Background

Founded by Jo Horgan in 1997, Mecca has grown from a single store in Melbourne’s South Yarra into a powerhouse of prestige beauty across Australia and New Zealand. The Mecca brand is synonymous with innovation, inclusivity, and discovery. Since launching its online store in 2001, Mecca has continued to redefine what a beauty retail experience looks and feels like — both in-store and online.

As User Experience Lead at AndMine, I was engaged to enhance and modernise the Mecca e-commerce experience through a data-led UX and UI refresh. The goal was to increase conversion rates, improve customer engagement, and streamline shopping journeys across mobile and desktop — without losing the vibrancy and glamour that define the Mecca brand.

Challenge

With a growing online audience and over 200 global beauty brands on offer, Mecca’s digital platform was under pressure to deliver both performance and personality. Key challenges included:

• Optimising UX flows using over a year’s worth of behavioural data to address drop-off points and cart abandonment

• Improving mobile usability, especially across product discovery and checkout flows

• Aligning digital touchpoints with Mecca’s in-store experience — fun, inviting, personalised, and empowering

• Increasing conversion rates while supporting a vast and ever-evolving product catalogue

• Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity for a diverse customer base

Solution

Using a data-driven approach, we identified friction points and prioritised updates to streamline the customer journey, enhance usability, and elevate the visual interface. Our solutions focused on simplifying the core e-commerce flows while enhancing Mecca’s signature experience of beauty discovery and empowerment.

Highlights of the solution:

• A restructured product discovery experience, including improved search filters, smarter recommendations, and more engaging category pages

• A redesigned product detail page (PDP) that focused on rich imagery, key product information, user-generated content, and cross-selling opportunities

• A frictionless, mobile-first checkout experience, with simplified steps, clearer CTAs, and contextual help

• Data-informed UX updates to navigation, menus, and on-site promotions to better reflect user behaviour and seasonal campaigns

• A refreshed UI design system — sleek, editorial, and clean — that allowed for bolder brand moments without overwhelming the user journey

• Enhanced support for accessibility, including improved contrast, tap targets, and semantic structure

Process

Our collaborative and iterative approach ensured stakeholder alignment and customer insight at every stage.

1. Discovery & Analysis

   • Reviewed over 12 months of behavioural and sales data to identify bottlenecks in the customer journey

   • Conducted heatmaps, scroll-depth tracking, and funnel drop-off analysis

   • Facilitated workshops with internal Mecca teams to align on KPIs, seasonal campaigns, and strategic business goals

2. UX Research & Testing

   • Interviewed frequent and first-time users to understand expectations and pain points

   • Ran usability testing on key journeys (product browsing, filtering, checkout) across devices

   • Benchmarked against leading beauty and fashion e-commerce experiences

3. Design & Prototyping

   • Developed low-fidelity wireframes for new navigation flows, PDPs, and checkout

   • Created interactive prototypes for mobile and desktop, validated with real users

   • Built a modular, responsive UI component library to support content, campaigns, and long-term scalability

4. Handoff & Optimisation

   • Delivered detailed specs and documentation to development teams

   • Provided support during implementation and ran post-launch A/B testing

   • Created guidelines for future content and UX updates to ensure consistency

Results

18% increase in conversion rates within the first three months following implementation

• 28% decrease in cart abandonment, driven by a simplified checkout flow

• Higher mobile engagement, with a 35% boost in product page views on mobile

• Positive customer feedback on the updated navigation and enhanced shopping experience

• A scalable, data-informed design system ready to support Mecca’s growth across products, campaigns, and regions