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Designing for browsing, not search: Miniso

A wide, fast-changing retail range that has to stay browsable when shoppers do not know product names.

Miniso — Retail
Role
UX/UI Designer
Timeline
2020
Team
Retail, engineering
The challenge

A rotating catalogue defeats search-first design.

Shoppers cannot search for something they cannot name, so they browse — and browsing collapses when category structure stops matching how people think.

Opportunity

Structure from the shopper's language

Categories built from how people describe products, not how inventory is organised.

The solution

A grid tuned for scanning.

Consistent imagery, price and key attributes visible without interaction, and filters that visibly narrow.

Design decision

Shopper-language categories

Not inventory categories.

The structure follows the words customers use, which is what makes browsing navigable.

Design decision

A grid you can scan

Everything decision-relevant is visible.

Price and key attributes sit in the card rather than behind a hover, so comparison happens in the grid.

Outcome

Browsing supported as the primary mode.

Rather than treated as a fallback from search.