Role
UX/UI Design Intern
Timeline
May - July 2025
Skills
UX Research
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Client Work
Tools
Figma
Overview
International Furniture Direct (IFD) is a B2B furniture company partnering with distributors and trade professionals throughout the U.S. and Canada. As a design contractor, I focused on restructuring the site architecture, improving product discovery, and refining the visual direction. The goal was to create a clearer, more intuitive browsing experience that felt easy to navigate and visually cohesive.
User Research
To understand how IFD’s core users navigate the site, I created user personas, journey maps, and user flows based on the company’s target audience. From this research, I identified several key pain points in the existing experience.
Building on these key user pain points, I translated them into clear opportunity areas to guide the redesign.
Ideation
After identifying key pain points and outlining design opportunities, I began exploring layout and content structure through low-fidelity wireframes. I created early concepts for the homepage, the New Intros (New Arrivals) page, and the Contact Us to test different ways of organizing content and guiding users through the site.
Reviewing the initial wireframes helped reveal what wasn’t working. The homepage felt too wordy and needed clearer separation between ideas, and past magazine issues weren’t important enough to be featured there. The New Intros page didn’t show all new products and relied too much on nested pages, while the Contact page included information that wasn’t specific to potential dealers. Overall, I simplified the site too aggressively and combined pages that should have stayed separate, but the visual formatting aligned well with IFD’s product aesthetic and brand identity.
Final Design
Homepage designed to engage new dealers, guiding them toward a clear and streamlined dealer information page.
Collections organized by clear style categories with a streamlined, easy-to-navigate menu.
New arrivals grouped by furniture type to make browsing straightforward and efficient.
Reflection
With more time, I would conduct user research with IFD’s existing dealers to better understand their real pain points and validate the design direction. I wasn’t able to complete the mobile version or build out the post–dealer sign-in experience, including the login, wishlist, and ordering pages. I’d also run user testing on this version to gather feedback and continue refining the design through additional iterations.
