Bouquet Shopping & subscription App
Treat Yourself with Flowers
BlooMe
15 min reading
BlooMe
Team
Individual
Role
Research
&UI/UX
Time
May 2023
Duration
6 weeks
Introduction: The "BlooMe" app is a mobile application designed to provide users with a delightful and convenient experience of purchasing bouquets as a treat for themselves.
Purpose: BlooMe caters to the joy of buying flowers while highlighting the habit's benefits for mood enhancement, self-care, and living space improvement, broadening the flower market's scope.
Target User: individuals who appreciate the beauty and benefits of flowers in their daily lives. (more details in Research Section)
MVP feature
Emotional design: Mood assistant
The mood assistant feature differs from standard AI recommendations, as user needs may vary with changes in mood. This function, through a chat format, creates a relaxed communication atmosphere, allowing users to more easily obtain psychological healing based on their mood and appropriate product suggestions.
Design Iteration
Fun interaction: Flower card
Research
I conducted user research by interviewing 5 people with the habit of purchasing flowers for themselves around me, engaging directly with potential users to unearth their preferences, pain points, and desires. These insights led to the creation of user personas, which helped us to develop a deeper understanding of the target users.
User research
User interview
Since this is an individual project, I cannot access a larger data foundation. Therefore, I interviewed five people around me who recently bought flowers, trying to include individuals with different characteristics, understand the motivation and process of buying flowers for oneself.
Research goal
Try to understand the whole journey about it, explore the motivation of people buying floral for themselves and dig out the obstacles and painpoint they might have during the whole process.
Main questions raised
- Motivations and frequency of purchase
- describe the whole story of buying florals
- happy moment and frustrated moment
How was it going..
Some script records
Analysis
User needs routing
Based on what people said in interview, I want to answer the question, what are their deeper needs when they trying to buy bouquets for themselves.
Analysis
Affinity diagram
Pain points during the purchasing process.
Insights
Pain points & User needs
4 Main pain points were extracted from the interview records, which are:
- Time saving
- Choice making
- Variant anticipation
- Quality worries
3 User needs were concluded from the analysis, which are:
- The need to showcase individuality
- The need to have better living environment
- The need to take care of their own emotions
Empathy map
1. Empathy map
What I got..
2. User persona
Business research
Competitive audit
Based on the user pain points and needs identified earlier, I conducted an in-depth analysis of three prominent bouquet purchasing apps in the market as competitors.
Research goal
Through a comprehensive analysis of the competitors, which includes market positioning, visual style consistency, target user demographics, interaction design, visual design insistancy, and unique value propositions... I hoped to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the bouquet purchasing app market's purchasing process. Potential opportunities and features can be leveraged to provide a clearer focus and a more comprehensive design approach for our product.
Competitors
- Bloom&Wild from the UK (Direct competitor)
- LaFleur Bouquets offers boxed luxury bouquets, bouquet DIY options, and a range of body care products.
- Floward specializes in offering a wide range of products related to occasions and events.
Our main competitor is Bloom&Wild from the UK. This product aligns closely with our goal on providing users with a warm and decent brand image. It offers fast and professional flower bouquet delivery, a comprehensive and thoughtful gift-giving system (including special date reminders and customizable greeting cards), meticulous and clear functional navigation, and a subscription service for regular bouquet deliveries, all delivered with love. The only difference between this product and ours, are the gift receivers.
Process
The sheets of Competitve audit
Strenths & weaknesses
Bloom&Wild
Strenths
- offering a well-rounded array of functions that cater to various needs
- maintaining a distinct and unmistakable brand identity.
- Focusing on the gifting aspect, they have crafted an intricate system that revolves around thoughtful and heartfelt gestures.
- Special features like recording significant dates and customizable greeting cards
- Successfully established an image of prioritizing consumer needs, not only in terms of color and visual design but also with a keen sensitivity in providing functionality that offers emotional value to users. This is something worth learning from.
Weaknesses
- Bloom&Wild's primary emphasis lies within the realm of gifting, which may result in less emphasis on individuals purchasing flowers for themselves.
La Fleur Bouquets
Strenths
- Especially successful in its branding. It makes its own bouquet design a fashionable trend.
- Their website is outstanding in its consistency and motion design, which is pleasing to interact with.
Weaknesses
- Considerable users complained about the delivery of La Fleur Bouquets. And the whole purchasing process is not smooth.
Floward
Weaknesses
- Emotionless tone of communication with users.
ONE HUGE GAP FOUND!
Currently, there are few products in the market that specialize in "people's need to buy flowers for themselves." And this is where out product could fill in.
Other opportunities
Flower delivery is not always smooth, though it could always cause a lot of user's complaints. Without better techiques of delivering, a more transparent informing system of delivery progress is a must-do feature.
The DIY bouquet and greeting card design are good features for adding some warmness and individualty to the purchasing process,
Create an caring, friendly, relaxing tone to help build the concept of caring about ourselves.
Design
In this design phase, I carried out a series of design preparations based on the conclusions drawn from the research. The goal statement clarified the design direction, and the brainstorming session selected the features to be included in the app. I then drew the user flow diagram and proceeded with prototype creation.
Goal statement
Define
BlooMe App will let users have easy access to purchasing personal floral gife conveniently, which will affect people who want to refresh their daily life(including motivation such as home warming, self-crediting, just-because) by special floral gifts. We will measure effectiveness by user subscription amount.
User flow
Design
The overall design process could be divided into two stages.
Stage 1
In the first stage, I created a user flow featuring basic bouquet purchasing functionalities. This included a simple flower-buying process as well as a calendar that displays special holidays and estimated delivery dates. This version of the design allows users to buy flowers for themselves.
Stage 2 (Iteration)
In the second stage, I adjusted my goal to further encourage users to make such purchases for themselves.
To achieve this, I decided to add extra features that would emphasize the uniqueness of buying flowers for oneself, including chat box, subscription, preference test.
The subscription feature offers long-term purchasing services. Users will be able to regularly receive personalized bouquets without the need to choose, becoming a surprise on special days.
The chat box advances the conversation through options provided in the chat window and recommends different themed bouquets based on the user's feedback on their mood.
The preference test pops up when users first register and log into the software, ensuring more personalized bouquet recommendations for subsequent use.
Whole structure flow
After finalizing these features, I merged them to the structure i created for the basic shoping function. And create the final, comprehensive user flow.
User flow
final version
Lo-fi protptype
Includes most of the interface, divided by function as 5 parts.
UI Design
final version
