You buy a plugin on a hunch about how it'll sound. There's no box to pick up, no shop to walk into — the product page is the product experience. I took a boutique audio-software company off a dated Wix site and rebuilt it as a custom Shopify storefront where you can understand a plugin, hear it, and buy it inside one scroll.
Research, UX, UI, visual design and the front-end build were all mine — no collaborators, no handover. That's the reason several of the decisions below exist.
A template was standing in for a manufacturer.
Klein sells dynamics and saturation plugins to producers who land mid-session with a specific problem in the mix. The old Wix storefront led with a catalogue and buried the one thing that actually sells a plugin — the sound.
Audio demos sat below the catalogue, if they appeared at all. For a dynamics processor the sound is the sales pitch — it belongs on the product page, in context, next to the price.
System requirements, licence terms, activation and iLok were fine print or absent. In this market they decide the sale rather than footnote it.
A free trial, no dongle and a perpetual licence are the strongest arguments this business has against the big subscription vendors — and none of them were stated anywhere a visitor would see.
Meet the category's conventions, then beat them on clarity.
Six weeks, one product waiting to launch — so discovery stayed proportionate. An audit of the old site, a teardown of how the category sells, and the founder's support inbox as the source of real objections.
In this category nobody buys on a feature list. They buy after hearing the difference — which means the comparison has to be immediate, and it has to be honest.
The difference a dynamics processor makes is only obvious in the instant you switch. Any player that restarts the audio loses the very thing it exists to demonstrate.
An existing owner hunting for an update in a footer becomes an email. Downloads belongs in the primary navigation.
A quiet frame around a loud product.
A near-monochrome frame, so the product artwork and the waveforms carry all the colour.
What shipped, what changed, and what I'd measure.
It shipped, it trades, and the storefront now answers the two questions that used to arrive by email.
It was deciding how much technical depth a page can carry before it stops persuading and starts exhausting. Numbered slabs were the compromise: all the depth is there, it is opt-in, and it visibly ends.
Working solo across design and front-end removed the translation loss entirely. Where a layout would have needed fragile CSS to survive a long product name or a missing video, I changed the design instead of fighting it.
The customiser is a product with exactly one user — the client. Naming and grouping the fields well is what decides whether the site is still coherent a year later.
A short think-aloud with five producers before finalising the product template, specifically on where they stop scrolling. And I'd build the audio A/B as a shared component from day one.
There are no performance numbers here on purpose. Those three are the honest metrics for this build — drop real figures in and this becomes the strongest part of the case study. Invented ones would make it the weakest.
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na Gj.Senior UX and product designer. I make complicated things feel simple.