Barton springs nursery
Role: Sole UX Designer, Researcher
Timeframe: 2-week sprint
Building trustworthy e-commerce while recreating the in-person plant buying experience, online
project context
Barton Springs Nursery (BSN) is a local plant nursery in Austin. While their current website has an abundance of information about services and their history, they do not have an e-commerce function and therefore are limited to a certain audience of users who will only purchase plants in person. For this conceptual redesign project, I sought to:
Understand users’ experiences and pain points while shopping online and for plants
Prioritize these needs into my design, building e-commerce functionality catered to target users but also those who might be initially skeptical of purchasing plants online
research & findings
Revealing the importance of trust, user needs, and convenience, and identifying new opportunities to stand out in design
User Interviews
I wanted to understand more about the users that would frequent BSN and and how they would best benefit from its new update and addition of e-commerce functionality.
I identified target users here as those who shop online as well as shop for plants for their home, either in-person or online.
My goals for user interviews were to understand:
Users’ goals and pain points when shopping online
Users’ goals and pain points when purchasing plants
Users’ experience with purchasing plants online
Analyzing the interview data via affinity mapping yielded a few trends:
Users buy plants primarily based on need (pet-friendly, low-light, etc.), and secondarily on aesthetics
Users didn’t consider themselves plant experts (as also verified through card sorting below)
Users researched a lot before making any purchases online - they wanted to trust businesses
Users exclusively preferred to buy plants in-person and distrusted purchasing them online
Learning this information helped me realize that building trust with users and recreating the in-person plant store experience as best possible online would be the top priority in my design, especially if I wanted users to use the new e-commerce function.
Competitive & Comparative Analyses
I also wanted to see what competitors in the online plant market, as well as brands with a strong e-commerce presence in general were offering - how they handled things like navigation, search, product description pages, and the checkout process.
Takeaways from my analysis of 6 companies showed:
All competitors kept product categories for plants simple (e.g., simply just “Plants”), with sub-sections for plants based on different needs.
Searching through the the search bar and secondary navigation showed that most competitors didn’t really use scientific or proper plant names. The ability to filter by price, etc was also important.
Individual product pages included recommendations for similar items. Opportunities of features to include: better images especially for showing scale of plants, shipping details, customer service access, quality guarantees, reviews - given that users told us they don’t trust buying plants online
Most competitors offered the option to checkout as a guest or create an account
These findings helped articulate the standard features the new BSN website design should include, as well as opportunities for BSN to set themselves apart.
Card Sorting
I also ran Card Sorting exercises to see how users would naturally categorize and group items from BSN (based on an image and the name of the item), and thus which product categories might make the most sense for those interacting with the new website.
This analysis from Optimal Workshop shows that if we keep the number of categories low (3) for simplicity’s sake, users frequently categorized items into distinct categories such as:
Plants (purple)
Pots and planters (orange)
Indoor decor (green)
Users categorized plans in many different ways - by plant size, indoor/outdoor, flowering, etc. Knowing this in conjunction with the fact that users didn’t consider themselves to be plant experts, plus what I saw in the C&C analysis, I planned to keep the plants section on the website broad, and allow for lots of filtering options to fit users’ needs.
Design & ideation
Creating reliable e-commerce for plants, with access to experts, quality guarantees, reviews and recommendations
To turn these above data points into design, and think of additional, new design solutions, I began ideating and sketching. I came up with and drew inspiration from these questions:
How might we increase trust for the plant buying process online?
How might we leverage the best parts of the in-person plant buying experience to bring online?
How can we make the online plant buying process as helpful and enjoyable as possible?
How could we ensure that the shipping process of buying plants online gets users to further associate it with something used for live plants?
From Sketching to Wireframing
Progressions from sketches to hi-fi wireframes and prototypes can be seen below:
Homepage:
Focus on building trust with new e-commerce feature, by highlighting access to plant experts for questions/concerns. This is an in-person service BSN offers, but with the introduction of e-commerce we could move it to virtual appointments too that you could schedule
Show information on how BSN carefully packages up plants, a quality and customer service guarantee
Product Listing Pages:
Providing many options to filter by categories like needs (light, pet-friendly, easy to case for, etc.), price, and size
Banners highlighting best sellers or items that fit different user needs (pet-friendly, etc.)
Product Detail Pages:
Highlighting reviews from other buyers (not a feature on any other competitor sites), access to experts for questions, other recommended items, and plenty of photos showing the scale and size of the plants - focus of building trust again, and also making the purchase process as convenient as possible to circumvent the issue of not being able to go in person and physically measure plants
Offering different plant sizes and cheaper options without planters for a range of budgets
Providing detailed care information and the care BSN takes in the packaging/shipping process
Prototype Highlights
Product Discovery: searching via navigation and search bar
Checkout Process: