Maxisafe carries hundreds of glove models, and choosing the right one is genuinely hard: the answer depends on the hazard, the material being handled, the required standards, grip, dexterity, and a dozen edge cases an experienced rep holds in their head. That consultation could take over an hour. Our brief: make it take 30 seconds without making it worse.
The trap with selector tools is exposing the database instead of the decision. Nobody browsing gloves thinks in terms of 47 filterable attributes - they think 'I'm handling chemicals and I need grip.' So the flow asks the questions a human expert would ask, in the order they'd ask them, in plain language. The taxonomy does the translation behind the scenes.
Every question had to earn its place. Each additional step costs completions, so we pruned the tree to the minimum set of questions that still lands on a confident recommendation - and we let users skip what they don't know rather than blocking them.
The result set matters as much as the path to it. Returning one 'correct' glove feels arrogant and breaks the moment stock runs out; returning forty feels like the filter did nothing. A short ranked list with the reasoning visible - why these gloves, for your answers - is what makes distributors trust it enough to use it daily.
It's now used by hundreds of PPE distributors across Australia. The deeper lesson: the value wasn't in the interface, it was in sitting with the experts long enough to encode how they actually decide.