Redesign

A working homepage you can scroll, built against the four priorities the research ends on. Ten changes, each traced back to the findings it settles — and three things it does not do yet.

ScopeHomepage onlyBuilt asStatic HTML, CSS and JavaScriptChanges10, annotatedStatusConcept, not a Shopify theme

01The homepage, live

A working page, not a picture of one. Scroll it, open the menu, hover the collection links, and click the leather seal. Everything in it links back to the live Orox store, so nothing here can take an order.

oroxleather.com — homepage conceptOpen full screen

02What it was built against

The four priorities that close the UX research. Everything below answers one of them, or admits that it does not.

Put something to buy, and a reason to buy it, in the first screen

Products with prices above the fold on a phone, and the three promises — free monogram, lifetime warranty, free shipping over $500 — stated where the price is being judged rather than in the footer.

Navigate by what the workshop makes

Wallets, bags, belts, aprons. Gender becomes a filter. This is what all five comparable stores do, including the two that are the same size as Orox.

Make the family the argument for the price

1933 in Oaxaca, six years in Japan, Portland today. Dated, photographed and on the homepage — not on a page a shopper has to go looking for.

Build it so a screen reader can use it

Landmarks, one h1, described images, 44px targets. The contrast already passes; the rest is markup that costs the design nothing.

03Ten changes, and why

Each change names the audit findings it answers. Where a change is here for its own sake rather than for a finding, it says so.

The menu leads with what the workshop makes

The top level is Shop, Best sellers and Our story. Opening Shop gives Bags & totes, Wallets, Belts, Crossbody bags, Travel & everyday and Aprons at work under the heading “Find your everyday”. Nobody is asked to pick a gender before they can see a wallet. Ashland Leather leads with the same four product words at the same size of business.

Answers N1, C5

Search is a field, not a word you click

Two real inputs: “Search bags, wallets, belts…” in the desktop header and “Find your next companion” in the mobile menu, which on the live store has no search at all. All five stores compared in the research have a header field; it is the most common single thing this store is missing.

Answers N3

The hero says what Orox is and where to go next

“A lifetime. In the making.” with “Rooted in Oaxaca. Handcrafted in Portland.” beneath it, and a button reading “Find your everyday companion” instead of “Explore more”. The top bar carries “Oaxacan roots. Portland soul.” rather than repeating the headline directly below it.

Answers H2, H4

Ninety-three years are on the homepage, in order

A scrolling heritage sequence stopping at 1933, 2012 and Today, with the family archive photographs and the line “Don Felipe began making gear for Los Audelos, passing the craft from father to son.” Oaxaca appears thirteen times across the page. On the live homepage the whole history is one line of script type over a photograph: “From Our Family’s Hands to Yours”.

Answers H6, H1

One h1, and it is about Orox

The concept has a single h1 — “A lifetime. In the making.” The live homepage has three, all carousel labels, and the first announces to a screen reader as “Left timeless for all Right” because the carousel buttons sit inside the heading.

Answers H1

Header, nav, main and footer are real elements

The concept has one header, five nav regions, a main and a footer. The live homepage has a main and nothing else, so a screen reader user has one place to jump to and it is the entire page. This costs nothing visually and it is the difference between usable and not.

Answers A2

Twenty-one of twenty-eight images describe themselves

Real alt text on every product and workshop photograph, with alt="" kept for the seven that are genuinely decorative. On the live homepage it is 46 images out of 47 marked decorative — an instruction to a screen reader to skip a page made entirely of product photography.

Answers A1

Named products, with a reason to click each one

The Luna Bag, “Your day, beautifully carried”. The Merces Cross, “Hands free. Possibilities open.” The Vertical Bifold, “A smaller footprint. A lasting impression.” Each with its colour named and a “Make it yours” link. The live homepage's equivalent row is headed “Timeless for all” and splits into For Him, For Her and Accessories.

Answers H3, C3

One piece of motion, and it earns its place

A leather seal travels the page from hero to footer, tracks the pointer, flips on click or tap, and can be focused and operated from the keyboard. Under prefers-reduced-motion its passive rotation stops. It is the only non-user-triggered movement on the page — there is no carousel that moves on its own, and no fade-up on every section.

Answers no finding — it is here because the page needed one moment of movement, and this is it

04What it does not do yet

The concept answers three of the four priorities. Here is the honest account of the fourth, and of what is still to design.

Prices are not on the concept yet

The product cards name the piece and the colour but not the price, so the first priority from the research — something buyable in the first phone screen — is only half answered. Prices come from the live Shopify products and go in at build.

The three promises are not at the buy point

Free hand-stamped monogramming, the limited lifetime warranty and free shipping over $500 are the store's strongest commercial facts. The concept mentions the warranty and does not yet mention the monogram or the threshold. They belong in the announcement bar and under every buy button, and that is a product-page change more than a homepage one.

This is the homepage only

The collection, product, search and cart pages are where most of the critical findings live — the broken desktop sticky bar, the missing no-results state, the duplicate collections. They are the next thing to design, and the audit is already the brief for them.