Florish

Expanding Customer Reach via eCommerce

Creating an eCommerce web process to optimise the consumer's online browsing and shopping experience as well as expanding Flowers by Marilyn's business reach to drive sales.

CLIENT: Florish

MY ROLE: UX Designers,UX Research, Ideation and prototyping

TOOLS: Figma, Fijam, Slack, Zoom, Marvel

DURATION : 4 - 6 week design sprint

Project Overview

Florish is an elegant online floral boutique designed to elevate the user experience of shopping for flowers and event décor. The project aimed to create a seamless, emotionally resonant, and luxurious digital platform that inspires users and simplifies the path to purchase.

Problem Statement

Most floral e-commerce platforms lack emotional appeal, feel transactional, and present usability issues, especially around product discovery and customization. Users often seek not just flowers—but meaning, beauty, and a personalized experience.

My Approach

Brand Strategy Integration: Collaborated with brand designers to ensure the interface echoed the brand's poetic and graceful tone.
Visual Hierarchy: Employed soft imagery, a neutral color palette, and elegant typography to reinforce the luxurious and calm mood of the site.
User Flow Optimization: Designed clear CTAs like “Start your journey,” ensuring that users could begin shopping with minimal friction.
Emotive Content: Included storytelling text (e.g., “Flowers are more than petals…”) to build emotional resonance and deepen user engagement.

Project Goals

Build an elegant and intuitive e-commerce experience.
Highlight brand values: beauty, purity, and grace.
Encourage exploration and product customization.
Ensure fast and easy checkouts, even for first-time users.

Design Vision

“The goal of Florish is to create a seamless and visually captivating platform that enhances the floral shopping and event décor experience. By blending elegance with functionality, the design ensures effortless navigation, inspiring users to explore and customize with ease.”

The design vision guided the UI strategy, emphasizing soft visuals, clear structure, and emotional storytelling.

User Research & Insights

I conducted competitor analysis and informal user interviews with:

5 online flower shoppers
2 event planners
3 first-time gift buyers

Before interviewing users, we developed a discussion guide to understand user needs and pain points when ordering flowers online, as well as industry best practices. We brainstormed initial assumptions to validate or disprove through user research. Our interview guide included opening questions about recent experiences, thoughts on buying flowers, reasons for buying, and frequency of purchases. We then asked specific 'why' questions to uncover user motivations.

After synthesising our findings via affinity mapping, we were able to pinpoint the primary needs, desires, and frustrations that users experienced.

Key Findings:

Users value emotional connection when shopping for flowers.
Visual quality and simplicity heavily influence purchasing.
“Occasion-based” navigation (e.g., birthdays, weddings) is preferred over product-based filtering.

Observing users in two different florist settings, we found:

Customers inspected the freshness and quality of the flowers.

They viewed the entire range of flower arrangements available.

They also compared the pricing of flower arrangements.

From our user interviews, we found our users saying:

“I rely on photos to buy online from unknown florist”

“I use photos to make decisions because I’m not familiar with types of flowers”

These insights revealed that users make their purchases based on the visual appeal of product photos, and that they will order from unfamiliar florists if the pictures looked attractive.

“I buy flowers for special occasions and events”

Users also expressed that one of their motivations to purchase flowers was to gift it to a loved one on special occasions.

EMPATHY MAP | DEFINING OUR USER

To better understand our user, we created an empathy map to visualise what they say, think, do, and feel. This process helped identify key motivations and deepen our insights.

We found that:

Users look for visually appealing images to make a purchase decision
They search for products suited to the occasion
Users want the actual product to be similar to the online product picture

PERSONA | DEFINING OUR USER

Meet Emily Carter

Based on our research and empathy map, we created our persona, Emily Carter. She values gifting flowers to her loved ones on special occasions but lacks extensive knowledge about flowers. Her purchase decisions are largely based on the product photos.

JOURNEY MAP | UNDERSTANDING EMILY'S PURCHASE EXPERIENCE

Emily starts to feel overwhelmed during the research and decision making phase when searching for visually appealing product photos online.

While browsing for product photos online, Emily starts to feel overwhelmed and experiences decision fatigue as she is unable to decide on which product to click into or choose.

IDEATE | REFRAMING THE PROBLEM

How might we...
make product pictures more appealing?

make Emily’s purchase decision easier?

make the decision making process fun?

Using the Crazy 8 ideation method, our group brainstormed ideas for each “How Might We” statement. We did two rounds, and after each round we presented our ideas and voted on solution ideas that we thought would be able to help Emily’s problem.

Some of the main ideas that came up during our Crazy 8 sessions included:

Making product pictures stand out more using a label
Showcasing ratings, likes, and reviews on products
Adding different image angles and perspectives to show scale and product details

We voted on ideas through a group voting system, and decided to focus on one statement that would create the most valuable and achievable solution to Emily’s problem. Considering this, we decided on ‘How might we make product pictures more appealing for Emily?’

Designs

REFLECTIONS AND NEXT STEPS

Maintaining strong communication skills is vital to successfully navigating collaboration in a remote setting.

Working remotely, our team maintained good communication using Zoom, Figjam, and Figma. However, a more detailed project plan and structured daily stand-ups with time-boxing could have improved efficiency. I also learnt to be more assertive and often took on a project management role, facilitating stand-ups and monitoring progress. Overall, the project was a valuable learning experience, demonstrating strong collaboration despite the remote setup. I look forward to applying these insights in future projects.

Recommendation for next steps:

Establishing style guidelines for product labels and website branding
Conduct further user testing and reiterate on designs accordingly
Improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding audio product descriptions and making images clearer to show scale and details accurately

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