My role in this project was as a UX designer. I was involved from research to prototyping.
My team communicated daily to ensure we were kept up to date with project developments. We scheduled meetings via Zoom and recorded the meeting outcomes and documented any discussed ideas for future reference.
All Seasons Florist INC has been selling both flowers and houseplants since 1997. It is located in Rockville, Maryland where they offer same day delivery. All Seasons Florist INC is a member of the FTD florists with international deliveries. Their mission is to exceed their customers' expectations with quality, value and professional service. According to their customers’ reviews, they are famous for their fast service and good quality flowers.
Our team started the process with contextual research to hear about the existing problems from users. We evaluated heuristics and we did comparative/competitive analyses to have a better understanding of the market and necessary features for the website. We documented the user journey map on the current website, and conducted extensive in-person and online interviews to discover the existing pain points in the conversion funnel. Lastly, we created a new UX design that takes into account our goal.
Observing, listening and learning
To learn about business needs, we visited the shop and interviewed with the owner. The majority of customers are local, but the manager was looking to increase online sales as a way of adapting to the new purchasing habits of consumers during the pandemic. Online sales also aren’t subject to the same size limitations of a physical showroom.
Contextual inquiry (onsite visit)
In order to more directly understand existing pain points of the website, our team held two in-person and two online
interviews. Our criteria for participation was that the individual self-reported as having a current or previous interest in buying flowers or plants.
We asked both survey-style and open-ended questions to better understand their existing attitudes, habits, and experiences with purchasing plants. After establishing a baseline, we asked them to sit down and browse the site as a potential user, while at the same time we observed their statements and reactions.
To better understand what makes an online flower shop liked or disliked by customers, we leveraged existing online reviews of similar shops. We read online reviews on two separate platforms, both Yelp and Shopper Approved.
The most common complaints in negative reviews were:
Positive reviews tended to mention:
We did SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to better understand the business.
Using the Heuristic evaluation approach as a model, we made another pass at reviewing the business website and organized our findings under four high-level themes.
Selling the business to the user
Finding the desired product
Standard design and behavior Conventions
The Checkout experience
A total redesign of the website is needed to build trust with the customer and increase sales.
Size: 5 potential users
Device: Mac Laptop and Windows PC
Task: Find a product of interest and complete your
purchase until the checkout point
User success Radial Progress
To understand the landscape of competitors we chose eight flower and plant shops that had similar products and e-commerce experience that is comparable to our goals.
Competitor analysis helped us decide what to put on the homepage. It provided insights into the features, functions, and flows. It uncovered valuable opportunities to create a product that could stand out from the competition.
Key missing features
Many newer online flower shops support subscriptions -- ie. scheduling regular deliveries of flowers. ASF does not currently offer subscriptions so users who want them may end up switching to competitors that offer them. By adding the feature, ASF would be matching offerings to larger online flower services. Subscriptions have the added advantage in that they can offer a more steady source of revenue in a business where revenue is normally cyclical.
We conducted an affinity diagram to separate the data into groups of major problems which further helped us in creating our persona.
Important for products
ASF pain points
The website will be redesigned based on Ryan’s needs and preferences.
To better understand the ways users can interact with the site, and navigate through their goals, we constructed a user flow according to our Persona’s needs. This flow shows Ryan’s journey from entering the website to order a plant to surprise his girlfriend, Julia.
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We used a user-centric approach to define the IA for redesigning ASF website.
Card sorting: 61 cards and 16 responses
Open card sorting — Users were asked to name every group they’ve defined for given content on the cards. Open card sorting could not help us because the users' understanding of the topics were not integrated.
Closed card sorting — Users were asked to sort the cards into the given pre-defined groups. The closed card sort worked better for us to understand how users sort content items into each category.
Closed card sorting was key to label categories and form the new Navigation System. We found that IA on the current site was a significant shortcoming for users. After the card sorting insights we created a visual sitemap to footprint how each page relates to the website’s hierarchy.
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Usability Plan Dashboard
Usability Testing Report
First Iteration Refinement
Second Iteration Refinement
The design solutions resolved many of the heuristic problems we initially found, and increased the user success rate
to 85%.
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User success Radial Progress after usability testing on new website
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