Blossoming Earth
Website redesign and identity for a florist and ceramicist
Timeline: 8 weeks, 80+ hours
Role: Designer, Researcher
Problem Statement
Blossoming Earth struggled with an outdated website that didn’t do the best to adequately show all it had to offer - a unique offering of ceramics and flower kits, wedding consult services, and more. As one of the main issues was a lack of cohesive brand storytelling connecting floristry to ceramics, many users would abandon their carts. Previously, they mostly took ad hoc orders through social media and are hoping to increase their legitimacy, streamline orders, and organize the highly personalized nature of the types of floral arrangements and ceramics customers can purchase.
There were a number of challenges, including the following:
Project Overview
Blossoming Earth needed a website redesign that would seamlessly unite their floral and ceramic offerings while maintaining the artisanal quality of their brand. The new design needed to create an intuitive shopping experience that would highlight the craftsmanship and creativity of the studio while making it easy for customers to purchase flowers, kits, or book into workshops.
Hypothesis
User goals
Blossoming Earth customers would need a site that lets them:
Access product information easily
Navigate between different categories seamlessly
Find relevant product information quickly
Complete purchases with minimal friction
Easily browse and purchase both floral arrangements and ceramics
Schedule floral wedding consultation appointments online
Understand the brand's unique value proposition and offerings, including Ikebana sets
Research
Competitor Analysis
When looking at main competitors in the area, a lot of the weaknesses from the other retailers were exactly what Blossoming Earth was already seeking to address in the website redesign. These included features such as ensuring a frictionless checkout flow, and making the website architecture clearer, so these were already top of mind for the business owner.
The three competitors we looked at had clear and identified strengths, such as unique product propositions, a clearly defined customer base, and in most cases, simple and clear information throughout. However, at least one of the competitors - a large nationwide online retailer - had too many product offerings, confusing and duplicative categorization of their products, and too broad of a customer base to actually seem appealing to any one type of customer. All these factors together gave the impression that shopping for flowers was rote, cookie-cutter, and a chore.
By contrast, Blossoming Earth were already acutely aware of their strengths and wanted to find a solution to play up their differentiators in the market which appeal to their unique customer base. This unique niche Blossoming Earth possesses is in encouraging the customer to create sculptural Ikebana arrangements, which are Japanese arrangements, and in providing one-of-a-kind handmade ceramic vessels to accompany them. Because this is a different sort of product offering, Blossoming Earth were keen that the website redesign adequately explained this to the customers and made it easy to pick different types of flowers and vessels for their arrangements.
Interview methodology and results
With this opportunity to increase cross-product sales in mind, I set out to speak to 5 people in moderated user interviews. The main purpose of these interviews was to understand what customers want to see in a seamless shopping experience for flowers and arrangements, and to understand what heightens their interests in different products on a florist site that they may not have necessarily come for, such as ceramics, workshops, and kits.
Basically, the owners of Blossoming Earth already had goals in mind before user research, which reaffirmed them - to keep the way the information is presented on the site clean, logical, and informative without being overwhelming. Other interesting key insights included that when it comes to learning a new skill such as Ikebana, beginners were afraid of ‘wasting’ money on an expensive hobby. It appeared that users were afraid of making mistakes, and that the barrier to entry and perceived consequences of ‘failing’ seemed high.
I took the insights from the interviews and developed them into 3 user personas. The main insights from the interviews are especially reflected in the persona called ‘Cameron’, who really is searching for a no-frills, easy, and reliable ordering process. At the same time, I knew I didn’t want to lose the other insights from users, who are also looking for something to tap into their creativity, looking for a space or way to express themselves, and are also particularly interested in unique and customized arrangements.
Design
Lo-fi Wireframes
The earliest iterations of the design, showing lots of different blocky rectangles and different types of text options throughout for the headers, as I was undecided at this point. I knew there were some elements that were already looking a little outdated, such as the booking page for the workshops, but wanted to wait until usability testing of these versions to see what else I could change.
Moving on from the interviews to the design process, I made two user flows - the first was to purchase a Ikebana set, the second was to send an inquiry about weddings and consultations. Ultimately, in the first iteration of the site, we decided that we had to narrow down our key screens. We decided to focus more on the shop and workshops pages, so this case study doesn’t focus on the weddings and events pages as shown in the user flows and information architecture.
The challenge in thinking around the site’s information architecture lay in creating a journey that wouldn't overwhelm newcomers while satisfying experienced practitioners. It felt intuitive to keep the site relatively simple, with 4 main category groupings - ‘Shop’, ‘Workshops’, ‘Weddings and events’, and ‘About us’. Based on user interviews, I decided that the Ikebana kits were a product offering of their own, creating it as a subcategory under the ‘Shop’ section.
