Happy Rose Floral App — From Case Study to App store
Background
Developing a mobile app for Happy Rose Florist was particularly meaningful for me. I grew up helping out in my parents’ flower shop and haphazardly walking customers through the flower selection process in order to figure out and match a flower bouquet to their needs.
I wanted to take all my firsthand experiences and build a better user experience for consumers that would in turn streamline the florists’ work as well. With the help of an iOS engineer, I developed a minimum viable product for Happy Rose that serves as a baseline catalog for customers to browse and filter their floral selection based on customer provided parameters.
The Challenge
Customers purchase flowers mostly on holidays and special occasions, and are more likely to purchase flowers online compared to other generations. Millennials’ attitudes and imagery of flowers as gifts are primarily positive, but they are still concerned with the price and longevity of floral products. An important means of cultivating millennial consumers’ purchase likelihood is improving their experiences with floral products. Specifically, improving floral products’ relevance, engagement and customization/personalization for millennial consumers.
The Goal
To design an incredibly simple way to find the floral bouquet that matches a customer’s needs.
My Design Process
I followed IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Thinking process to ensure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.
01 Empathize
Research
I created a research plan and a 1:1 interview guide aiming to answer questions on current buyer behavior and attitudes toward online ordering of flowers. I recruited 10 participants’ in the flower shop who were in the act of purchasing flowers and current customers. Their ages ranged from 24 to 40 years old and represented Happy Rose Florist customer demographics, which for our first version of the app is our target market.
My secondary research was supported by online user surveys from the American Floral Endowment (AFE) and the Floral Marketing Research Fund (FMRF) that provided more comprehensive context across the market and bolstered the in-person research that I conducted.
And lastly, I simply observed customers in store and answered the phone. I realized after speaking with my interview participants that their answers to my questions did not necessarily match their actual actions in store. “People themselves are often unaware of their true needs, even unaware of the difficulties they are encountering” (Norman, The Design of Everyday Things). In order to better understand their floral needs, I listened and watched and let them speak first.
Research Findings
Regarding consumers’ overall attitudes toward floral products, they agreed the most that there is great potential to personalize/customize flowers, that flowers cheer them up, and that using/purchasing flowers can be made into a fun experience.
One way of improving the experience and making it more relevant was to make the purchasing and sending experience more fun, enjoyable and/or adventurous. Giving consumers more reasons to send floral products and making the products more visible and conveniently located increased relevance.
This study found similar results with millennials primarily purchasing flowers for holidays or special occasions (36%). Interestingly, 18% indicated they purchase floral products monthly and 12% more than once per month. Fifteen percent purchased floral products every other month while 15% rarely purchased floral products. Only 4% never purchased floral products.
Regarding online options, 35% of respondents preferred local florist websites, followed by 34% preferring national online floral retailers, and 17% preferred Groupon or LivingSocial. Approximately 30% preferred shopping in person at floral street vendors and 14% preferred convenience or gas stations. Very few (2%) preferred toll-free telephone options.
Important Floral Attributes
One means of encouraging millennial consumers to purchase more floral products is to provide products with relevant attributes and information. Regarding important product attributes, men and women had different perceptions. For women, the price was the most important attribute, followed by flower/bloom quality, flower type/variety, longevity, ease of care, design, and fragrance. Conversely, men valued flower/bloom quality the most, followed by price, flower type/variety, fragrance, design, longevity, and ease of care.
The gender differences may reflect different product uses. Men more often purchase floral products as gifts. As a result, the price is less important than quality and they are less concerned with longevity and care (Banks). Conversely, the experience-related attributes (design, fragrance) become more important. Women, on the other hand, tend to purchase flowers for themselves and therefore attributes related to obtaining (price), perceived quality (quality, variety, longevity), and caring for the products become more important. Lastly, millennials are very tech-savvy so it is imperative that floral firms develop and maintain a professional website with vivid, clear pictures of products.
