Role:

Product Designer

User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing

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2021-Present

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I had the idea to create an E-Commerce platform for people to sell their propagated plants.  During the pandemic I started buying more plants, and learning about different species. For the most part when I started looking for plants I went to Home Depot, Lowes or garden centers. I quickly realized if you wanted a specialty plant they were hard to find so I turned to the internet. With that said, the plant community will buy various clippings from people on forums that have a special color or plant that can’t be found in regular stores. 

This is where my idea for a propagate plant website came from.

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Understanding the Problems

For my usability test-plan for my E-Commerce site: Propagate, I worked off of the acronym D.E.C.I.D.E.

Determine the goals.

Explore the questions.

Choose the evaluation approach and methods.

Identify the practical issues.

Decide how to deal with the ethical issues.

Evaluate, analyze, interpret and present the data.

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Insight

For this user testing my main goals were to focus on completions of purchasing an item from the site.  
The site will eventually be a platform for sellers and buyers.
My idea is to have a minimum of 5 people with different backgrounds and ages maneuvering through the Propagate site, and attempting to purchase a product.
I am starting the process with a script to introduce what we will be doing for the testing, then have a set of initial questions for the users.  I gave them the task, then asked them follow up questions with a questionnaire to get their responses. My whole goal is to have this questionnaire viewed as unbiased, only capturing true, factual answers and responses from the users.

After evaluating my data from my user testing, and reviewing my usability scale, I found that my site may seem a little over designed.  I went back and changed some elements on the initial landing page and took the advice from my question 10 and added product names to the pictures to help communicate better what is on my site. I also removed a couple of elements that felt repetitive and softened the palette.    

According to Scott Belsky “Simplicity is everything when it comes to great UX." As Albert Einstein famously said, “Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”

The user experience of any product should be as straightforward as possible; as soon as the user lands on a website or opens an app, they should be able to navigate from A to B without even thinking about it.  This means getting rid of too many elements that can bog down the system.

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Style Guide

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As a UX designer I created a style guide to document a growing and ever-evolving set of design guidelines that arise from the design process. In creating a style guide, I basically documented my thought process. Please click here for the style guide.

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Wire Framing

Based on the above problems identified, I worked towards addressing these pains by coming up with potential solutions:

Reducing the number of steps to minimize time to completion.

Establishing clearer visual form hierarchy by grouping related fields.

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Prototyping

I created my high fidelity mockups in Adobe XD. This is where I would work closely with the Front End team to spec out any missing interactions that have been missed in the process. I then would conducted a UX review of each iteration that has been implemented to ensure it was aligned with the designs before it went live.

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Results

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Some key takeaways from this project are:

Development doesn't end after user testing. Design is a constant iteration of improving the experience for the end user. Always find ways to collect and listen to your user's feedback.

Create a strategic plan to launch. This helps the project stay on track and have less derailment.

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Here is the final results for my E-commerce page!

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