Lo-fidelity wireframes, part 2
After an initial round of testing with the mid-fidelity wireframes above, I set up moderated usability tests over video calls, with 4 individuals. I had each do three different task flows:
Buy a classic arrangement
Sign up for an Ikebana class for September 24
Buy a ceramic + Ikebana kit
I was looking at success metrics along the following lines:
Completion rate: ability of testers to complete tasks without assistance
User observations: overall satisfaction or mentions of delightful as well as difficult moments or features
Time to complete tasks: does something take a lot longer than expected?
Branding
I wanted to prioritize a color palette that emphasized warm, earthy tones and felt natural. I also knew the colors should feel fun, catering to a mainly Gen-Z/Millennial clientele, and tapping into the themes users expressed with wanting to see something new that felt bold and approachable - but at the same time, it was super important to not sacrifice readability, high contrast, and clean fonts.
High-fidelity prototypes and usability testing
To understand how users would interact with my proposed solution, I conducted remote usability testing using Maze. I focused on testing two key user flows that aligned with the business goals and user needs: purchasing an ikebana kit and signing up for an ikebana workshop.
The remote testing format allowed participants to interact with the prototype in their natural environment, providing authentic insights into how they would navigate these processes in real life. Through Maze's analytics, I could track success rates, time spent on tasks, and identify potential friction points in both user journeys.
I chose these specific flows because they represented two distinct yet complementary aspects of the business - the physical product (ikebana kit) and the experiential service (workshop). Testing both helped validate whether the design effectively served users with different intentions and comfort levels with ikebana.
The main takeaways I had from usability testing at this stage was that the flow for signing up for the classes of an Ikebana workshop was completed at a marginally higher rate, which signaled to me that maybe the storytelling component for this was stronger. It seemed that there was less friction, less click drop-off for this flow.
For the workshops, there was one less screen in between the homepage and the checkout page - based on user feedback, I decided that the extra screen for the Ikebana kit, designed to tell the user more about what it is and how to order a personalized kit was perhaps not very helpful and only led the user to confusion as many users were ‘stuck’. One of the users said ‘on this ‘Get Started’ page, I didn’t know I had to scroll down to continue. Based on this feedback and the Maze heatmaps, I decided to get rid of the screen causing the confusion.
One of the screens I was most worried about was the customization of an Ikebana set. On the usability tests, all users but one were able to complete this flow.
The heatmap shows how users interacted with each of the dropdowns for the step to build their own kits.
Other takeaways and things to explore - some users didn’t like the overall branding and colors. This is something for me to tweak and experiment with, but ultimately all components of the site were tested for readability and accessibility, so this may have been a case of personal preference. Another user said some of the terminology was confusing, so I condensed some of the language and explained certain terms in the text.
Main iterations
Adding more of a story to the products
The main edit to the actual screens themselves was to add more context in an engaging way for the user.
In testing, quite a few individuals said they hadn’t heard of Ikebana before, revealing a significant knowledge gap: while users were intrigued by ikebana, they hesitated to purchase kits due to uncertainty about the practice itself. Our initial design focused primarily on the kit contents and pricing, assuming users had baseline knowledge of ikebana.
Afterwards, we added more context, including example images of arrangements, the history, practice, and benefits.
This educational approach increased user confidence and time spent on product pages, with several test participants noting they felt more prepared to try ikebana for the first time. The additional context helped bridge the gap between interest and purchase decision.
Final designs
A look at the homepage, including different sections for weddings, workshops, and shop, plus different opportunities to also reach these pages throughout
Going through the checkout flow for an Ikebana kit, including the option to customize the kit, the placing it in the cart, seeing the cart, and checking out
Retrospective
It was great to be able to work on this project, and something I hope to improve for this as well as other projects is really embracing the idea that clear content hierarchy both improves workflows and the end product. Also, simplified product pages and navigation work well to not add to any user confusion, and minimizes dropoffs. This was a valuable lesson I saw firsthand during usability testing.
In the future, it would be great to explore more with Blossoming Earth. There is a lot of work needed, such as load time optimization, additional payment requests, and finalizing the wedding package flow.
More ‘blue-sky’ thinking ideas could be thinking of ways to show 360 degree rotations of the arrangements, enhancing the user shopping experience. I’d also love to see if videos could be incorporated in the homepage instead of static images, and to revisit the overall branding of the site. The website is coming soon - in the meantime, view the prototype here.