Synthesis
Convenience is one of the major purchasing barriers at Florists — improve convenience through online services (e.g. online ordering and pick up in store). Consumers use online information when selecting products/stores, which makes an online presence essential. Provide accurate pricing and product information (e.g. pictures of the actual products instead of model products, detailed descriptions, product dimensions, etc.). Provide clear online care instructions. Consumers use their mobile phones as quick, easy information sources and often use mobile apps that have relevant content and features.
02 Define
POV
I defined the Point of Views based on my synthesis of research findings.
03 Ideate
HMW and Brainstorm
How might we…allow users to filter their options based on occasion, flowers, and price range, since these are questions we typically ask walk-in customers.
How might we…improve the ordering process by giving users a clear idea of what they can expect and provide accurate pricing and visuals.
This helped me open up a brainstorming phase. I focused on a few different ideas of filtering results, allowing users to navigate the pre-arranged options their way as defined in POV and HMW. I made a list of all possible features for each. From a filtered view to a detailed view, users can browse and find a selection based on their parameters.
Business Goals and User Goals
I started with listing out the goals that Happy Rose would try to achieve in this project, and the goals that users can achieve through using this new app. This is an important step as we, designers, should create something that meets both business and users goals.
04 Prototype
Product Roadmap
I created a product roadmap by prioritizing the design tasks for an MVP. From the research, I defined the priorities in this product as helping users to better filter and view floral selections they are interested in based on price, style, flower type, and occasion. I then listed out the features that we need to build in order to achieve each design task. Through this, I was able to break the design into smaller tasks, which helped me to focus on the following interaction and interface design. It was helpful to run this by an engineer, who further honed in and deciphered what was possible for an MVP.
Low Fi Wireframes
I sketched the lo-fi wireframes based on the “Filter by” user flow. This is a rough concept of interactions a user will perform on the screens and the basic UI elements that will be covered. This is a very important step that I could use to once again review my user flow before prototyping. This also allowed me to quickly visualize the features before starting the Hi-Fi design.
Going Hi Fi
The main challenge is to design a seamless user flow and enable easy multi-decision making for an on the go audience. My scope involves translating user-friendly interface designs that ultimately deliver an intuitive, frictionless experience. The design of the mobile app aims to keep the experience ultra simple and familiar while presenting a reasonable variety of choices to interested buyers. A clean solution was crafted to keep customers focused on the inputs that matter most to them (choice in flowers and style) with transparent pricing, while streamlining browsing and buying to optimize ordering for efficiency.
I used Zeplin to export the art boards and share with my developer and established an easy to share UI Style Guide that documents all the design elements for a unified design from back to front-end.
05 Test
Validate assumptions and improve the experience by watching users interact with Happy Rose’s new mobile platform. While this is mostly to gather feedback and weigh interest to build in new features, there are opportunities to see what value our mobile app is adding and what can be further iterated upon.
My developer and I consistently reminded ourselves that we were focused on building an MVP, because it was tough to hear critical feedback and not want to provide our users with more. We are taking it one step at a time and enjoying the process from end to end. We submitted the Happy Rose app to the App store and were rejected because it was primarily a “marketing app.” I learned that the Apple development store is very strict and aims to protect users.
Opportunities
I am working to create a full purchase flow — with order history and a shopping cart, so customers can order and have flowers delivered as well.
In addition, a future feature I would like to explore is the ability to ask questions like anniversary dates and birthdays in order to assist with push notifications to alert users of their next floral consideration. Especially in an age of convenience and the tech to support it, small reminders for milestone dates in people’s lives can fulfill an important floral use case.
Learnings
- Follow a diligent design process from research to iteration. Process-driven design is key to success.
- Take constructive criticism with an open mind, fail fast, and iterate from feedback.
- Prioritize your design tasks. There will always be a long list of things to do. Ask yourself and stakeholders what is most critical, especially for an MVP.
- Innovation comes from deep understanding and critical thinking; become obsessed with the user problem first and innovative solutions will follow.
