Floward

Floward is the Middle East’s leading online flowers and gifts platform, dedicated to helping people celebrate life’s special moments with ease. Operating across nine countries, including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, Floward delivers curated bouquets and personalized experiences to a growing global audience.

‍

The challenge

‍

As Floward continues to expand its offerings, the company introduced a new checkout interface. The primary challenge was to understand how users, both frequent and new, interpreted this new flow. Floward needed to identify specific user behaviors, preferences, and hidden pain points within the navigation, cart, and checkout processes to optimize the UI/UX and ultimately increase product adoption.

‍

The approach

‍

Digital of Things (DOT) conducted a deep-dive qualitative research phase to evaluate the live platform:

• Usability Testing: 20 moderated research sessions were conducted, with 5 participants attending in-person at our UX lab in JLT, Dubai, and 15 joining online.
• Targeted Recruitment: We recruited a diverse sample of 20 participants from the UAE, KSA, Qatar, and Kuwait. The group consisted of 11 existing Floward users and 9 non-users to capture a broad spectrum of perspectives.
• Realistic Scenarios: Each 60-minute session required participants to complete three key tasks: finding a gift for a traveling colleague, a graduating friend, and a loved one within a 300 AED budget.
• Immersive Setup: Testing was performed on live iPhones to ensure a seamless, interactive, and realistic experience.

‍

The impact

‍

By implementing our recommendations and product refinements, Floward can significantly reduce the cognitive load for new users. Our research provided the following value:

• Identified main blockers: Pinpointed the error pop-up as a high-severity issue hindering the path to purchase.
• Uncovered market dynamics: Highlighted why Floward felt less established among UAE expats compared to competitors, providing a roadmap for localized marketing and UX adjustments.
• Strengthened user confidence: Provided a clear strategy for using microcopy and proactive alerts to reassure senders and recipients, building long-term brand trust.
• Internal alignment: The study served as a catalyst for internal stakeholders across engineering and product teams to prioritize high-impact UI/UX optimizations.

‍

Client Feedback

‍

At the conclusion of the research playback, Usama, a key stakeholder at Floward, expressed his satisfaction with the depth of the findings:

"I think we'll get a lot of new insights or confirmation about what we have from our data. This is a lot of information actually... really good job. Thank you so much. I can see a lot of opportunities here as well to just discover more things together in the future."

‍