New American Stone Mills
A digital flagship for an analog craft
Rebuilt the New American Stone Mills website, contact pipeline, and three 75-page manuals into one coherent brand experience.
- 3 × 75pg Manuals rewritten Installation, operation, and maintenance — for clarity and brand consistency.
- Web + print Unified system Same voice, same design language, online and on the workshop floor.
- Sales-ready Contact pipeline Forms wired directly into the sales team's intake.
TL;DR
- Rebuilt the user flow on desktop and mobile after a deep heuristic evaluation.
- Wired customer-contact forms directly into the sales team's pipeline.
- Rewrote three 75-page manuals so the brand voice carried from web to workshop floor.
The brief
New American Stone Mills builds beautiful, heritage-style stone flour mills for working bakeries and home millers. The product is craft. The digital experience didn’t quite match.
I came on as a contract UX designer and product manager with a clear remit: make the website, the sales pipeline, and the manuals all feel like the product itself — careful, durable, clear.
What I owned
- Heuristic evaluation of the existing site, with a prioritized fix list
- Streamlined desktop + mobile user flow following user testing
- On-brand imagery refresh and UI retooling for stronger storytelling
- Customer-contact forms wired into the sales team’s intake
- SEO and analytics implementation across the company web properties
- Full rewrite of three 75-page installation, operation, and maintenance manuals
Process
1. Audit the experience like a customer would
I started with a structured heuristic evaluation — focusing on the moments where a real prospect would either trust the brand or quietly bounce. Two recurring themes:
- The site asked customers to do work the brand should do (e.g., decoding spec sheets without context)
- The contact path was buried, then dropped into a generic inbox
Both fed directly into the redesign priority list.
2. Redesign the flow, not just the surface
I restructured the navigation around the decision a prospective miller is actually making — which mill is right for me, and how do I talk to a human about it. New imagery, calmer typography, tighter content blocks, and a contact path that respected the customer’s time.
3. Make manuals part of the brand
The three manuals — installation, operation, maintenance — are the documents customers spend the most time with after the sale. I rewrote all three (75 pages each) for clarity, accuracy, and brand consistency, so the voice they meet on the website is the same voice they meet in the workshop.
4. Plumb in the data
SEO and analytics went in at the same time as the new flow, so we could actually learn from what worked. The contact forms were wired into the sales pipeline, not a generic inbox — so a prospect’s question became a tracked conversation, not a lost email.
Outcomes
- A cohesive, on-brand digital experience across desktop, mobile, and print
- A contact pipeline that feeds the sales team directly, with analytics behind it
- Three 75-page manuals that match the brand voice — and that customers actually read
- A small-business engagement that proved the ROI of doing UX seriously, even at this scale
Reflection
The most useful UX work I did at NASM wasn’t on the website at all — it was the manuals. They’re the document a customer holds in their hands while they’re trying to install a mill. Treating them like a product surface, with the same care as a website hero, was the move that made everything else feel coherent.
The site eventually shipped on a tighter, more honest flow — and the brand voice carries from the homepage all the way to a torque spec on page 47.