A mobile-first turnaround of SimpleTire's navigation, product pages, and checkout — pairing UX research with a front-end performance overhaul to recover stalled conversion and AOV.
Leading cross-functional design and front-end operations, I treated the storefront as an instrument to be measured and tuned — instrumenting the purchase flow, removing friction, and holding engineering to a performance standard rather than a ticket count.
Revenue from mobile traffic and average order value had stagnated, while product landing pages suffered from excessive load times. The offshore engineering team was measured on ticket volume rather than code quality, accumulating technical debt that put both conversion and organic search rankings at risk.
Following these declines, the CMO requested a strategic intervention to rebuild the customer experience and recover lost performance.
Mobile revenue and average order value flat despite steady traffic.
Bloated header and image code dragging product landing page load times.
Offshore team optimizing for ticket count, compounding tech debt and SEO risk.
As UX Lead, my objective was to modernize the mobile experience, raise front-end engineering quality, and optimize technical performance to drive measurable revenue growth and SEO health. The mandate spanned three teams that didn't routinely work together: design, marketing, and offshore engineering.
I partnered with the Director of Marketing and the CTO to execute a multi-phase turnaround built on three pillars.
Before touching the UI, I built a shared, evidence-based picture of where the experience was breaking down.
HotJar session recordings and heatmaps to locate friction in the purchase flow.
Surfaced unoptimized images, legacy HTML, and cluttered DOM structures.
Cross-referenced performance data with support feedback to validate navigation pain points.
I led a data-driven UI cleanup of the navigation and product detail pages, simplifying call-to-action visibility based on heatmapping insights. The header was rebuilt around an integrated tire finder so shoppers could start a search — by vehicle or by tire size — from anywhere on the site.
The revised mobile checkout (ticket SIM-4384) reorganized the flow into clear, single-purpose steps: choose a shipping method and local installer, schedule the install, pay, and confirm. I also collaborated with the CTO to overhaul offshore engineering metrics — shifting from ticket volume to performance impact, with a mandatory UX quality review on every critical-path journey.
Step 1Shipping & installer
Step 2Schedule install
Step 3Payment
Step 4Confirmation
I directed the removal of legacy code and established a formal image-optimization protocol to reduce page weight and DOM size. Stripping bloated header and image code cut mobile load from 9.1 to 8.3 seconds on the header alone, with the broader page-weight work driving the site-wide gains documented in the results — and lifting SEO health through improved DOM efficiency.
Mobile and desktop conversion from the redesigned checkout navigation.
Further mobile conversion from moving the coupon field to payment.
Header-level load reduction from stripping bloated code.
The initiative repositioned UX as a primary revenue driver — establishing a new collaborative standard between marketing and engineering, and carrying the experience through hyper-growth to a successful acquisition by Dealer Tire.