Overview
Duluth Trading Company, a retail brand known for its durable, workwear-inspired apparel, turned to Userlytics to help strengthen its UX foundation during a key website redesign. With only one person leading UX research internally, the team needed a strategic partner to support testing, provide expert guidance, and scale research without adding headcount.
The partnership enabled Duluth to explore user expectations around filtering behavior, generate actionable insights, and align design decisions with actual user preferences.
The Challenge
With only one person overseeing UX research, Duluth Trading Company faced limitations in scaling insights across the organization during a high-stakes website redesign. Internal demand for customer input was growing, but the team lacked the time and resources to run consistent, structured testing. Additionally, when the previous UX research lead left the company, continuity became another major hurdle.
At the same time, stakeholders were expressing strong opinions about preferred competitor experiences, particularly around product filtering, but without any user-backed validation. Duluth needed a trusted partner to help bridge resource gaps, support strategic decision-making, and generate persuasive insights to align cross-functional teams around the user’s voice.
The Approach
To support Duluth Trading Company’s UX efforts during a major website redesign, our UX Consulting team stepped in as a strategic partner, offering hands-on guidance, research execution, and reporting support for the team of one.
With limited internal bandwidth and growing pressure to validate design decisions, the retailer leveraged our expertise to efficiently explore user expectations around product filter placement. We collaborated closely to develop a structured, unmoderated study comparing two competitor sites, each showcasing different filtering layouts.
Our strategy included:
- Designing a targeted script focused on users’ natural filtering behaviors, ease of use, and layout preferences.
- Managing participant recruitment and study implementation through the Userlytics platform.
- Delivering a comprehensive report to support stakeholder conversations and future design planning.
Rather than stretching internal resources thin, Duluth was able to access high-quality insights quickly and confidently, ensuring the team’s direction was backed by real user feedback.
The Insights
Userlytics played a pivotal role in helping Duluth Trading Company validate a key usability question that had generated strong opinions internally: should their future product filters appear at the top of the page or along the side?
With the support of our UX Consulting team, Duluth designed and ran an unmoderated usability study comparing filter placements on two well-known outdoor apparel websites—one using a top-of-page filtering layout, the other using a left-side (sidebar) approach.
This approach allowed Duluth to observe user behavior in realistic shopping scenarios, identifying which filtering layout users discovered more easily, interacted with more efficiently, and preferred overall. The study also explored whether participants could track active filters, how the layouts supported decision-making, and which setup aligned best with their mental models.
The findings provided clarity: while both layouts had advantages, users consistently appreciated filter placements that were highly visible, logically grouped, and clearly reflected applied selections. Importantly, users didn’t just react to the layout; they responded to discoverability, filter feedback, and overall usability.
“Userlytics helped us validate the data so that our stakeholders could make an informed decision. Qualitative and quantitative research of such depth and scale is a phenomenon! It is highly recommended.”
– Michelle Kang, User Researcher, Duluth Trading Company
By grounding stakeholder discussions with user-backed insights, Duluth gained the credibility needed to align cross-functional teams on next steps. The study also became a valuable proof of concept, demonstrating the value of lean, targeted testing during a critical redesign phase.
For the company’s sole UX researcher, this study reinforced what’s possible with the right tools and partnership in place. Instead of waiting for resources or internal consensus, she was able to quickly generate compelling evidence and move forward with clarity and confidence.
Userlytics helped Duluth:
- Validate a high-visibility design question with real customer input
- Build stakeholder alignment based on evidence, not assumption
- Explore UX decisions efficiently, without added headcount
- Establish a research process that can scale across future site updates
