Recently, I got a wonderful opportunity to design a website for an organization which are into gardening business. They offer wide range of services starting from designing gardens to maintaining gardens. Also, they do sell a wide variety of products with respect to gardening equipments and  necessities.

The main intention of creating this website was to multiply their sales volume and be global and reach majority of the customer base in India. Also, to target at big ventures like designing boutique gardens in hotels, Resorts and Offices. This website design journey was indeed an exhaustive one as it was under very tight deadlines. So, a quick research on the user base and analysis and website design was what was asked for.

In this process, I had a round of stakeholder interviews who were the marketing heads of the organization and got an insight regarding customer feedback and competitor strengths and weaknesses.

Next, I was on my UX journey to start the design process which begins from user interview sessions. I requested the team to organize interview sessions with the real users of the application under design. I carefully chose the users in such a way that I could interview users with varied interests and motives and needs.

I interviewed around 20 people ranging from age groups 17–75. From the user observation and interviews I could gather some qualitative data which would give a clear understanding of the needs and goals of the end user.

Post User research, I had a round table with the stakeholders where I presented the data from the research. From the brainstorming sessions, we discussed on the feasibility, budget constraints, Technological aspects. I like Stakeholder interviews as it mainly gives me an insight on the following:

I could build some personas based on my research and here is a sample one. Personas are fictional representative users whom we design for. They give us a perspective to design and the goals, needs and behavior help in decision making throughout the design process.

Next aspect of the design is to carve out a user journey and design the use cases and scenarios. A user Journey is an entire journey of any user beginning from his decision making to buy a product till the time he completes his journey, receives the product and stays intact with the client as a happy customer.

Wireframes were created based on the MVOs and was user validated. The same users then again validated the high fidelity prototypes and feedback was incorporated.

Final mockups were ready and I chose minimal colors to reduce visual load. The final mockups were delivered.  The final look goes as shown below: