Optimizing Product Discovery

eazle — Customer × Heineken

My role

Product Designer

The team

DS Team & Product Designers

Duration

3 months

Product & Project Context

eazle is Heineken's global digital ordering platform, enabling customers to discover, order, and manage products online. As eazle expanded across operating companies worldwide, the need for scalable and consistent product experiences became increasingly important. The product card is one of the platform's most widely used components, serving as a critical building block across product discovery and browsing experiences. This project focused on evolving the eazle product card to improve product discovery, support growing product assortments, and establish a scalable foundation for future product card enhancements.

My contribution

As Product Designer, I led the redesign of the eazle product card and defined the strategic direction for its future evolution. I collaborated closely with the Design System team and product designers across eazle to understand component requirements, existing limitations, and future scalability needs. Through component audits, benchmark research, and review sessions, I identified opportunities to improve product discovery and browsing efficiency. Based on these insights, I developed a phased product card strategy, created the design concepts, and defined a scalable framework capable of supporting different product types, business requirements, and operating company needs.

Challenge

Customers experienced high scrolling effort when browsing products on the Product Listing Page (PLP), particularly on mobile devices. The existing product card occupied a large portion of the viewport, limiting the number of visible products and making product discovery less efficient. As eazle expanded across operating companies, product assortments continued to grow and the product card evolved to support a wide variety of business requirements, product types, and market-specific needs. While this increased flexibility, it also resulted in a component that no longer scaled effectively for large catalogs, creating a tension between information richness, usability, and browsing efficiency.

Design direction

Rather than redesigning the entire browsing experience, the project focused on evolving one of eazle's most important building blocks: the product card. The redesign followed a phased approach, balancing immediate usability improvements with a longer-term vision for scalability and flexibility. In the short term, the focus was on improving product visibility and browsing efficiency. At the same time, the project laid the foundation for a more flexible and scalable product card framework capable of supporting different product types, business requirements, operating company needs, and future platform enhancements.

Challenge

Design direction

Design goal

Create a more discoverable and efficient product browsing experience by redesigning the product card to increase product visibility, improve information prioritization, and reduce browsing effort. The solution needed to remain flexible enough to support different product types, business requirements, and operating company needs while providing a scalable foundation for future growth.

Discovery

To understand the challenges within the existing product browsing experience, I analyzed the eazle product card in the context of the Product Listing Page and its role across different operating companies. The discovery focused on understanding how evolving business requirements impacted the component over time, how information was prioritized within the card, and where opportunities existed to improve discoverability, scalability, and browsing efficiency.

Discovery

Research methods

Current product card audit

Reviewed the existing card structure, height, spacing, image area, typography, and content hierarchy to identify what contributed most to vertical space.

Existing concept and experiment review

Reviewed previous product card explorations, experiments, and customer learnings to identify recurring patterns, validated assumptions, and remaining opportunities.

Design system review

Collaborated with the Design System team to understand component constraints, scalability considerations, and opportunities for future flexibility.

Cross-team design reviews

Conducted review sessions with designers using the product card across different eazle experiences to understand business requirements, implementation challenges, and market-specific needs.

Competitive benchmark analysis

Analyzed e-commerce product cards and browsing patterns to identify opportunities for improving information density, discoverability, and scalability.

Research methods

Current product card audit

Reviewed the existing card structure, height, spacing, image area, typography, and content hierarchy to identify what contributed most to vertical space.

Existing concept and experiment review

Reviewed previous product card explorations, experiments, and customer learnings to identify recurring patterns, validated assumptions, and remaining opportunities.

Design system review

Collaborated with the Design System team to understand component constraints, scalability considerations, and opportunities for future flexibility.

Cross-team design reviews

Conducted review sessions with designers using the product card across different eazle experiences to understand business requirements, implementation challenges, and market-specific needs.

Competitive benchmark analysis

Analyzed e-commerce product cards and browsing patterns to identify opportunities for improving information density, discoverability, and scalability.

Findings

The discovery revealed that the existing product card had gradually evolved to support a growing number of business and market requirements. While this increased flexibility, it also reduced browsing efficiency and limited product visibility within the Product Listing Page. Research across multiple operating companies, previous experiments, and industry benchmarks consistently pointed towards the same opportunity: improving information prioritization, reducing unnecessary visual weight, and creating a more scalable product card framework. The findings highlighted the need for a product card that balances discoverability, flexibility, and scalability across different markets and product assortments.

