Meytal Dahan
Partners
Back to products

Furniture & Retail

Shomrat Hazorea

An e-commerce platform for a leading Israeli furniture company, offering a curated range of high-quality, design-led pieces.

Type

B2C

Role

Product Designer

Scope

  • E-commerce UX
  • Guided selling
  • Information architecture
  • Responsive web

Shomrat HaZorea is one of Israel's leading furniture and home design retail chains. Like most traditional retailers of its size, the brand already had an e-commerce platform - but the existing user experience was purely transactional and technical: a standard catalog focused mainly on specifications and rows of products, with no real space for lifestyle inspiration or personal connection. The new platform was created to change that. The goal was to design an immersive, inspiration-led shopping experience that addresses the deep psychological barriers customers face when purchasing high-ticket furniture online - while balancing clear information architecture with rich media, intelligent logic, and intuitive tools for guiding user decisions.

01 · Section

Guided Selling Experience

The experience of interacting with a physical in-store sales advisor, designed to solve the problem of choice overload. Users enter a clean and intuitive interface where a virtual assistant, "Asaf," guides them through the process using simple, conversational questions. Instead of complex technical filters, decisions are made through visual cards and intuitive language that simplifies the decision-making process. While the user engages with the assistant in the center of the screen, the left side of the interface updates in real time, continuously surfacing the most relevant product results.

02 · Section

From Inspiration to Conversion (Homepage)

The new homepage was designed to bridge the gap between open-ended browsing and making a purchase decision. Instead of overwhelming users with an endless grid of products, the page creates a focused and guided experience that helps users efficiently reach their intended destination. A clean information architecture establishes visual clarity and reduces cognitive load, enabling users to move through the journey naturally and with minimal effort.

03 · Section

Overcoming Hesitations - The Product Page

Purchasing high-ticket furniture online is often accompanied by concerns around dimensions, comfort, and trust. The new product page was designed as a "friction remover": The purchase area centralizes configuration and color selection in a simple, intuitive way, alongside a rich media gallery that includes video of the product in real home environments, helping users better understand scale and proportions. Critical logistical details are presented through collapsible accordion components, keeping the page clean and focused on conversion.

04 · Section

Outcome

The result is a complete, modern e-commerce platform that transforms the traditional furniture buying journey into a smart, seamless, and conversion-driven digital experience. By combining a clean, modular information architecture with interactive inspiration-driven solutions, the site successfully balances open-ended browsing with a significant reduction in cognitive load for the user. The project's standout feature - the Guided Selling experience powered by a virtual sales assistant - effectively solves the consumer problem of choice overload by simulating a human consultation and delivering a dynamic, real-time personalized results feed. Ultimately, the new platform not only elevates the brand experience but also serves as a powerful business tool that bridges the gap between physical and digital retail, maximizing conversion potential at every stage of the customer journey.

See it live

Next product

Begin Heritage Center

Digital Platform for a National Heritage Institution

Insights

More on Shomrat Hazorea.

View all insights
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering LeadersIndustry-Specific Accessibility

Accessibility When the Product Is a Sofa You Can't Touch

Accessibility on a furniture platform has a trap specific to the industry: we sell with sensory richness — in-home video, fabrics, color, a configuration drill-down down to the foam in a pillow. The more immersive that gets, the easier it is to quietly exclude people who can't consume it visually. So our brief wasn't generic WCAG compliance. It was: every visual decision needs a real non-visual equivalent. Swatches need names and state, not just hue. A live results feed that updates silently is invisible to a screen reader. Accessibility is a parallel interaction contract — not a CSS pass at the end. Especially when the product is a sofa you can't touch.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Studio & Agency

Enterprise-Grade E-Commerce Projects: Why Your Studio Needs an Expert in Complex Configurators

Studio leaders: an e-commerce project for a large retail chain is a golden opportunity — but it demands expertise in product configurators and enterprise-grade commerce logic. My experience on the Shomrat Hazorea platform lets your studio present a "seal of approval" and close large projects without the learning curve.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering Leaders

Designing a Configurator With Complex Logic: How Do You Prevent Performance Collapse on 3D Display Screens?

Engineering leaders: product configurators with 3D displays collapse when the designer thinks "what's prettiest" instead of "what's most efficient." In the Shomrat Hazorea project we developed Progressive Loading with a Performance Impact review for every decision. Design + performance from day one = a product that works in production.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering LeadersDesign Systems

Why the Shomrat HaZorea Design System Was an Engineering Decision, Not a Cosmetic One

On Shomrat HaZorea's e-commerce rebuild, I stopped pitching the design system as 'consistency' and started pitching it as infrastructure. A configurator that drills from fabric to the foam inside a pillow is expensive to maintain if every control is bespoke. Shared, documented components let R&D spend its energy on the genuinely hard problem — the real-time results feed — instead of rebuilding buttons. A design system isn't a paint job. It's the contract that makes ambitious UX survivable.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Project ManagersDelivery & Handoff to Development

