bol
Client
bol
Bol is the largest e-commerce platform in the Netherlands and Belgium, connecting millions of products from thousands of partners to consumers through a marketplace built around trust and relevance.
Bol asked me to redesign the Discover phase of the bol app: the part of the journey that starts the moment someone opens the app and ends when they decide to buy something. Most of the app is built for task-driven shopping, but a smaller group of users, "fun-shoppers", open the app with no concrete goal at all. They just want to browse. The challenge was to design an experience that meets them there: one that offers inspiration and guidance instead of requiring a search term or a plan.
Duration
15 weeks
Research → Synthesis → Concepts → Testing → Final Product
Project
My interpretation
I translated the research into a personalized "Voor Jou" (For You) feed: an endless, visually driven scroll experience that replaces the search-first homepage with inspiration-first browsing. Users shape their own feed through a short swipe interaction, choosing themes that interest them, after which the app builds a feed around those preferences. Saving a product is reduced to a single tap on a heart icon, and related products are surfaced right there to keep the discovery going. The design deliberately strips away anything that could interrupt that flow, no prominent search bar, no pop-ups, no forced choices, so browsing stays effortless.
Challenge
The hardest part wasn't designing screens, it was resisting the obvious solution. Bol's brief leaned toward conversational AI, but weeks of interviews, observations and desk research showed that fun-shoppers don't want a conversation, they want to look around without being asked anything. Every concept had to be checked against that insight, which meant cutting features that looked appealing on paper: gamification wasn't something users asked for, mood-based entry points confused more than they helped, and a "build your own feed" selector felt like too much effort for a passive audience. Hick's Law came up constantly in testing: more choices meant more hesitation, so the real design work was in what to leave out.
Outcome
User testing with the Hi-Fi prototype confirmed the core direction: the "Voor Jou" feed was consistently described as calmer, more varied and more inspiring than the current homepage, and the swipe-based personalization was received as playful and low-effort rather than a chore. It also surfaced a clear next step: the feed itself works, but users don't discover it on their own. My recommendations for bol focus on making the personalized feed more visible on first use, lowering the barrier into the swipe interaction, and keeping conversational AI as an optional layer for higher-intent moments (like a saved-products screen) rather than baking it into the core browsing flow. The project reinforced something I keep coming back to as a designer: good research doesn't just generate ideas, it's just as useful for telling you which ones to let go of.
