Papeterie Papu

Project Snapshot

Challenge
Small creative brands need to express personality and emotion online, but e-commerce experiences can easily become either too generic or too visually busy.

Solution
Papeterie Papu combines brand identity, product discovery, and mobile-first UI design to create a stationery shopping experience that feels warm, playful, and easy to navigate.

Outcome
A UX/UI and branding concept for a mobile-first stationery e-commerce experience, including brand direction, product categories, product pages, cart flow, checkout screens, and visual interface design.

Overview

Papeterie Papu is a UX/UI and branding course project created for a small independent stationery e-commerce concept.

The project explores how an online shopping experience can express a cozy and playful brand personality while still keeping the interface clear, structured, and easy to use. Papu was built around journaling, stamps, writing tools, paper goods, and everyday creative rituals.

The Problem

Independent stationery and lifestyle brands often rely on atmosphere, curation, and emotional connection. Their value is not only in the products they sell, but in the feeling they create around browsing, collecting, gifting, and making.

The challenge was to translate that charm into a digital shopping experience without compromising usability. Too much personality can make an e-commerce interface feel cluttered, while a purely functional layout can make a small creative brand feel generic.

The main opportunity was to design an experience where branding and usability support each other.

Methods & Frameworks

The project followed a Design Thinking process, combining user interviews, survey research, competitor analysis, user persona, card sorting, user flows, moodboarding, mobile-first interface design, wireframes, prototyping, 5-second testing, mid-fidelity usability testing, UI design, and e-commerce flow mapping.

These methods helped define the experience around brand personality, product discovery, category clarity, mobile usability, visual direction, and a smoother path from browsing to checkout.

Key Insight

The strongest insight was that people are not only shopping for stationery. They are looking for inspiration, comfort, personality, and a sense of discovery.

This shaped Papu as a brand-led e-commerce experience rather than a simple product catalog. The interface needed to support browsing and emotional connection while still making product information, categories, and purchase actions clear.

Key Product Decisions

One important decision was to make category discovery more visual and inviting. Instead of treating categories as plain filters, Papu uses them as entry points into different creative moods and shopping intentions, such as journaling, stamps, writing tools, and paper goods.

Another decision was to keep the mobile shopping flow familiar and easy to understand. While the brand direction brings personality to the experience, core e-commerce actions such as browsing, product details, cart, and checkout remain simple, recognizable, and easy to follow.

The mobile-first structure also guided the interface. Navigation, product cards, product details, cart, and checkout screens were designed to feel readable, touch-friendly, and visually consistent across the full shopping journey.

Trade-off

A key trade-off was balancing brand personality with shopping clarity.

The product could have leaned heavily into a decorative and playful visual style, but that risked making the interface harder to scan and use. For that reason, the design uses softer colors, generous spacing, clear hierarchy, and simple shopping patterns to keep the experience calm and usable.

This allowed the brand to feel cozy and distinctive without distracting from product discovery or purchase decisions.

Interface & Visual Direction

The visual direction was designed to feel cozy, playful, and tactile, reflecting the atmosphere of a small stationery shop. Soft pastel colors, rounded components, warm backgrounds, and product-focused visuals helped create a friendly and personal brand world.

My background in branding and graphic design helped shape the visual language, especially around color balance, layout rhythm, typography, product presentation, and overall consistency. The goal was to make the interface feel emotionally engaging while keeping the e-commerce experience clear, structured, and easy to navigate.

Outcome

The final concept presents a brand-led mobile e-commerce experience that integrates product discovery, category browsing, product details, cart review, and checkout into a single cohesive shopping journey.

Papeterie Papu shows how a small creative brand can use e-commerce not only as a sales channel, but as an extension of its identity. The result is a warm, visually distinctive, and usable shopping experience that balances emotional appeal with clear purchase flows.