A Handoff Built for the Hardest Screens First

Handoff is where timelines quietly slip — not from one big failure, but from a hundred "quick questions" mid-sprint. On the Shomrat HaZorea redesign, I handed off the hardest screens first: the guided selling flow with its real-time feed, and a product page that lets you configure a sofa down to the foam in the pillow. I specified states, not just layouts — loading, empty, updating, every configuration branch. The goal was to answer the developer's questions before they had to ask. A handoff isn't a folder of pretty frames. It's the contract that keeps the build moving without routing every ambiguity back through you.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Project Managers

Managing a Digital Project in a Retail Chain: Syncing Commerce, Inventory, and Field Teams

Project managers in retail chains: the challenge is syncing digital with physical. In the Shomrat Hazorea project we mapped every "sync loop" at the requirements stage: order > inventory > branch > warehouse > customer. The result: zero late surprises. Investing in a flow map at the start of the project = saving months down the line.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
CEOs

Digital as a Force Multiplier for the Physical Chain: How Do You Raise Sales Without Hurting Your Branches?

CEOs of physical chains: don't be afraid of digital — turn it into a "force multiplier" for your branches. In the Shomrat Hazorea project we designed a process where the customer researches on the site and arrives at the branch with the rep already knowing what they were looking for, what budget, and which models. Digital = the branch's ally, not its replacement.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Founders

A D2C E-Commerce Startup: How Do You Outflank the Giants With a Premium Configurator Experience?

D2C founders: you can't beat Amazon on price — but you can beat them on experience. In the Shomrat Hazorea project we built a configurator with an interactive preview of every choice. The customer reaches checkout with certainty, return rates drop, referrals rise. Competition = depth of experience, not price.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
CEOsSpecific Feature ROI

What 'Asaf' Really Buys You: The ROI of Guided Selling

Every CEO asks the same fair question about a new feature: what's the return? On our furniture e-commerce platform, the costly failure isn't a slow page — it's a hesitant high-ticket buyer who quietly leaves. So our guided selling assistant, Asaf, targets that exact cost: conversational questions and visual cards instead of an intimidating filter wall, with results updating live. The ROI isn't one magic number. It's fewer drop-offs at consideration, cleaner demand signal for merchandising, and showroom staff freed to close instead of orient. Tie a feature to the specific cost it removes — then it funds itself in the conversation.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Product ManagersTypography & Visual Hierarchy

Typography Did the Heavy Lifting in Removing Choice Overload

Furniture shoppers rarely abandon because they lack information. They abandon because everything competes for attention at once. On Shomrat HaZorea's rebuild, typography and hierarchy became the tool for sequencing decisions: inspiration first, configuration next, logistics quiet and collapsible. We removed overload without removing a single feature. Hierarchy decides what users notice and in what order — that ordering is a product decision, not a visual one.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Project ManagersUsability Testing

Testing the Guided Experience Before It Cost Us a Sprint

Replacing furniture-site filters with a conversational guided experience was our riskiest bet on the Shomrat HaZorea redesign. The instinct is to test it once it's polished. That's the most expensive time to find out it doesn't work. We tested the guided flow early, while changes were still a design edit and not an engineering rebuild. Each round retired a category of risk before it could become a mid-sprint surprise. Usability testing isn't validation theater. Scheduled against your riskiest assumption, it's the cheapest insurance a project plan can buy.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering LeadersProject-Specific Data Visualization

The Real-Time Results Feed Is Data Visualization Disguised as Shopping

It looks like shopping, but Shomrat HaZorea's Guided Selling feed is really data visualization: a live, filtered view of a large multi-attribute catalog that re-renders the instant a customer changes one criterion. For R&D it's the same problem as any responsive data view — coherent state, immediate updates, no stale or flickering entries. The feed has to visibly reconcile as choices narrow, because the user is trusting that what they see is what they chose. Treat the catalog as a live visualization, not a list, and the conversation starts to feel intelligent.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
FoundersFrom MVP to Full Version

Shipping the Furniture Platform Without Shipping a Shell

A tempting MVP for our furniture platform would've been the old transactional site with new paint. It would've proven nothing — except that we can restyle product rows. The real bet was removing the psychological barriers of buying high-ticket furniture online. So the MVP had to carry one honest slice of that thesis end to end: a choice-reducing homepage into a product page that genuinely removes friction. The guided selling assistant came as the next ring out, not a launch blocker. An MVP isn't the smallest thing you can ship. It's the smallest thing that can prove — or kill — your core claim.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering LeadersInternationalization (i18n)

Designing the Furniture Platform So i18n Isn't a Rewrite

i18n on an Israeli furniture platform doesn't start with 'maybe we expand later.' It starts with Hebrew being right-to-left. Our guided selling flow — conversational cards, a live results feed, a deep configuration drill-down from fabric to foam — is precisely the UI that breaks ugly when direction and strings are bolted on after the fact. The concern I kept raising with engineering wasn't translation cost. It was structural debt: are we hard-coding layout direction into components, or letting the design system resolve it as an input? The cheapest internationalization is the architecture that never assumed one language in the first place.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
FoundersAI Strategy in the Product

