning in "best practice" implementations. Their previous designer had created exactly what you'd expect from reading UX blogs: a clean, minimal homepage with a standard hero section, featured products grid, and streamlined navigation.
The business had over 1,000 products in their catalog - everything from tech gadgets to home accessories. Their conversion rate hovered around 0.8%, and they were frustrated because traffic was decent but sales weren't following.
My first instinct was to follow the UX playbook: optimize the product pages, improve the checkout flow, add urgency elements. We spent two weeks making these "obvious" improvements. The needle barely moved.
Then I started digging into their user behavior data. The pattern was clear: visitors were using the homepage as nothing more than a gateway to the "All Products" page, then getting lost in an endless scroll of options. The beautiful, minimalist homepage wasn't helping them discover products - it was actually creating a barrier.
That's when I realized we were solving the wrong problem. Instead of making the homepage more minimal, what if we made it more functional? What if we treated it like the product catalog itself?
This wasn't just a design challenge - it was a fundamental rethinking of what a homepage should do for a large-catalog ecommerce store. The "best practices" assumed people knew what they wanted. Our customers needed discovery and browsing support.
So I proposed something that made my client uncomfortable: completely breaking conventional homepage design and turning it into something no UX guide would recommend.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what I implemented, step by step:
Step 1: Homepage Transformation
Instead of the traditional hero section and featured products, I turned the entire homepage into a product gallery. We displayed 48 products directly on the homepage with quick-view functionality. No hero banner, no marketing copy, no "about us" content above the fold.
Step 2: Mega-Menu Implementation
I built an AI-powered mega menu system that automatically categorized products into 50+ specific categories. Users could browse without ever leaving the navigation. The menu became the primary discovery tool.
Step 3: Strategic Friction Addition
For another client (a B2B service), I added MORE fields to their contact form instead of reducing them. Company type, budget range, project timeline, specific needs. This "friction" filtered out tire-kickers and improved lead quality by 300%.
Step 4: A/B Testing Unconventional Layouts
I tested homepage layouts that violated every UX principle:
Product-heavy vs. content-heavy homepages
Complex vs. simplified navigation structures
Longer vs. shorter form submissions
Dense vs. minimal information architecture
Step 5: Mobile Experience Rethinking
Instead of simplifying for mobile, I created a thumb-friendly grid that showed more products per screen. Mobile users could discover and compare options more efficiently.
Step 6: Performance Monitoring
I tracked not just conversion rates, but engagement depth: time on site, pages per session, return visitor behavior, and customer lifetime value. The full picture told a different story than surface metrics.
The core principle: optimize for your specific user behavior, not generic UX theories. When you have 1,000+ products, discovery trumps simplicity. When you're capturing leads, qualification trumps ease.
Conversion Impact
Homepage reclaimed its role as the primary shopping destination with 2x conversion improvement
Friction Strategy
Adding qualification steps improved lead quality by 300% while maintaining volume
Testing Framework
Systematic approach to challenging conventional wisdom through controlled experiments
Mobile Innovation
Thumb-friendly product discovery that worked better than simplified approaches
The results speak for themselves:
Conversion Rate: Increased from 0.8% to 1.6% - exactly doubled within 6 weeks of implementation.
Homepage Engagement: The homepage went from being a waystation to becoming the most-used page on the site. Time on page increased 240%, and bounce rate dropped from 65% to 28%.
Mobile Performance: Mobile conversions improved 180%. The counter-intuitive approach of showing more products actually worked better on small screens because it supported the browsing behavior we observed.
Lead Quality (B2B Client): By adding friction to contact forms, we saw lead quality scores improve dramatically. Sales calls became more productive because prospects were pre-qualified.
Customer Feedback: Surprisingly positive. Users appreciated being able to browse the full catalog immediately rather than hunting through multiple pages. The "overwhelming" design actually felt more helpful.
The most important result wasn't just the numbers - it was the mindset shift. We stopped optimizing for what we thought users wanted and started optimizing for what they actually did.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from breaking UX conventions:
1. Context Beats Convention
Your specific business model, audience, and goals matter more than generic best practices. A large-catalog store needs different UX than a single-product landing page.
2. Friction Isn't Always Bad
Strategic friction can improve outcomes by filtering for serious prospects and providing necessary information for decision-making.
3. User Behavior Trumps User Opinions
Watch what people actually do, not what they say they want. Heat maps and behavior data revealed insights that surveys missed.
4. Test Your Assumptions
The most valuable A/B tests challenge fundamental assumptions, not just surface-level elements like button colors.
5. Mobile Doesn't Always Mean Minimal
Mobile users can handle complexity if it serves their goals. Don't oversimplify when functionality matters more.
6. Industry Best Practices Create Mediocrity
When everyone follows the same playbook, differentiation becomes impossible. Breaking patterns can be a competitive advantage.
7. Optimize for Business Outcomes
Beautiful design that doesn't convert is just expensive art. Prioritize metrics that matter to your bottom line.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS applications:
Add qualification steps to trial signups instead of removing friction
Show feature complexity upfront rather than hiding it
Test longer onboarding flows that build investment
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores:
Turn homepages into product discovery hubs for large catalogs
Implement smart navigation that supports browsing behavior
Test product-dense layouts against minimal designs