Because occasion-based merchandising did not have a readily established design pattern, I had a chance to establish a new pattern—one that could possibly work across different verticals outside of the floral industry. As this was my first project where we would build new experience from the ground up, I was able to define the product design process.

I defined a problem statement that the stakeholders, product, and engineering would all agree on. I also created a design hypothesis to determine what would make the project a success.

View Product Design Notes

After reviewing the problem statement and hypothesis with the project stakeholders, I then created a user journey map.

There weren’t many real-world examples for occasion-based merchandising tools. With no best-practices or established patterns available, I instead researched how other tools handled sorting and organizing data. I analysed the admin sections for different eCommerce services. I also looked into how other platforms and systems handled sorting and organizing items like photos, emails, or files.

Example sketchbook pages, from the researching and problem-defining stages.

Using my research and the findings from the design studio, I created lo-fidelity wireframes to illustrate a couple of options.

Because we were building a new type of merchandising tool I decided we should conduct a round of user testing to ensure that my design choices were on the right track. Besides doing a basic usability test, I also wanted to validate that the merchandising experience I had designed was meeting the needs of our florists, based on the initial hypotheses the team had agreed on. 

I created a test plan to keep track of the test goals, objectives, logistics, scenarios, and participant information. I created “mid-fidelity” wires for a prototype that would be polished enough to use for testing with florists, and then located 5 florists and 3 internal employees to test.

Post-testing I compiled all of the notes and created a slide deck with the main findings of the test, as well as actionable follow-up tasks based on the findings. The findings were positive with no need to make any drastic changes to the overall experience, but we did need to modify the UI to match the old dashboard's branding and colours. In addition, I gained insight that supported my plan to launch this tool with proper user onboarding and help guides.

View Findings & Recommendations Deck

Using the findings from the recommendations deck, I built new hi-fidelity mocks and created a prototype that engineering could refer to during the development stage. Once dev began, I worked closely with engineering to stay informed of any changes to original release goals due to backend/API issues. A variety of edge cases were also uncovered once the engineers started working, so I delivered UI and UX specs for various scenarios as needed.

View Hi-fi Prototype

I made most of the icons used in the tool, with the exception being several of the 40+ occasion icons that I sourced from an icon repository. We will use this iconography for catalog management in other parts of the florist dashboard, in the florist help guides, and in marketing material sent to florists from BloomNation.

view icons in style guide