Introducing E-Commerce to Ginkgo Gardens
My Role: UX Researcher/ Visual Designer | Duration: 2 Week Sprint

Project Overview

Ginkgo Gardens is a garden center in the Capitol Hill district of Washington D.C. It is one of the most well known in its area and is frequented by people looking to buy houseplants, flowers, garden materials, and schedule garden services.
This project consisted of a redesign of the user experience and user interface of the Ginkgo Gardens website. From my research I found that Ginkgo's current set up does not allow for is not online shopping and does not have an intuitive or attractive flow. In my prototype redesign I created e-commerce capabilities and a reviews feature
UX Techniques Used
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Competitive/ Comparative Analysis
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Persona Development
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User Flows
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Sketching and Wireframing
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Prototyping in Figma
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Usability Testing
Design Process

Understand
I began my research by conducting an element analysis of competitors of Ginkgo Gardens: Olde City Gardens, The Sill, and Burpee. I also did a feature analysis of other e-commerce comparators: Etsy, Apple, and Target. What I wanted to gain from these analyses was an understanding of how these companies mapped out their users navigation through their sites and what features would be most useful to users.
I realized after this research that having elements that provided more information about Ginkgo Gardens and the products it provides, and features that allowed for reviews and product search could be beneficial to my redesign of the Ginkgo Gardens website.

Define
Persona
In the UX design process it is important to always keep the users at the forefront of all design decisions. This is why we created target user personas, so we always know exactly who we are designing for.
In this project we were to chose between four different user profiles. I chose the "careful critic".

What's the problem?
Users, like Marnie, need a way to read the opinions of other buyers and share their own experiences for others to read before purchasing items online. This is necessary because these users are careful about how and where they spend their money.
Develop
Userflows
Once I understood who my target user was what their needs were, I was able to start mapping the process of buying a plant and leaving a review on the Ginkgo Gardens website
Purchasing a Houseplant


Leave a Review
Sketches
After getting down the basic flow of the tasks that I wanted users to complete I began sketching out what I imagined the basic look of the interface would look like.

Finalize
Prototype
When reworking the visual design of the Ginkgo website I thought about the tone I wanted to set with the color theory and typography
A fresh earth toned website felt most appropriate for the garden center and the shopping experience I saw customers wanting
Usability Testing
Once I was done creating a prototype it was time to test it. With 5 participants I conducted unmoderated usability test observations. I had my participants complete the tasks of (1) Buying a house plant and (2) Leaving a Review on a house plant. My goal was for them to finish both tasks in under 3 minutes.
100%
Plant Purchase
All 5 of the participants completed the task of purchasing a house plant
Participants took on average 52 seconds to complete this task, which aligned with my 1 minute goal for this task
20%
Leave a Review
Only 2 out of the 5 participants were able to complete the "leave a review" task.
Participants who were able to complete this task took on average 40 seconds to complete it
On average there were 5 misclicks per usability test, most often while performing this task
Iterations
From the usability tests I saw that a major change needed to be made in the flow of writing a review.
I had not considered that most people go to write a review on a previous order so therefore they would not think to get to reviews from a product on the product page.
In my iteration I created a page from the drop down “my orders” that allows them to then see their previous orders and write a review from there as well as the product page.

Next
Steps
As I continue building on this redesign I would like to introduce a scheduling feature for services such as
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Garden Consultation
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Plant Repotting
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Landscape Design
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Installation & Maintenance
I would also like to introduce a "product comparison" feature. I saw the value of it on the Apple website in my C & C analysis and seeing which, plant, soil, or service is best for a user based on a comparison could be very helpful to Ginkgo customers
I would also like to do at least one more round of usability tests after further iterations and introduction of new features.