Medgal — Product Catalog & Information Architecture

Medgal manufactures orthopedic implants and instruments — hundreds of products across multiple systems, generations, and anatomical areas, sold to distributors, surgeons, and patients across Europe. As sole end-to-end designer, I replaced a fragmented experience — category pages on the site, detailed product data locked in separate PDF catalogs — with one searchable, filterable system. The same principle — one clear path per need, not a static document — carried through the rest of the site.

Medgal manufactures orthopedic implants and instruments — hundreds of products across multiple systems, generations, and anatomical areas, sold to distributors, surgeons, and patients across Europe. As sole end-to-end designer, I replaced their PDF-only product catalog with a searchable, filterable system built to handle that complexity. The same principle — one clear path per need, not a static document — carried through the rest of the site.

I audited the existing site and reviewed five direct and indirect competitors. Despite operating through an extensive distributor network across Poland and Europe, the company — like most of its competitors — still split product discovery between category pages and separate downloadable PDF catalogs. None of the five competitors let visitors browse from a category all the way to an individual product on the website itself. This revealed a clear gap between the scale of the business and the digital experience available to its customers.

BEFORE — Product discovery was split between the website and PDF catalogs.

The website helped users find a category. Detailed product information lived elsewhere.

Product areaProduct categoryLimited category infoDownloadsPDF catalog

AFTER — Multiple paths to the right product

Users can start with what they know — a product type, system, or body part — and progressively narrow the catalog to the right product.

Product type+System+Body partIndividual product page

The catalog had to make a genuinely complex product range easy to navigate, so I designed a filtering system around three dimensions: product category (e.g. bolts, plates, screws), system/generation, and body part. Users could start from any dimension and combine filters to progressively narrow the results — for example, starting with a body part and then refining by product type and system to find compatible products. Active filters were surfaced as removable pills above the results, making the current selection visible and easy to adjust.

Because the product range was difficult to navigate by name alone, search became a second primary entry point rather than an afterthought. Product pages then supported the final decision with full specifications, downloadable data sheets, and compatible implants from the same system, allowing surgeons and distributors to confirm fit without leaving the page.

The redesign addressed the core structural problem: a large, technical product range where browsing stopped at the category level, with product-level detail locked away in separate PDFs. Products moved from static PDF catalogs into a searchable system with three-dimension filtering, and that same structure — one clear path per need — extended to documentation, patient content, and distributor inquiries. The result was an information architecture built around how people actually look for a product, not around the company’s internal categories.

This project reinforced how much of a complex digital product is defined before the interface itself. The real challenge wasn’t visual design — it was turning a large, technical product range into something people could navigate without knowing exact product names. Building the filtering logic taught me that strong information architecture isn’t about organizing content into categories; it’s about giving people multiple honest ways into it.