During my interview with users, I received some pretty negative feedback regarding the current website. At best, criticism was about the aged look of the website. Unfortunately, more negative commentary included not wanting to buy products from the website due to a lack of credibility based on the appearance of the website.
‍

Though there were some organizational and cosmetic tweaks to be made towards enhancing this online platform, usability was not a big issue when looking for a generic bouquet. Of the three users I had go through a task analysis, all were able to successfully get to the end of the checkout process with 0 errors.

A caveat to this finding was that if more specific bouquets or plant types were sought, there would be no way to specify a search outside of the limited existing options in the side nav or an input of an exact name in the search bar. Once I had collected enough information from users, I began synthesizing my data to keep my design focused on my target audience's needs.

After synthesizing my research, I discovered and defined two key personas who would typically shop at my website:

Visser’s is the perfect shop for price-conscious shoppers like Eric and Courtney, however they lack trust for the website in its current state; they are hesitant to input their contact info let alone their credit card information. They want a website that feels up to date, organized, consistent and familiar-- a website they can trust.

Since Visser's had little to no existing information architecture, I drew out a site map attempting to merge the Visser’s online inventory to the categories listed in Urban Stem’s current dropdown menu. Though most categories listed on Urban Stem’s website were relevant, some categories failed to overlap.

Visser’s sold cigar boxes and plant baskets, neither of which were offered through Urban Stems. Visser’s also offered a category of flowers named “tropical flowers” which didn’t have an obvious home in my first iteration of a site map.
‍

I administered a closed card sort and gained insights into where people expected to find these items. I placed “tropical flowers” under my “Flowers by Collection” category, and I placed both cigar boxes and plant boxes under gifts. Card sorting interviewees also elucidated that they would expect to find “Romance Flowers” under “Flowers by Occasion” rather than “Flowers by Collection” which I moved accordingly in my final site map.
‍

Before moving onto digital wireframing tools, I drew out a general layout of what I wanted some of my main pages to look like.