Ironhack — Local e-Commerce: New Leaf Flores
This week’s Ironhack project was devoted to local e-commerce, certainly an interesting topic given the situation with Covid. We are going to focus on developing a great online shopping experience for a wonderful local florist, New Leaf Flores.
Our client, New Leaf Flores, currently operates on the west side of Boston and have been open for 15 years now. By aiding New Leaf Flores with an e-commerce function, this will allow them to become more completive in the market.
Starting with How to Better Understand
We started with research to better understand our customer base. Our user profile was targeted to recent customers in the past six months. Since the flower industry rely on occasions, large groups and events is another key user to focus on. Most florist rely on weddings, corporate events and other general events as a large source of revenue.
The Lean UX Canvas facilitated our research into discovering a business strategy. Our business problem was that New Leaf Flores lacked an online ordering system. We planned to help them create this while considering users and business online ordering needs.
This chart helped us compare New Leaf Flores to other direct and indirect competition. .
We saw that indirect competitors such as 1–800-Flowers and… had an established online presence and useful website with online ordering systems.
We were able to interview the Owner of New Leaf Flores and he gave us good feedback about their e-commerce. The owners don’t want to be like the corporations and don’t want to put forward a set of floral arrangement that consumers are going to pick, he wants to be more personalized. They want to be able to give the customer something that is custom, fresh, and high quality.
“A customer today was not at all happy with our website because …well, because our website didn’t show pictures of arrangements that I’m going to make for them today. She wanted to know the name of every flower in the arrangement … the thing is, that’s going to be different every day.”
— Jeb Taylor, Owner, New Leaf Flores
When interviewing a frequent customer, we discovered that consumers call up local florist to discuss her needs and how might they meet those. Some key insights were people want to know what flowers are current and fresh and how might the florist meet their customization needs. 90 percent of consumers shop online to save time and preferred local florist rather than large corporations.
The Owner is looking to stay local and creative without losing control of their workload. The customer also wanted to convey emotions when deciding on floral arrangements.
Customers wanted to engage in the process and the journey map shows us the connection with users and the ordering logistics with New Leaf. While walking through the user process we were able to discover the touchpoints on the website that needed improvement. The current website offers a quick and standard form to place an order.
After going through th e UX research process and discovering what the customer is going through, what the business wants and needs are, and where there is room for opportunity. The problem is the lack of e-commerce function currently and that needs to be created. The customer needs to know what they are going to get, and they get what they expect. This brough us to our how might we statements.
How might we…create an ordering portal to meet those needs of the users and the stakeholders.
How might we… help the customers express their emotions through giving this gift and how is New Leaf Flores going to be able to meet those needs.
How might we… help New Leaf Flores accurately give examples of an order to give them without having to the customer that cookie cutter model example.
Develop Success from Failures
We were able to take a lot of those ideas we created in the brainstorming session and bring them into the must have section. The patterned that we saw from user what the need to have a custom arrangement. So, into this custom arrangement tool, we want to be able to have this filter function to create a mood board. With that customers are going to be able to put forth the emotion they want to convey to the person that Is going to be receiving the for the price they want to pay, what the occasion is going to be for and if they have likes and dislikes of flowers.
We want to show in this value proposition canvas with linking up the customer side and business side is that the job to be done is giving something that conveys emotion.
We were able to take a lot of those ideas we created in the brainstorming session and bring them into the must have section. The patterned that we saw from user is the need to have a custom arrangement creator to help aid in the ordering process.
With the how might we, we need the ordering portal, we need customers not to be confused about what they are going to get, we need to really show the customers emotions.
The MVP is custom arrangement creator and will present images of arrangements filtered by their preferences for price, occasion, and emotion. Users will then form a mood board of their favorite images. New leaf will use these preferences and images to create a custom arrangement for the intended recipient.
To create a prototype, we worked on building a flow chart and site map of the website. The site map provided valuable insights on how the user might visit the website and how-to best layout the new feature and guarantee a more expected flow for users. We took the opportunity create a lo-fi prototype of the online ordering portal. This helped us make adjustments and think about different ways to lay out the redesign. Our mid-fi prototype offered customer to order online, the steps were shown as the user went through the process of custom creating their arrangement.
We were able to get seven users to test the prototype with about 15 average clicks through nine pages. With this, we saw an opportunity to improve as some of the feedback stated the shop button was difficult to locate.
To ensure success with the prototype we reviewed conversion rate and bounce rate. We also used the Net Promotor Score (NPS) which measures customers satisfaction. We want to build on the existing customer loyalty.
Still Learning to Trust the Process
As I stated, I am learning to implement more the research process in order to drive the design decision making process. We have to consistently keep in mind the suer point of view and decipher user pain points and needs.
An interesting self-aware insight is the learning to flow through the process as one. It’s important to follow the steps but to remember that UX is always a living project. You can guarantee that you will need to go back into the research and really define the user goals many times.
We must always keep in mind, the why!
