Dallas Flower Florist is a local floral delivery service. The objective of this project was a full UX audit and redesign of their existing e-commerce platform. The legacy website suffered from cluttered visual layouts, confusing category taxonomies, and high interaction friction, preventing customers from smoothly finding arrangements and completing purchases.
We initiated the project by running a heuristic evaluation on the live Dallas Flower Florist website to identify fundamental usability issues:
Cognitive Overload & Clutter: The homepage presented dense, unformatted blocks of text (such as listing delivery zip codes and hospital destinations in raw paragraphs) rather than clean, structured metadata.
Navigation Bottlenecks: The category hierarchy was disorganized, mixing flower types, seasonal holidays, and recipient occasions without clear prioritization.
Friction in User Flow: Essential actions—like continuing shopping from the cart, reviewing custom event services, or accessing privacy policies—lacked clear visual cues and intuitive placement.
Competitive Benchmarking To identify industry best practices and market opportunities, we benchmarked multiple national and international floral e-commerce platforms across key user experience parameters:
Filtering Mechanisms: Top-performing platforms consistently provide faceted filters for price, flower color, and occasion.
Transparency & Care: Value-adding features like flower preservation tips and clear digital refund policies were missing from smaller competitors but created strong credibility on leading sites.
Personalization: Features like custom greeting card integration and flexible arrangement sizing directly improved conversion rates during checkout.
Based on our user research and the target demographic of floral gifting, we developed the primary persona Jasmine to guide our architectural and design decisions:
Information Architecture Restructuring via Card Sorting
To resolve the chaotic categorization of the legacy site, we conducted open Card Sorting sessions with real users:
Card Inventory: We extracted over 40 essential content elements, features, and taxonomy items (such as product categories, delivery policies, occasion types, and account settings) onto individual cards.
Testing & Matrix Analysis: Participants grouped and mapped these items into intuitive categories. We then analyzed the frequency matrix to identify patterns in how users naturally expect information to be nested.
Key Findings:
Users clearly separate "Occasions" (Birthday, Sympathy, Romance) from "Flower Types" (Roses, Orchids, Lilies) and "Plants"
Critical transactional information (such as delivery date selection, card customization, and shipping policies) belonged strictly within the checkout and product detail phases, not cluttering the top-level navigation.
Streamlined Sitemap
Synthesizing the card sorting data, we constructed a shallow, intuitive Sitemap that organizes the entire product catalog and operational pages:
Primary Categories: Clear entry points split by Occasional, By Flower Type, Exotic Flowers, Plants, and Special Events Customization.
Utility Navigation: Dedicated quick-access paths for Search, User Profile, and Shopping Cart anchored in the header for seamless global access.
Footer & Support Hub: Secondary content—such as preservation tips, delivery zones, working hours, and FAQs—was moved to a clean, accessible footer structure.
Wireframes & Interface Layout Transforming our information architecture into tangible screens, we developed mid-fidelity wireframes focused on readability, visual hierarchy, and conversion:
Curated Homepage Layout: Replaced the wall of raw text with clear visual entry points—featuring structured promotional banners, a "Best Sellers" carousel, and direct filters by occasion and flower type.
Product Detail & Customization: Redesigned the product page to prominently display transparent pricing, size variations, clear delivery date pickers, and flower care/preservation advice.
Streamlined Value Add-ons: Embedded intuitive upsell steps, allowing users to easily write a greeting message and pick custom card options without disrupting the core ordering flow.
Global Support & Transparency: Grouped business hours, delivery zones, FAQs, and contact links into a clean, predictable footer layout.
Usability Testing & Task Validation:
To validate the redesigned navigation and ordering flow before final handoff, we ran scenario-based usability tests using Maze:
The Test Scenario: "It's your friend's birthday in the USA, and you want to send them a floral arrangement as a gift. Since your friend loves crimson, choose an arrangement in that shade and complete the purchase flow."
Testing Focus: Measuring task success rate, navigation path clarity (navigating through the "Occasional" -> "Birthday" taxonomy), and checkout efficiency.
Maze Insights & Quantitative Feedback:
Users navigated through the occasion-based taxonomy directly to the birthday catalog without friction.
The dedicated color and occasion filters drastically reduced browsing time compared to the legacy website.
Feedback confirmed the checkout flow felt transparent, especially with early visibility of delivery options and card customization steps.
Interactive Prototype Experience the redesigned ordering flow and streamlined navigation in Figma:
[🔗 View Interactive Prototype]