Where AI Earns Its Place in a Furniture Buying Journey

The lazy AI strategy was obvious: bolt a chatbot on the furniture site, announce 'AI,' move on. I pushed the other way. The real job to be done: people stall on high-ticket furniture because choice is overwhelming and stakes feel high. So our assistant, Asaf, points intelligence at exactly that moment — conversational visual cards and a live results feed replacing an intimidating filter wall. Founders, the trap is treating AI as a category to check off instead of a tool aimed at one painful job. Do one thing that visibly moves someone from paralysis to a shortlist. That beats sprinkling 'AI' everywhere as novelty.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Project ManagersDocumentation & Organizational Handoff

Documenting So the Platform Outlives the Project

A redesign isn't done when it ships. It's done when the organization can run and extend it without the people who built it. On the Shomrat HaZorea platform, I documented intent, not just specs — why the guided selling flow maps questions to results the way it does, the logic behind configuring a product down to the foam, what each piece is meant to remove for the customer. A component spec tells the next team what something does. It doesn't tell them why — and "why" is what they need to change it safely. Undocumented intent is the most expensive debt a project can leave behind.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
FoundersColor & Psychology

Color as a Trust Signal When You're Asking Someone to Buy a Sofa Online

Selling a sofa online is a trust problem before it's a commerce problem. At Shomrat HaZorea we used color to lower that barrier: a warm, home-led palette instead of a clinical 'sale' look, honest fabric and finish rendering so color informs a real decision, and accent color reserved for the next step so guidance feels gentle. Color isn't decoration on a high-ticket purchase. It's how the brand whispers 'you can trust this' before a word is read.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Product Managers

Designing a Complex Product Configurator: How Do You Let a Customer "Build" a Piece of Furniture Without Losing Them?

Product managers in e-commerce for complex products: you offer hundreds of combinations — and lose customers to decision paralysis. In the Shomrat Hazorea project we built a configurator with Progressive Decision Making and Visual Preview First: the customer makes choices in a natural order and sees the result instantly. Lots of options = a win, but only if the design guides the way.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
CEOsPersonalization & Tailored Models

Personalization That Respects How People Actually Buy Furniture

Personalization gets pitched to CEOs as an engine that magically always knows the customer. Furniture humbles that story: people buy a sofa rarely, deliberate hard, and care about one specific room. So the personalization that matters isn't cross-the-web tracking — it's tailoring inside the session. Our assistant builds a live picture of taste through conversational cards, and the results feed reshapes around what the shopper actually responds to. A tailored model of intent, assembled where the signal is strongest and the shopper is consenting by participating. Be wary of promising a permanent profile in a category with long gaps between purchases. Personalization earns trust by being visibly helpful — not by knowing more than the purchase justifies.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Product ManagersUser Research

What Stops People From Buying a Sofa Online

The hardest part of furniture e-commerce isn't the catalog — it's the hesitation before someone spends real money on something they can't touch. On the Shomrat HaZorea redesign, our research didn't ask "what features do we want?" It asked "why do people abandon and drive to the showroom instead?" That reframing changed the roadmap. We stopped prioritizing filters and started prioritizing the removal of psychological barriers: choice overload, no sense of the product at home, configuration anxiety. Research isn't the step before the work. It's how you decide which problem is even worth building.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Product ManagersMicro-interactions & Animation

Micro-interactions Are How Guided Selling Earns Its Trust

The most important animation in Shomrat HaZorea's Guided Selling isn't a flourish — it's the results feed updating in real time as you answer Asaf's cards. That instant feedback IS the product: it proves each choice is shaping the outcome. Micro-interactions here aren't polish-backlog items; they're how the core mechanic tells you it's working. My rule for the team: every motion must confirm, reveal, or guide. Anything else is just latency wearing a costume.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Product ManagersFirst-Run Onboarding

Onboarding Without a Tutorial: How a First-Time Furniture Shopper Finds Their Footing

Treat furniture e-commerce onboarding like a SaaS product tour and you lose people fast — nobody browsing for a sofa sits through five coachmarks. On Shomrat HaZorea I made onboarding disappear into the experience. The inspiration-led homepage orients you in seconds, and Asaf's conversational cards walk a newcomer into the catalog with no filter taxonomy to learn. The real measure isn't 'did they finish the tour' — it's 'do they know where they are in the first few seconds.' The best onboarding is just a product that explains itself.

Read
Shomrat Hazorea
Engineering LeadersR&D Collaboration

Designing a Real-Time Feed With Engineering, Not At Them

A real-time results feed that responds as a shopper answers visual questions is as much an R&D problem as a design one. On the Shomrat HaZorea guided selling experience, I didn't design it in isolation and throw it over the wall. I brought engineering in while the interaction was still moving — sharing intent, not just a finished comp. Knowing the cost of an interaction made me a better designer. It told me where instant feedback was worth it, and where a small simplification kept things smooth without overbuilding. Involve R&D while the design is still negotiable. Feasibility should shape the concept — not gut it at handoff.

Read