Key insights

Mapped and prioritized product attributes to identify the information most critical for product discovery.

Customers rely on a small set of high-priority information when browsing products. Pricing, promotions, recommendations, and returnable indicators consistently outperformed secondary attributes such as SKU numbers and additional product details

Small optimizations create significant browsing gains

Multiple experiments showed that reducing image size, whitespace, and redundant information can increase product visibility and improve browsing efficiency without negatively impacting usability.

One product card needed to support diverse market needs

The product card serves multiple operating companies, product categories, and business contexts, each with their own requirements and priorities.

Industry benchmarks showed a clear direction

Competitive benchmarking revealed consistent patterns across leading e-commerce platforms: mobile-first list views, stronger information prioritization, compact layouts, and flexible product card structures designed to maximize discoverability.

Key insights

Mapped and prioritized product attributes to identify the information most critical for product discovery.

Small optimizations create significant browsing gains

Multiple experiments showed that reducing image size, whitespace, and redundant information can increase product visibility and improve browsing efficiency without negatively impacting usability.

One product card needed to support diverse market needs

The product card serves multiple operating companies, product categories, and business contexts, each with their own requirements and priorities.

Industry benchmarks showed a clear direction

Phase 1: Low-effort, high-impact optimizations

Rather than introducing a completely new product card concept, the first phase focused on identifying incremental improvements that could be implemented with relatively low design and development effort. By optimizing image dimensions, spacing, and typography, product visibility could be increased and browsing effort reduced, delivering immediate value while minimizing implementation complexity and risk.

Future Vision: Towards a Flexible Product Card Framework

Defining the future product card framework

While the first phase focused on low-effort optimizations, the longer-term vision explored how the product card could evolve into a more flexible and scalable framework. The process started with mapping and prioritizing product information to understand which data points were essential for product discovery and which varied across operating companies and product categories. This foundation informed a series of explorations into different card structures, layouts, and information models. Rather than designing a single fixed solution, the goal was to define a flexible product card framework capable of supporting diverse business requirements while maintaining consistency, discoverability, and scalability across the eazle platform.

Design approach

Information inventory and prioritization

Mapped and prioritized product attributes to identify the information most critical for product discovery.

Horizontal and vertical layout explorations

Explored different card structures to understand how layout impacts discoverability, flexibility, and space efficiency.

Information prioritization

Defined which product attributes deserved prominence on the card and which could be deprioritized to create a more efficient browsing experience.

Flexible card architecture

Investigated adaptive component models capable of supporting different product types and business requirements.

Future-state concept development

Developed future product card concepts to explore long-term scalability and platform-wide consistency.

Designing for scale and flexibility

The explorations highlighted a set of principles that guided the future evolution of the product card. These principles balanced product discoverability, flexibility, and scalability while addressing the diverse needs of operating companies across eazle.

Guiding principles

Prioritize decision-critical information

Highlight the information customers rely on most when browsing and comparing products.

Optimize for browsing, not individual products

The card should maximize product visibility and comparison efficiency within large assortments.

Balance consistency and flexibility

A shared framework should support operating company needs without creating separate card variants.

Design for scalability

The component should accommodate future product types, requirements, and platform capabilities without requiring redesigns.

Designing for scale and flexibility

Guiding principles

Prioritize decision-critical information

Highlight the information customers rely on most when browsing and comparing products.

Optimize for browsing, not individual products

The card should maximize product visibility and comparison efficiency within large assortments.

Balance consistency and flexibility

A shared framework should support operating company needs without creating separate card variants.

Design for scalability

The component should accommodate future product types, requirements, and platform capabilities without requiring redesigns.

Outcome and Impact

The project established a shared direction for the future evolution of the eazle product card, balancing immediate product discovery improvements with a longer-term vision for scalability and flexibility. Through discovery, experimentation, and concept development, the work consolidated insights from previous initiatives into a coherent product card strategy. The resulting framework provided a foundation for future enhancements while creating greater alignment between product, design, and design system stakeholders. Beyond the immediate optimization opportunities, the project helped shift the conversation from individual card improvements towards a scalable framework capable of supporting evolving business requirements, product types, and operating company needs.