My first-ever dive into UX Research and Product Design happened while participating in a Google Venture Design Sprint at IronHack. The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.
CHALLENGE
Bloom Box Miami is an exclusively online retailer for unique and customizable flower arrangements. Although having created a strong social media presence which drove traffic to their website, BloomBox was seeing a large drop-off rate once consumers arrived at their product page. Bloom Box would like to improve the online shopping experience in order to increase product purchases.
We evaluated the user pain points, then laid out all of the problems in one place. When mapping the data, we discovered that there were multiple complaints regarding the checkout process. Mapping trends led us to our main problem we sought to solve.
"HOW MIGHT WE EDUCATE THE CONSUMER ON THE FLOWER SHOPPING EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATIONS?"
Our biggest concern was that BloomBox did not provide adequate details about their bouquet curation process, and we also wanted consumers to be able to further customize their shopping experience.
Our group began ideating and sketched competing solutions on paper. We utilized techniques such as "crazy 8's" to quickly develop fresh ideas. Once all the ideas were displayed, our group collectively chose the best solutions to move forward with.
On this day, we drew out a storyboard and drafted potential screen designs for our BloomBox prototype. On this day, we voted to add detailed descriptions of the bouquets. A new feature we created was the ability to to add additional gifts to the purchase (such as chocolate and champagne).
We created a high fidelity prototype using Keynote, as it facilitated real-time collaboration on the same file. We focused on the shopping flow, paying special attention to product descriptions and the additional gift feature. Our additional aim was to make the prototype clean and visually pleasing.
The final day arrived... and several guests visited our class to test our prototype!
Each of us took turns interviewing our guests, which took place in a separate room with camera surveillance. While interviewing and user testing was being conducted, the remainder of the group supervised, noting all user feedback on post-its.
When all of the prototype testing had been completed, we gathered all of our notes and began to identify common trends. By doing this, our group mapped and identified our successes and failures with the BloomBox redesign.
The Google Sprint was a great (crash course) introduction to UX Research. Our class was taught how to brainstorm quickly, and eliminate overthinking when developing new ideas. We also learned that failures in our product don't indicate the end of a project; but instead can be used as motivation to further investigate user needs.
USER LIKES
Users enjoyed the visual design of our prototype, the add-on gift feature, and the real life images of BloomBox arrangements.
USER DISLIKES
Users disliked the video embedded on the homepage, found the size diagram and descriptions confusing, and ultimately wanted to be able to customize the design of their bouquets.