Project Type
Role
Timeline
416-Flowers is an online-only flower shop where the entire experience lives on its website, yet the outdated design made it hard for users to trust and send something truly meaningful. This redesign reimagines the experience to feel intuitive, reliable, and emotionally resonant.
The Problem
The original website had weak visual hierarchy, unclear delivery availability, limited filtering, and outdated design. These issues made it difficult for users to navigate, evaluate products confidently, or trust the credibility of store, especially when sending flowers as thoughtful gifts.
(original website shown below)
Redesign
The goal was to create a more intuitive, emotionally resonant, and reliable e-commerce experience from browsing to checkout.
Dual product views
Products are presented in two views: a clean, isolated product shot and a real-life contextual image.
This allows users to understand both the objective details of the bouquet and how it would feel when given as a gift.
PDP
Beyond basic product details, a "symbolism" was introduced to highlight the symbolism behind each bouquet.
This highlights the key user driver as meaningful gift, helping users choose gifts with deeper emotional relevance.
Customization
A dedicated customization flow allows users to visually compose their bouquet with real-time feedback, making 416-Flowers experience more uniqe and different from others.
The experience shifts from buying a product -> creating a personal gift.
Research began with an audit of the original 416-Flowers website to understand its current structure, existing features, and limitations:
— 416-Flowers positioned fast delivery as its key strength.
Conducted a competitive analysis to identify common elements across flower shop websites and uncover gaps/opportunities for 416-Flowers to differentiate and remain competitive. Many online flower shops:
— Rely heavily on occasion-based navigation, suggesting that product choices are driven more by context and recipient than by the product itself.
Interviewed range of participants with experience ordering flowers online, focusing on their common shopping behavior, emotional drivers, and challenges in selecting products or stores.
Explored users' shopping behavior, emotional motivations, and pain points, particularly how they select flower shops, what influences their trust, and how they navigate the purchase process.
A card sorting activity was conducted to explore how users naturally categorize flowers, which informed a more intuitive and effective navigation structure.
Synthesis
Key Insights
With over 80 feedback points, key insights revealed that: 1. As flowers are typically purchased as gifts, people tend to make decisions based less on the product itself and more on its arrangement, the context of the occasion, and the recipient. 2. Users tend to associate the website’s visual tone and quality with the perceived value of the flowers. 3. Value customization to make it feel more special.
These findings led to the creation of a primary persona, David, a busy professional who wants a fast, reliable, and emotionally meaningful way to purchase flowers online. His needs, goals, and concerns guided the design direction moving forward.
Design Opportuniy
Insights from the interviews and affinity mapping revealed several opportunities to improve the 416-Flowers website experience.
Users primarily shop by occasion and rely on visual cues, so the navigation needed to reflect that behavior.
Many struggled with unclear delivery information and lack of transparency around bouquet sizes and add-ons, which highlighted the need for visual previews and early delivery filtering.
Additionally, users tended to search by descriptive terms like color or sentiment rather than product names, suggesting the value of keyword-based search.
Lastly, trust in the brand was closely tied to the website’s tone and presentation, emphasizing the importance of a professional, emotionally engaging layout. These insights directly informed the design priorities throughout the project.
Site Map & Task Flow
Using insights from the audit, interviews, and card sorting, I restructured the site’s information architecture and mapped out a task flow based on a realistic user scenario to better understand how users would browse and make decisions. The updated sitemap prioritizes occasion-based navigation and improves product discoverability by organizing content in a more intuitive and user-centered hierarchy.
Wireframing & Usability Test
After synthesizing the research findings, I created low-fidelity wireframes to visualize the improved user flow, which were tested with four participants. All users successfully completed the full journey in under four minutes and provided valuable feedback that informed further design refinements, ultimately leading to a final prototype.
Prototype