Onton

Redesigning the Discover page for exploration, not just shopping.

Where: Product Design Intern, Onton

Timeline: June – August 2025

Role: User Experience Designer

The two Ontons

“The average shopper spends 79 days before making an online purchase. Onton’s mission is to reduce that decision time to zero.”

Before I joined, Onton had grown from 50,000 to over 2 million monthly visitors — and image generations were climbing. People weren’t just shopping; they were reimagining whole spaces. At the core is a personalized feed, Pinterest-like, that surfaces what each user will love. It served two audiences:

Route one — shop

  • Find a product
  • Evaluate it
  • Buy it

Route two — explore

  • Browse for ideas
  • Reimagine a space
  • Save for later

The problem

Discover’s panel behaved like a storefront — price and promos on every card — pushing explorers to evaluate before they’d finished imagining. And exploration didn’t flow: moving between the feed, a product page, and Onton’s other tools kept dropping people back into shopping.

“I want to browse like Pinterest, not shop like Amazon.”
“I’m not ready to think about price yet — I just want ideas.”
Before — prices and promotions surfaced on every card, pulling explorers into evaluation too early.
Before — prices and promotions surfaced on every card, pulling explorers into evaluation too early.

How might we let people explore freely — and still find their way to buy?

The redesign

I treated Discover as a system, not a screen. Three moves:

Let the personalized feed lead

The feed is personalized, so I designed for an output I couldn’t predict — a flexible, image-first grid that holds up whatever the algorithm returns, with price and promo stripped out so picks read as inspiration, not inventory.

Kept exploration moving

A product page used to be a dead end. I added a “More like this” button that opens a fresh feed seeded from that item — so evaluating one product starts the next hunt instead of ending it.

Connected Discover to Onton’s tools

Drag any image off the feed straight into the image tool, to reimagine a space around it, or the gather panel, to collect it. Discovery feeds creation, by hand.

  1. sketchSketch: the Discover feed grid, image-first, price tags gone.
    1.

    The personalized feed — image-first, no prices.

  2. sketchSketch: a product page opening from the feed.
    2.

    Tap a product to open its page.

  3. sketchSketch: PDP → “More like this” → new seeded feed, pink arrow between.
    3.

    “More like this” opens a fresh feed seeded from that item.

  4. sketchSketch: dragging a feed image into the image tool / gather panel.
    4.

    Drag any image into the image tool or gather panel.

After — a price-free, image-first feed built for browsing, saving, and carrying products into Onton’s other tools.
After — a price-free, image-first feed built for browsing, saving, and carrying products into Onton’s other tools.

Impact

One surface now serves both routes — buyers keep a clear path to purchase, explorers get room to browse without pressure.

What the redesign was built to move

  • More time spent exploring the feed before drop-off.
  • More products saved to the gather panel and carried into the image tool.
  • Deeper engagement with the exploratory route the company was investing in.
Mira Bella Sabbagh — Product Designer