Specialty Florist App: FleursFinder
As part of my coursework for a UX Certificate from Google, we were challenged to create three portfolio projects. This was my first: a specialty app designed to help anyone find the perfect flowers for any occasion from the comfort of wherever they happen to be at the time.
This was my first attempt at a design project, so it’s a little rough around the edges, but I think it demonstrates a clear throughline of design choices and thinking that I’m proud to say I draw upon today. Please look past the clumsy color choices to see the potential within.
I used ideation exercises like Crazy Eights and How Might We to come up with solutions to my problem: purchasing flowers is downright inaccessible! From needing to travel to cramped and poorly lit shops to not knowing what will be in season without an almanac, flower purchasers face too many hurdles. I hoped to alleviate some of those pain points by creating an app that would appeal to users of all ages and experience with floral arrangements, automatically presenting a smaller number of excellent choices rather than an infinite number of wrong choices.
I wireframed on paper before transferring to digital wireframes and prototypes in Figma. I needed to spend time on paper before leaping to digital design because I wanted to nail down my thoughts before I got bogged down in technical details and my limitations with a new tool.
Once I had a working prototype, I was able to conduct some usability research via an unmoderated usability study. I had participants record themselves using the prototype and try to complete a set of simple tasks and then asked them to answer some questions about the experience. Based on their feedback I made a bunch of tweaks both large and small to the designs and then created my high-fidelity mockups.
Finally, once I had mockups I was happy with, I stitched them together into a final working prototype, my high-fidelity prototype of the FleursFinder app, which you can experience for yourself here: https://tinyurl.com/2j44y5z8
“Designing a solution that meets the needs of users with limited vision also creates solutions for users with unhindered vision. Good design makes tools accessible to and useful for everyone.”
This project represents the earliest stages of my design thinking, but you can see already that accessibility is important to me and something I plan to center in all my designs. While my color and typography choices are probably not what I would choose for a final product today, the benefit of hindsight allows me to appreciate where I was coming from stylistically.
