Colgate.com: Turning Content Traffic into Meaningful Commerce

Colgate.com Website
Timeline
February - December 2022
Role
Senior Product Designer (Lead)

TL;DR

I led the redesign of Colgate.com's content and commerce experience to reduce confusion, improve discoverability, and turn oral health education into meaningful conversion. Through global user research, IA restructuring, and iterative testing, we increased engagement and conversion while addressing broader issues of dental health equity.

The Problem

Three screenshots of existing product pages, showing different designs for each of a children's toothbrush, a tooth whitening pen, and Colgate Total toothpaste.
Existing product pages all had different design patterns and were not easily found.
The average conversion rate across all products was 1.8%. My goal was to get it as close to 5% as possible.

Colgate.com had massive traffic but low commercial impact. Users bounced heavily from educational content, navigation was unclear, and stakeholders couldn't articulate how the site actually helped users or the business.

At the same time, dental misinformation online disproportionately affects underserved communities, making trust and clarity critical.

My Role & Leadership

Lead UX Designer

Key Insight:

Information as equity
Three user profiles showing a man who wants an attractive smile, a woman who wants to whiten her teeth for a special occaision, and a third woman who wants to cure X issue without seeing a dentist.

Teeth whitening was the most important issue in the US, UK, France, and Germany. But in Mexico, Brazil, India, acute dental problems like cavities, gum disease (gingivitis), and plaque were more important to users.

  1. Users weren't "just browsing."

    They were actively seeking trustworthy dental guidance, often before making purchasing decisions - especially parents and users without regular access to dental care.

  2. The site failed not because of content quality, but because:
    • Topics were poorly grouped
    • Navigation imposed arbitrary mental models
    • Educational journeys didn't connect naturally to products

What I did

Three screenshots showing design iterations.
Design iterations reduced visual weight and increased clarity.

  1. Rebuilt the Information Architecture

    • Audited 50+ oral health topics
    • Ran card sorts across 7 countries with novice and expert users
    • Discovered no consistent mental model → abandoned forced categorisation

    Instead, I introduced:

    • An A-Z topic index
    • Clear topic labelling
    • Search-first discovery

    Tree testing showed:

    • Lower abandonment
    • Faster task completion
    • Higher confidence

  2. Connected Content to Commerce

    • Designed contextual product recommendations based on user intent
    • Reduced hard CTAs in favour of soft, educational transitions
    • Clarified when users were “learning” vs “shopping”

  3. Introduced User Testing to Stakeholders

    Stakeholders were skeptical of research, so I:

    • Started with lightweight usability testing
    • Shared direct user quotes and recordings
    • Tied findings directly to conversion metrics

    This shifted how decisions were made across the project.

Two screenshots showing product pages from before and after design changes.
Side by side comparison of before and after shows more products shown above the fold, more consistent with commerce products across industries.

Impact & Reflection