Reducing friction without breaking fulfilment

At Bloomon, customers had to manually enter their address when subscribing. It created unnecessary effort for customers and introduced another problem downstream: incorrectly formatted addresses could create issues for the Logistics team responsible for getting flowers to the right place.

What looked like a simple form-design problem was actually a challenge spanning customer experience, technical constraints and fulfilment operations.

Entering an address seems straightforward until you try to design one experience that needs to work reliably across different countries, address structures and customer behaviours.

I started by looking beyond the subscription form itself. Working with Logistics helped us understand what happened after a customer entered their address and where incorrect or inconsistent information created problems downstream.

At the same time, we had to account for an important constraint: addresses don't work the same way in every market. The UK and Netherlands have different address structures and postcode behaviours, which meant simply creating one universal interaction wasn't necessarily the right answer.

This shifted the project from “How can we make this form quicker?” to “How can we reduce effort while still collecting the information the business needs to fulfil an order reliably?”

The happy path was relatively straightforward:

Enter postcode → Find address → Select address → Continue

The more interesting design challenge was everything around it. What happens when the postcode is incorrect? The address can't be found? Several addresses match? The suggested address isn't quite right? The customer needs to enter an address manually?

Rather than treating these as exceptions to solve later, I designed them as part of the core experience. This helped us create an experience that remained simple when the lookup worked, without trapping customers when it didn't.

We explored a flexible search experience where customers could begin with different pieces of address information. It initially felt like the more customer-friendly approach, but that flexibility introduced significantly more complexity: more possible inputs meant more ambiguity, more states to account for and less predictable results.

A postcode-first approach was more constrained, but it gave customers a clearer starting point and allowed the system to progressively reveal the information needed to complete their address.

The constraint actually made the experience simpler.

Instead of forcing an identical interaction across the UK and Netherlands, I designed around a shared principle:

This became one of the most useful lessons from the project: scalable design doesn't always mean identical design.

Once we'd refined the interaction through usability testing, I designed the final experience and worked with Engineering to prepare it for experimentation.

Rather than evaluating the address lookup in isolation, we tested it within the actual subscription journey. The new experience was evaluated through a three-week A/B test and subsequently rolled out to customers.

This project changed how I think about seemingly simple product problems.

Address entry wasn't really a form-design challenge. It sat at the intersection of customer experience, technical constraints and fulfilment operations.

Bringing Logistics into the process early helped us understand consequences that weren't visible from the interface alone, while designing across two markets reinforced that scalable experiences need shared principles, not necessarily identical solutions.

But the lesson I've carried most strongly into later work is: