NATURE HILLS
eCommerce Redesign
Purpose
While living in a world so drastically altered by the Covid-19 Pandemic, we noticed users were beginning to explore outdoor activities, such as planting fruits or redecorating their yards.
Seeing that opportunity, inspired us to redesign Nature Hills, a reliable and large online nursery store, so we could give newer gardeners and Nature Hills the ability to grow.
What I Learned
Discovered opportunity to expand the market through our research
Lead the redesign and prototyping efforts.
Created new branding assets and design guide.
Managed an international and multilingual remote team.
Project Details
Goals
Simplify the shopping experience for Nature Hills’ users, so that you didn’t need to be a gardening expert to purchase your dream plant.
Capitalize on growing plant and garden market during the pandemic, and identify areas of continued growth.
Create a welcoming and consistent brand identity that enables users to feel a sense of community.
Reduce customer support time by 20%.
Team
Rashida Ali was our Lead Researcher
Caty Nava was our Lead UI Designer
Gloria Vázquez assisted in our Responsive Design.
Tools
Adobe XD and Unsplash for Design
Google Suite and Miro for research
Project Timeline
Projects are complicated, but timelines help! Here is ours roughly 3 weeks of work broken down.
Project Final High Fidelity Design Homepage
Constraints
Communication Barriers
Remote working is hard enough, but the fact that one of our members needed help communicating in English added an additional layer of complexity.
Luckily, I’m bilingual and I was able to translate; however, it did add more work for the team.
Too Many Ideas
Usually that wouldn’t be an issues, but it becomes one when we were on a time crunch.
While we had to prioritize, we had a exciting backlog of ideas for this project.
Small Team & Limited Bandwidth
In about 3 weeks, we were able to go from our brainstorming to a complete high-fidelity prototype with responsive design.
So we had to make some tough choices about our priorities.
Research
Our research lasted 1 week, and we utilized the methods below to understand our user’s plant purchasing habits.
5 Interviews and Usability Test
40+ Surveys
Heuristic Evaluation & Accessibility Testing
Affinity Diagram & Empathy Map
Issues Identified & Proposed Solution
Research Objectives
01
What were planters’ and gardeners’ typical plant purchasing habits and were they altered by the pandemic?
02
What motivated planters and gardeners to purchase new plants and planting supplies?
03
What impact a planter’s or gardener’s skill level have on purchasing habits?
What did we learn from our interviews?
Affinity Diagram
Key Takeaways
From this Affinity Diagram, we were able to uncover the emotional impact of losing a plant.
Some people felt denial or less of an adult and it seemed that the memory of a plant’s death stood out at many users.
As a result, people were keen to purchase easy-to-maintain plants.
Empathy Map
Key Takeaways
Here we were able to create a clearer picture of our user.
The user’s main goal was to create a calming home environment with the help of many decorative plants. This would a fun hobby with the benefit of showing their friends and family that they were capable adults.
But users often lacked the skill and knowledge to get started.
Interview quote that struck a cord
“Usually when plants die, I have two feelings. First terrible and then the other one is denial.”
What did we learn from a Heuristic Evaluation?
From this exercise, we learned that Nature Hill’s was consistently inconsistent.
They used multiple different fonts and components.
Which we believed would overwhelm users, and could be a deal-breaker for stressed pandemic shoppers.
What issue did we identify in our Usability Testing?
We also conducted 5 usability tests and asked users to ‘purchasing a lemon tree’ on Nature Hills. Here are the results:
01
Terminology
Terminology was considered unhelpful by users new to gardening. Even the terminology used in the navigation required Google.
Proposed Solution
Card Sorting
02
Window Shopping
From our research, beginner gardeners didn't always have a list of specific plants they were going to purchase. Rather, they wanted plants that fit their lifestyle and purposes. We wanted to help users quickly find the plants and tools that were best for them.
Proposed Solution
Quiz, Improved search, & filter feature
03
Community Support
Lastly, beginners needed guidance and support.
According to the data, one of the most requested features, besides low-maintenance plants, were trusted reviews and experts. It became clear to us that gardening and planting is hard enough without a community.
Proposed Solution
Chatting with Experts Feature, comment section, and incorporating community experts into the site.
04
Aesthetics
Many users had issues with the design of the site, which had multiple colors, like grey and highlighter orange, and fonts. It took users outside of the shopping experience.
Proposed Solution
Update the UI and make everything consistent.
Define & Product Strategy
No project is complete without more data, so we created a survey to help us get a clearer picture of our user base. That data and the analysis of all the research will be shown below.
Market & Competitor Research
Data Analysis
User Insights
What did we learn from the market?
According to our research, the pandemic had actually boosted gardening and plant retail by 8.6%.
Given that a global recession and pandemic had actually allowed this industry to thrive, we want to understand the motivation behind increase purchases and how we could harness these purchasing habits for the future.
What can we learn from our competitors?
After conducting this exercise, it became clear that Nature Hills would not be unable to compete with the size or efficiency of Home Depot or Amazon.
However, we could work to embed Nature Hills into a more niche community, like Urbanstems.
This would require us to become a more personalized site and building a community around our site.
Home Depot
Sets beginners up for success:
Great Refund Policy
DIY Inspiration Section
Project Calculator
Brand Recognition
Sites that foster more community and unique plant purchasing experience.
Connecting through comments.
Sleek and inviting UI.
A wide range of buyers turn to buy plants online on Amazon because they already have an account set up, but they have issues with:
Consistency and likeness.
Trust delivery and packaging.
