Centauro
Product Design, 2025
What happens when UX meets football passion?
Over six weeks, we designed and tested a new search experience that helped users explore football products more intuitively.
After successful A/B testing, the solution increased conversions by 22%, showing how UX and football passion can drive real results.
CONVERTION RATE+22%
More users completed a purchase after finding products related to their teams more quickly.
PRODUCT DISCOVERY+15%
Team filters helped users narrow results faster and find relevant products within the catalogue
SEO↑
Team nicknames and chants increased keyword indexing and improved organic discoverability.
Problem
Centauro is one of the largest sports retailers in Brazil. Football is one of its most important product categories.
By 2024, conversion in Centauro’s football search journeys was declining as users struggled to quickly find products related to their teams.
As a result, high-intent searches often led to long browsing sessions or early exits, limiting product visibility and reducing purchase rates.
Approach
To understand the drop in conversion, I combined behavioural analysis with user research.
Using heatmaps, usability tests and user interviews, we analysed how football fans interacted with search results. We found that users searching for their teams often received results related to other clubs.
Users often described the search experience as too generic. When they did not find the expected product quickly, they often continued their search on Google or other retailers.
Search queries also showed that fans frequently used team nicknames rather than official names. Although Centauro’s search supported synonyms, several common nicknames were not recognised.
Based on these findings, the project was divided into two directions:
1. Focused on technical architecture improvements to better manage filters and improve product relevance.
2. Focused on redesigning the search experience to make team-related products easier to recognise and navigate.
Solution
To improve the search experience, I designed a dedicated interface for football team searches.
When users searched for a team, the experience adapted to highlight that club throughout the results and browsing journey. The solution introduced several elements to reinforce team identity:
• a specialised search component for team-based football queries
• club crests to help users quickly recognise their team
• support for team nicknames commonly used by fans
• visual covers featuring supporters and chants associated with each club
The experience also adapted the site’s colour scheme to reflect the team’s primary colours, extending the identity across the entire shopping journey after the search.
These elements made the search experience more recognisable and engaging for football fans, while helping users quickly identify products related to their teams.
Outcomes & Learning
The redesigned search experience improved product discovery and increased conversion within the football category.
By prioritising team identity in search results, users were able to recognise relevant products faster and navigate the catalogue with less effort.
This project showed that designing search experiences around team identity can help transform high-intent searches into product discovery and purchases.