NATURE HILLS
E-COMMERCE REDESIGN: NATUREHILLS.COM
Nature Hills Nursery, a company founded in 2001, served in a limited geographic area when it initially began. The company has evolved over the years to respond to their growing online-based customers and has now become America's largest online plant nursery store.
As user researchers and designers, my team and I wanted to understand how avid gardeners and plant owners are shopping online and finding plants and garden supplies that fit their lifestyle and criteria. As we started googling for our class, we stumbled upon this website called naturehills.com and decided to apply our research and technical skills to redesign this plant e-store as a solution to our initial problem.
ROLE
Project Lead, UX/UI Designer and Researcher
TOOLS
Trello, Miro, XD, Figma, InVision, Photoshop, Google Sheets
DURATION
4 weeks
CHALLENGE
UX RESEARCH
Research, Design Thinking, Problem Definition, and Ideation, Early Prototyping
UI DESIGN
Mid-fidelity Prototyping, Testing, Hi-fidelity Prototyping, RWD UI Style Guide
PRODUCT
Responsive E-Commerce Web Design for Mobile and Desktop
WHO BUYS PLANTS ONLINE?!
We kick-started our research by questioning ourselves what kind of a person would buy plants online, and quickly created our proto persona, Jasmine.
HEURISTIC EVALUATIONS, REDLINING AND ANNOTATING
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EVALUATION SUMMARY:
The current website seems to cater mostly to expert level gardeners. The terminology and verbiage used for product descriptions feel technical and scientific. It's just not everyday language.
The colors of the website are very high saturated and the hierarchy of the website feels hodgepodge.
Overall the website looks really old and outdated.
RESEARCH STATEMENT ELABORATED
The current e-commerce website, Nature Hills Nursery, is dated and caters mostly to experienced gardeners. As user researchers, we want to understand what the general audience expects of an e-commerce nursery store when they want to buy plants. What troubles they face when deciding what they might want or need to purchase that fits their lifestyle and criteria in terms of plant care, which region it grows, which type of plant it is, and more.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
We studied a lot of plant stores online, for example, The Sill, UrbanStems and Bloomscape and indirect competitors like Homedepot and Etsy to see what they were doing differently.
HOME DEPOT SETS BEGINNERS UP FOR SUCCESS WITH A DIY INSPIRATION SECTION:
Brand Recognition
Great Refund Policy
ETSY AND BLOOMSCAPE FOSTER MORE COMMUNITY AND UNIQUE PLANT PURCHASING EXPERIENCE.
Connecting via comments
Sleek and inviting UI
PEOPLE BUY PLANTS USING AMAZON BECAUSE OF THEY HAVE AN ACCOUNT AND EASE OF USE:
Consistency and likeliness. Trust delivery and packaging
GATHERING QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE DATA
VIA INTERVIEWS AND SURVEYS
We conducted five interviews and gathered data from a survey questionnaire, we got 40+ responses. The questions were designed to investigate the target market and to study online buying patterns and behavioral responses specific to planting and gardening which would help us redesign the website.
"A staggering 75% of people consider themselves to have beginner level skill set when it comes to gardening and is mostly doing it as a hobby or for decoration purposes."
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WHAT WE DISCOVERED ABOUT OUR USERS?
After gathering data from interviews and surveys we, took notes on Miro and did some Affinity Diagrams, and created an Empathy Map.
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MAJOR INSIGHTS
During these processes, the major insights we gathered from all our data, including helped us determine our target market and what was most important to them - which was mainly:
Clean product display - images and photographs with proper descriptions and trusted reviews are a top priority for online plant buyers.
Most customers are interested in buying low maintenance indoor and outdoor plants and pursue gardening and planting because it is their hobby and/or for decoration purposes and creating their own food supply.
EMPATHIZING WITH USERS HELPED US PERSONIFY JASMINE
HIGHLIGHTING IDEATION AND FEATURE PRIORITIZATION
We defined features using the I like, I wish, what if method, also dot voted, and did feature prioritization using the Moscow method.
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As we dived more and more on what users will appreciate about a plant e-store, our design planning was narrowed down to three major aspects of the solution:
1: Easy Navigation (By creating simpler, easy to understand titles for the navbar)
2: Inviting User Interface (By keeping a clean, modern, and trendy looking face for the website)
3: Focus more on "Beginner Level Gardeners" (By adding features that will offer easier search and categorization modules to users who don't know much about plants and garden supplies)
VALUE PROPOSITION
Nature Hills Nursery- America’s Largest Online Plant Nursery
Blooming new looks and fruitful new features that will make your plant buying and gardening experience efficient and enjoyable.
STORYBOARD
To string together our ideas for the website, we created a storyboard using our persona Jasmine to help condense the user journey process..
Goal: Jasmine wants to buy low maintenance indoor and outdoor plants.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND WIREFRAMING EARLY PROTOTYPES
The navigation of the Nature Hills website is very confusing, it is sorted by type and variety, the number of trees they have is endless and the botanical terminology used would only be understood by experts of agriculture or botany, most users like Jasmine would not even know what "perennials" and "dogwood bushes" mean unless she googles them.
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CARD SORTING
Keeping everything user-centric for users like Jasmine, we did card sorting and categorization to simplify the top navigation.
SITE MAP
Again keeping Jasmine's needs and users like her the center of our design, we further simplified our top navbar by creating three main menu items to choose from.
1: Outdoor Plants
2: Indoor Plants
3: Garden Supplies
We added Search, Account, and Cart as well on to the top right because most users are accustomed to seeing those list items in that fashion.
TASK FLOWS
We created a task flow for Jasmine and similar users who would like to sign up and shop for low maintenance indoor and outdoor plants.
LOW-MID FIDELITY WIRE-FRAMES AND USABILITY TESTING
We created wireframes for the following features:
Search Module
Quick Quiz
Chat Box
Although these were three different features all addressed the same problem
These features were all essentially helping users to find the right plants for them in different ways. In addition, we also created product pages and check out page, our aim was to offer clearer filters and improved layout and build more interactions to guide the users.
In addition, we also created product pages and check out page, our aim was to offer clearer filters and improved layout and build more interactions to guide the users.
USABILITY RESULTS
UI CHANGES
We generally received positive feedback on the UI changes. So moved forward with our UI changes and finalized our designs.
HOW COULD WE IMPROVE?
Cart icons
More interactions
Make the quiz engaging
Search Module could have subcategories
SEARCH MODULE VS QUIZ
Search feature was seen as great idea, but was geared towards experts that knew what they wanted. Quiz created extreme reactions. Either you loved them or are complete indifferent.
One user said, “In the real world you’ll always have mixed opinions from users, that’s why we keep iterating.” So we decided to keep both features on the website.
BRANDING AND COLOR PSYCHOLOGY
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UI STYLE GUIDE
DESKTOP PROTOTYPE
IOS MOCKUPS - RWD
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
Build out more interactions and pages
Optimizing search options by creating more subcategories and filters
Suggest more gifts and kits ideas for new buyers and beginners
Make a blog section and include product reviews