Blom Market

B2B MARKETPLACE FOR PLANTS AND FLOWERS

Blom Market is a tech-enabled, global ecosystem of digital services focus to connect flower wholesalers and florists in the same channel and thus become the largest marketplace in the world of flowers to provide the best service and experiences for flower professionals.

TIMELINE

Oct 2022 - Mar 2023

MY ROLE

Product Designer
UX Researcher
Service Designer

TOOLS

Figma
Hotjar
Notion
Miró

Context

Blom Market was established in 2018 with the purpose of modernizing and transforming the European flower industry, which has traditionally been outdated and lacking in digitalization.

Pain Points

Users do not prefer us, they say it is more difficult and expensive for them to buy with our platform, resulting in a lack of recurring orders from customers.

Challenge & Goals

It was essential for us to gain a comprehensive understanding of our users' specific concerns and establish ourselves as a reliable and trustworthy platform for them.

Our high level goals were to:

  • Create a strategy for increasing average of recurrent orders.

  • Addressing pain points and design a new product discovery experience.

Research insights

To identify pain points that exist within flower and plants marketplace and the process of product discovery, I created a survey with questions to find the motivations behind a user's decision on whether or not to place an order.

After interviewing a total of 5 people and analysing their responses, I discovered two main reasons that kept users from placing orders:

Long time to find what users need and it’s very difficult to find again a product they have already purchased before

High prices and no deals for deliveries

📊 Competitive Analysis

I chose and compared the three major competitors which has similar services and business models as Blom Market.

The aspects to focus the comparative would be:

  • Product Discovery

  • Pricing

  • Recurrent buyers strategies

🕵🏻 Research methods

Given how non-digital our users are, we find it difficult to conduct tests or interviews digitally. We decided to make face-to-face visits and take advantage of different dynamics:

  1. Card sorting to understand their priorities when it comes to shopping.

  2. Conduct a moderated user test to gather qualitative data.

The test consisted of 3 different tasks that were based on doing "the weekly shopping for their business supplies" we wanted to understand how they searched for products, what were the most important aspects of a product to decide to buy it and identify what their priorities were when making the decision to buy.

Moderated user test

Task 1

Users had to search for a specific flower genus and color and make sure it would arrive in an exact time period

Task 2

Users had to search for a product by category but not by specific genre

Task 3

Users had to search for a specific type of plant

Surveys summary

We also took the opportunity to conduct surveys within our platform to gather more quantitative information and to be able to contrast it with the results of the usability tests.

What level of challenge did you make to find the products you want to buy within Blom Market?

What are the most important factors when deciding to search for a product on our platform?

💡 Key insights from survey responses

4 out of 5 people needed guidance to complete the tasks we gave them. It was very difficult for them to locate the products because the information on many of them was incomplete and made it difficult to make a purchase decision, and they did not know how to locate products they had already purchased quickly.

When answering the question "What are the most important factors when deciding to search for a product on our platform?" 35% answered "The products do not have complete information" and 25% answered "I have nowhere to store my favorite products" and 25% answered that price is decisive.

Define Phase

After analyzing the results of the usability testing and user surveys, user frustrations became evident. High prices and a product discovery with difficulties were not solved by the current platform.

Furthermore, it had become clear that each of these problems was very different and would therefore require different solutions. Ultimately, these customised solutions were developed to alleviate each problem. These solutions took the form of:

  • A new Product Discovery Experience

  • Launch of the MVP of the Add to favorites feature

  • Minimum order quantity (MOQ) enforcement to ensure profitable sales and help users save money

User persona

To better understand how to design for users looking for better prices and faster checkout times, user personas were created for each type of user. Below is a brief version of Montserrat's persona, a 54-year-old lady who lives in Alicante, owns her flower shop and is looking for ways to save money and place her orders while serving her customers, as she works alone.

    • 54 years old

    • Alicante, Spain

    • Flower-shop in the center of the city

    • Family business

    • Monthly income: 3.5K

    • Orders flowers supply 1 time a week

    • Montse use his phone to places her order between customers to take advantage of the time she spends in the store

    • She likes to explore what's on the platform to find the best deals and best prices for products

    • Seeks to maintain the quality of the products it offers in order to keep its customers happy and build customer loyalty

    • She needs to be able to save as much money as possible by buying her raw materials in order to increase her profits on the final product

Wireframes

We worked on improving the information architecture and standardizing the data displayed for each product, in the order of priority that users take into account for their purchase decision.

Early iterations

At this time, we prepared LO-FI prototypes of the solutions we were proposing and tested them with some of our recurring users to validate the designs and flows.

Branding

Creating a new flower marketplace concept required me to think about what the look and feel would be based around, and how the visual language of the platform would tie into its purpose to create a fresh and exciting experience. I worked on defining and refreshing the brand with focus on UI Design.

Design System Integration

In order to be more agile and scalable, we decided to integrate a new design system that would allow us to create a more consistent experience. With the help of Chackra UI Pro, we customized components and created our styles and tokens to meet our needs.

Bring it all together.

Solutions

We designed a new product page and a new product card for the listings.

We prioritized the order and hierarchy of the data we displayed and did an internal work of standardization of the information to ensure that each product had the most important values for the users. This would make it easier for them to be located by the search engine and filters when looking for them.

We created an MVP of the new Add to Favorites functionality. The user now has the possibility to save products, create lists and categorize them and also add all products that are part of a favorite list to the cart page.

And finally hand in hand with the business we defined the new MOQ strategy and I designed all the UX logic and flows to integrate them into the purchase process.

New Catalog and Product Page

  • Prioritize the most relevant data for users and give them hierarchy, such as: Price, units, product features, etc.

Favorites 💜

  • Allow to create different lists and categorize favorite products depending on the user's needs.

  • Make it easy for the user to add to the shopping cart from their favorites lists.

Minimum Order Quantity

  • Help users save money on a single purchase.Help users save money on a single purchase.

  • To have a more sustainable process and become more efficient at the business level.

Outcome

The result of these three key enhancements—introducing the new product card and page, enabling the 'add to favorites' feature, and implementing Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) for each purchase—have effectively addressed two major pain points for our users during their product discovery process. As a result, we've seen a remarkable 13% increase in conversion rates.

Furthermore, we've also witnessed a noteworthy uptick of 0.5 points in our Net Promoter Score (NPS). This not only suggests greater user satisfaction but also has the potential to attract more traffic and prospective customers, ultimately fostering stronger engagement with our brand and our value proposition.


🔬 Retrospective

A great post-project practice is to give yourself some time away from the project to reflect on what went well, what did not go so well, and how you would improve the product or process the next time.

So, what went well?

  • With the different initiatives, we are able to impact users in a short period of time.

  • Through these projects we get closer to our users and find out a lot of valuable information about how they perceive our service and platform.

That's nice, but what needs improvement?

  • Test more when launching a new feature.

  • To be as transparent and clear as possible with the user when it comes to prices and conditions.

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