
A 4-day design sprint creating an e-commerce store
Week 2 of our Bootcamp at Ironhack is completed and I am proudly presenting this week’s project outcomes in this article.
Introduction — Local shops often suffer a decrease in their annual sales due to more and more adoption in online purchases through options like Amazon or eBay. Our task for this week’s project was, to find a local business with no existing web presence or to help improve their online presence to be more competitive in the market.
Phase 1 — Empathize
Once we received the project brief, my group and I had to decide for a local business to support. After discussing a few ideas we decided upon Rag & Bone Man which is a concept store, well known in the area of Neukölln in Berlin. Rag & Bone Man’s main business used to be about selling dried flowers, poetry, vintage clothes, and coffee. Recently they added workshops in aromatherapy and mental health to their repertoire. It was quite obvious to us that Rag & Bone Man has many unique selling points, but to build up a successful e-commerce store, we had to narrow down the focus — dried flowers.
Our competitor’s analysis shows clearly that there is a huge potential for an ‘dried flowers’ e-commerce business as most competitors offer dried flowers only as a sub-category.
Phase 2 — Define
Our quantitative research, in the form of an online survey, helped us to define our primary user persona.

- Shops very consciously
- Tries to support local businesses
- Open-minded for learning new things
- Happy to pay a higher price for something unique
- Supports sustainability
- Purchases only for special occasions
GOAL: have something unique that lasts for a long time.
PAINS: hard to get dried flowers, online and in local shops. Fresh flowers wilt so quickly
Phase 3 — Ideate
Keeping Natalies pain points and goals in mind, we created a sitemap. We refined it using the card-sorting method up until we reached an ‘optimal’ structure, which is intuitively navigable. From there we designed the user flow, Natalies ‘happy path’:

Once the user flow was created, we used the Crazy 8 method to come up with Low-Fi-Wireframes as fast as possible. A lot of ideas were on the table and we voted for the best elements to join them in a paper prototype.

Phase 4 & 5 — Prototype and Test
We tested our paper prototype with multiple users to observe patterns of the users’ behaviors. A few adjustments had to be made and we started another testing round with our paper prototype before we designed our Mid-Fi-Prototype.
Conclusion
The second week of Ironhack Berlin is done and dusted! We’ve learned a lot, and I am extremely happy about what we have achieved within our team. We worked really well together and each one of us contributed their own little touch. I also believe that our prototype is a great start digitalizing the concept of Rag & Bone Man. It offers a very unique selling point hence why it is a great market opportunity.
