Problem statement
How might we create a seamless, informative, and enjoyable online shopping experience that empowers both beginners and seasoned plant lovers to find, purchase, and care for plants with confidence?
Research
Our research began with user interviews, revealing four major pain points that informed the design process: users often received plants that didn’t match their expectations, lacked care information, struggled to find matching accessories like pots and soil, and had difficulty identifying the right soil for their plants. With this in mind, we created personas and user journeys to better empathize with our target audience. Additionally, a competitive audit of major plant shops on the market highlighted gaps in care advice, matching accessories, and educational content, which became key design opportunities for our platform. To identify potential design solutions it is necessary to come up with as many design ideas as possible. Competitive audit helped us to generate ideas. Other ideation techniques such as “How might we” and “Crazy Eight” contributed to idea generation as well. We selected those ideas which we will use: clear filtering system; implementing plant care labeling and providing short information on a product detail page, as well as a separate menu page; provide matching accessories when selecting an item. To create a clear organizational path of the information presented on the page, we prioritized hierarchical structure and created hierarchical sitemap. Sitemap helped find out where content should be and show the relationship between different pages. A user start their journey with homepage, then go to the parent pages (plants, accessories, plant care tips, contact, my cart). The child pages are represented by other diverse subcategories such as different categories of plants, soil and tools, plant care tutorials, delivery information, payment, etc.
Designs and testing
We focused on addressing key user pain points by prioritizing clear information structure and usability. Design solutions included plant care labels on product pages, a dedicated "Plant Care" section, and the ability to purchase matching accessories, such as pots and soil, alongside plants. We first created low fidelity wireframes followed by digital wireframes and prototype. For the usability study we employed 5 participants of different age and background. We performed unmoderated usability study, participants completed the tasks at their homes. The goal of usability study was to figure out difficulties users may encounter when using a website, such as product selection process, placing an order, finding information and using navigation. Participants interacted with the website, completed specified tasks, and answered follow up questions. After, they were presented with the System Usability Scale where they had to select one of the items on the Likert scale ranges from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Prototyping and usability testing with five participants revealed additional areas for improvement, including navigation issues and the need for clearer labeling. Based on feedback, we refined the website's structure and added user-friendly features like filtering options and detailed care instructions.
Results and learnings
Key takeaways
The final design incorporates light, clean visuals that reflect the natural, calming theme of plants, and provides users with a comprehensive, intuitive platform for buying and caring for their plants. When working on the project, we understood how important was plant care advice for users. Even experienced plant caretakers do not know some details about certain plants. When making a purchase, it is good to know what care requirements plants have and what treatment they need. We provided information on how much light or watering a plant need, whether it needs to be replanted often, etc. We also added a separate page “Plant Care” with tips and video tutorials. The importance of matching plant accessories might be underestimated in the beginning, however it is essential to provide users with options, such as matching pot or soil. There might be much more implemented in this area, such as motivating users for collaboration and creating tips' sharing options. Adding a community component might be considered as a next opportunity to build.
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