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Interviewed stakeholders and tested customer expectations around custom equipment, account states and team purchasing.
← Selected work
Commerce UX + Product Configuration
Researching and Designing a Custom Equipment Engine
Led research and experience design for the customization platform behind Wilson’s custom baseball glove journey, balancing player creativity, product rules and a confident path to purchase.
05RoleLead UX Research + Product Design contractor
TeamAgency, Wilson stakeholders, product, engineering and commerce teams
ScopeFocus groups, stakeholder interviews, usability testing, architecture and configuration UX
Research ledFocus groups, interviews and usability testing
Complex choicesModels, patterns, materials and personalization
End to endDiscovery through customization and checkout
In marketCore customizer remains in use today
DESIGN EVIDENCE
The work, in the order it was designed.
The visual story is presented in the order the product was designed: hand sketches, architecture, reusable wireframe states and the final custom-equipment experience.
01
Hand drawings and sketches
Fast, low-cost exploration established the account, team and customization concepts before detailed design.
02
Navigation and system architecture
The sitemap connected commerce, account and team states into one coherent system.
03
Wireframes and reusable patterns
Reusable structures defined how recognized and unrecognized users moved through the experience.
04
Final purchase path
The final path carried a configured product through a secure checkout experience.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
Customization had to feel creative without becoming cognitively exhausting.
A custom baseball glove is a deeply personal product, but the number of choices can quickly overwhelm a customer. Model, pattern, web, color, lacing, embroidery and other options all have dependencies and manufacturing constraints.
The product experience needed to help players explore possibilities, understand tradeoffs and trust that the final configuration would match what they intended to order.
MY MANDATE
Own the experience, not just the screens.
On an agency engagement, I led focus groups, stakeholder interviews and usability testing for the experience that became Wilson’s customization engine. I translated what customers and internal teams needed into the architecture, patterns and interaction model supporting custom gloves.
HOW THE WORK MOVED
Research translated into decisions teams could build from.
Define
Organized the experience around customer intent and progressive decisions rather than exposing the entire product rule set at once.
Design
Created site architecture, reusable patterns, recognized-user states, product selection, configuration and checkout concepts.
Validate
Used testing and stakeholder review to make customization choices clearer and reduce ambiguity before purchase.
OUTCOME
The work created a scalable path from product inspiration to a buildable order.
The experience connected category discovery, model selection, product configuration, account behavior and checkout into one coherent commerce journey. Wilson continues to use the custom equipment engine today, providing durable evidence that the research and interaction model supported both customers and the business.
REFLECTION
A configurator succeeds when the underlying complexity disappears. The customer should feel in control of a creative process while the system quietly protects product and manufacturing rules.