User Insight Statement
Now more than ever users are looking to online nurseries for their planting and gardening needs; however, we believe that Nature Hills’ current site is missing a few key elements to bridge the gap between online and in-person shopping.
What did the data teach us?
75% of users surveyed would consider themselves planting and gardening beginners
That piqued our interested and we began to wonder how skill level could impact your shopping experience.
Planting & Gardening Skill Set Chart
Low maintenance plants are what users are buying, regardless of skill level.
The data seemed to indicate that our users were primary interested in low maintenance plants. Which alerted us to the fact that we needed to find ways to guide users to these specific plants.
Planting and Gardening Experience Preferences Chart
Motivation behind gardening chart
The strongest motivation behind gardening and planting was to decorate.
Unbeknownst to us, we interviewed a lot of experienced gardeners that grew vegetables for food, while the data really showed they were a minority. The greatest motivation for users was actually decoration.
Develop & Design
Now that we have a deep understanding of our problem, we dug into the solutions.
Wireframing
Usability Testing & Analysis
Iteration
Prioritization of Features
Wireframes - Basic Features
Products Gallery
After you are down find what plants could fit your lifestyle and location, users will be guided to this results page that list all the available plants.
Product Page
Once a user selects a plant, they can learn more about it, its care, and view some reviews.
Checkout Page
When you have have found the plant our dreams, checkout page is there to complete the transaction.
Wireframes for Key Features
While designing a solution, we identified three ways to guide users to their perfect plant.
01 Quiz
The quiz created extreme reactions. Either you loved or were completely indifferent to the quiz.
02 Search Dropdown
We noticed the trend that search was geared to plant and gardening experts that knew what they wanted.
03 Chat
Generally neutral and positive reviews.
Insights from Second Usability Testing
After completing the wireframe, we tested the usability of the prototype by asking 5 users to complete a set of tasks. All culminating with the user ‘purchasing’ a tiny potted plant. Listed below is the feedback we received from users.
5/5 Users love our Minimal UI
Even though the wireframe had very few design elements, it seems that the users enjoyed the minimalist modern style. That encouraged us to move forward with that style.
4/5 Users preferred the Quizzes over the other features.
Because we asked about the user’s skill level from the start, we noticed a peculiar pattern. Beginners loved the Quiz feature, while Experts were more excited by the Search feature because they usually already knew what they intended to buy.
3/5 Users wanted more clarity from the design
While the usability test did help us understand the features and the design style, users also helped us make the site clearer and more engaging in smaller areas.
Add a cart icon.
The search module could have subcategories.
I would love to see more interactions.
Choices
After realizing that beginners tended to prefer the quiz and experts favored the search feature, we began to debate the merits of each feature. We had limited resources and wanted to focus on one; however, we didn’t want to exclude any group.
But in the end, we decided to focus on the personalized quiz, and backlog the chat feature and detailed search feature to give these pages the proper attention they deserved.
Deliver
Prototype time! Below are all the deliverables from the design phase with explanations.
Final Iteration
Responsive Design
Final Thoughts
Future Ideas
Redesigned User Flow 02
Below is our second attempt at a high-fidelity design of the site.
Iterations
Improve the design of the homepage to better display information.
Less text in the about me sections for improved readability.
More fleshed out the product page to make the site more credible.
Quiz Feature
What our users liked:
The quiz is a simple way to curate products for new plant buyers.
The quiz helped reduce anxiety for first-time or stressed shoppers.
What our team wants to do to improve:
Animation to keep quiz takers more engaged
Product and Checkout Pages
What our users liked:
A curated list of possible plants personalized for each shopper.
Limited options were less likely to overwhelm users.
Filters reflect quiz results.
What our team wants to do to improve:
Flesh out checkout process.
Continue working on product pages.
Responsive Design
What our users liked:
Show new design assets.
Guides users through the purchasing process to help reduce shopping stress and the need for real-time support.
The redesigned site had fewer moving components to simplify browsing.
What our team wants to do to improve:
Team members on the Responsive Design needed more time to develop more pages.
Components needed to be resized, but time was limited.
Drop-Down
While I would love to side by side comparison of each page, I want to save us time. So I created a video of both site and you can just watch the video.
That being said, I did want to being your attention to the new navigation. It took a lot of work and I think encapsulates the essence of our redesign, efficiency and clarity.
Before and After
Nature Hills’ Current Website
Previous drop-down contained complicated terminology that few beginner planter and gardeners understood and an abundance of possible navigation links that some considered overwhelming.
Hi-Fi Prototype
We created this unique drop-down, because we believe that having images, beginner friendly language, and descriptions should help new gardeners navigate the site.
Design Walk Through
Hi-Fi Prototype
Our design! I’m so excited for you to take a look.
Final Thoughts
Working through the pandemic, it was an eye-opening experience to translate something so personal to gardeners and plant enthusiasts as shopping at a local nursery to online shopping.
Our intention slowly moved away from just redesign Nature Hills and started to be about adding a personal touch to an existing website, so that users could feel the warmth, community, and joy that customers normally experience with less of the anxiety.
That being said, while we had big dreams, we had no budgets and limited time. For example, on top of our work, I had to translate for my Spanish-speaking team member.
While it was a joy to help, it was definitely tiring. That really forced us to prioritize our work and really watch our scope.
Future Iteration
Build out more product pages and quiz interactions.
Optimizing search options by creating more subcategories and filters
Suggest more kit ideas for new buyers and beginners.
Make blog section and include product reviews.
Work on fine tuning design assets.