Florascent's new website (not online yet)
When I took over the Florascent project, the website was far from conveying the brand's exclusivity. The design was dated and mostly spoke to an older group of customers. The challenge was to make the brand more appealing to a younger, trend-aware audience without losing the existing customers.
The weak storytelling on the site made it hard to build an emotional bond with the brand and the products. The "About us" page was minimal and barely told the story behind the exclusive scents or the team that makes them. Another problem was the large selection of perfumes. The variety, together with often abstract names and missing information in the feed, left customers overwhelmed. Users faced a huge choice of scents without knowing how to decide on one.
Technically the site had room to grow too: search did not work properly, did not recognize typos or synonyms, and struggled in particular with the often foreign-language product names. On top of that came more UX problems like the cookie window you could not click away, seemingly small details that still hurt the user experience considerably.
Florascent's old (still current) website
Before we got to the actual solution, I ran a thorough UX audit. I looked at usability as well as the aesthetic and emotional language of the website. It quickly became clear to me that luxury e-commerce asks for much more than the usual UX principles. So I learned more in this area specifically, to understand how you build emotion, exclusivity and trust digitally too.
My goal was to create a user experience that reflects the luxurious character of Florascent and at the same time makes the buying decision easier. I focused on two main things: improving the product presentation and adding emotional storytelling.
To counter decision paralysis, we developed a new feature in the product feed. Every scent got a small button that, when clicked, shows an overlay with the top, heart and base notes of the perfume. The perfume bottle moved into the foreground, while the background was subtly dimmed. We also placed poetic descriptions of the scents subtly under the images, to give users a sense of which emotions and impressions each scent evokes, all without having to leave the feed page.
Overlay with scent-note information & short description
For the users who were overwhelmed by the large selection, we build an interactive perfume quiz. Based on personal questions about preferences and moods, the quiz helped users find their ideal scent. It was not just about simple preferences, but about a playful and inspiring experience that makes buying more personal.
Florascent scent quiz
Alongside the functional improvements, we worked deliberately on strengthening the emotional bond with the brand. Images and videos showing the elaborate production process and the dedicated team behind Florascent were placed cleverly across the whole website. That way the brand's story can be told naturally, and the exclusive character of the products moves into the foreground.
Florascent video in the feed
One of the biggest challenges was that at first no user interviews could be done. Instead I had to rely on insights from customer support and Google Analytics. That made it harder to understand the deeper needs of users. To still make sound decisions, I also relied on research into luxury UX and best practices from other perfume sites.
Later we ran small user interviews with friends to test navigation & readability. We noticed that "Home" for room scents was misread as a start page, so we changed it to "Room scents".
Because we were so deep in the design process ourselves, we automatically associated "Home" with room scents, but for users that was confusing. This finding made it clear to me again: You are not the user.
