Pets at Home's department and category pages needed to do two jobs: help customers find products quickly and give the business space to promote campaigns, brands, offers and advice.

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Over time, the pages had become crowded. On mobile, important navigation was difficult to find, SEO content occupied prominent space and customers were increasingly relying on search or the main menu to move around the site.

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As part of a wider replatforming project that would bring the separate desktop and mobile experiences together, I was tasked with rethinking how these pages could better support browsing.

Before designing, I reviewed existing research, analytics and heatmaps to understand where the experience was breaking down.

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Customers were attempting to interact with a prominent but non-clickable SEO element. Others were turning to search and the main menu because useful navigation wasn't immediately available. Short scroll depths also meant that important links further down the page were often being missed.

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This changed how I approached the problem. Rather than simply reorganising the content, I focused on making navigation visible earlier, reducing the effort required to browse and giving customers clearer routes into categories, brands and offers.

My first concept combined a dropdown menu with horizontally scrolling links. Testing revealed an unexpected problem: customers struggled to understand how the two elements related to each other. The dropdown was also inconsistent with subsequent pages.

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I increased its prominence in the second prototype, which encouraged more interaction but didn't resolve the underlying confusion. Some customers still missed the navigation altogether.

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The third prototype took a simpler approach, using circular category links and clearly separated tabs. Customers navigated confidently and responded positively to the familiar interaction pattern.

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However, the business raised a valid concern: some departments had so many categories that this approach could create excessive vertical scrolling.

 

I developed a fourth option that removed the dropdown and displayed popular links horizontally, while allowing customers to switch between categories, brands and offers.

The challenge wasn't simply to choose the concept that tested well. It was to preserve that ease of use across departments with very different product ranges, while still giving merchandising teams room to promote relevant content.

 

I also explored a more structured way to present product ranges further down the page. This allowed interested customers to browse additional content without forcing everyone to scroll through it to reach what they needed.

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The resulting approach prioritised visible navigation, more manageable content and a consistent experience across mobile and desktop.

Testing showed that customers could use the refined navigation to move between categories, brands, offers and related pages. Earlier A/B testing had also indicated that providing navigation links encouraged browsing and increased purchases, reinforcing the direction of the work.

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Following stakeholder sign-off, the designs were ready to progress with the UI and development teams as part of the new platform, ahead of a phased beta release.

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The project reinforced an important principle in my approach: the simplest-looking solution often comes from exploring and testing several more complicated ones first.