Over an intensive 4-day period, I personally recruited and conducted remote interviews with 7 diverse users representing our key demographics. These in-depth conversations revealed critical insights about user expectations and frustrations with the current ordering process. The rich qualitative data collected became a foundational reference point that informed and validated our design decisions throughout the entire development process, ensuring we remained focused on addressing genuine user needs rather than assumed problems.

To deeply understand our users' motivations, pain points, and behaviors, we developed three evidence-based personas representing our primary user segments. These detailed archetypes were crafted through rigorous analysis of user interviews, surveys, and behavioral data, then iteratively refined as we gathered additional insights. The personas served as crucial decision-making tools throughout the design process, allowing the team to empathize with users and evaluate potential solutions through their perspective rather than our own assumptions.

Our design process began with crafting low-fidelity sketches and wireframes, which proved invaluable for rapidly visualizing potential solutions and accelerating decision-making without unnecessary delays. These preliminary concepts were directly informed by insights from user interviews, aligned with our core business objectives, and guided by heuristic evaluations that identified excessive workflow distractions. Throughout the entire design journey, we consistently returned to these foundational sketches as anchoring reference points, ensuring our innovative solutions remained focused on addressing the identified user needs and business goals.

I developed a comprehensive customer journey map to systematically visualize and analyze how users discover, interact with, and experience our service throughout their relationship with our brand. This strategic mapping process revealed significant pain points and opportunities during two critical phases: the initial consideration stage and the loyal user stage. These insights directly informed our design priorities, ensuring we allocated resources to address friction points where they would have the most impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

Our qualitative insights were gathered through in-depth user interviews and targeted open-ended surveys, revealing nuanced pain points and user expectations. Complementing this, we leveraged Google Analytics to extract critical quantitative metrics including demographic segmentation, conversion funnels, and user flow analysis. For deeper behavioral understanding, we deployed Content Square's advanced heatmapping and session recording capabilities, which visualized real-time user interactions and validated our hypotheses with empirical evidence. This methodically integrated data ecosystem empowered our team to make evidence-based decisions that directly addressed user needs while supporting key business objectives.

With business objectives as our guiding principle, I prioritized creating a frictionless path for users from entry point to checkout completion. To accomplish this, we developed a detailed current-state user journey map that methodically identified optimization opportunities throughout the process. This systematic analysis revealed unnecessary steps and critical drop-off points that were hindering conversion. By strategically eliminating these friction points during our redesign phase, we delivered a significantly streamlined checkout experience that directly contributed to measurable improvements in conversion metrics.

To gain deeper insights into our users' mental models, we conducted 6 structured online card-sorting workshops with diverse participants. This methodical approach allowed us to precisely identify how customers prioritize different factors when selecting a shipping provider and navigating the parcel sending process. The results revealed clear patterns in user expectations, directly informing our information architecture decisions and ensuring our redesigned navigation paths aligned with natural user thought processes.

To validate our design decisions, I developed a comprehensive, high-fidelity interactive prototype using Axure that simulated the complete user journey. Concurrently, we systematically recruited test participants who aligned with our established user personas and demographic criteria. Our rigorous testing approach included two distinct phases: an initial round consisting of 4 in-depth usability sessions, followed by a second phase with 3 additional participants after implementing targeted refinements based on the critical insights gathered from our first iteration.