“Sowing together plants and friendships”

End-to-End Application

Introduction

PLANT APP

Background 

Every spring, aspiring and experienced gardeners begin planning for their gardens. These gardens can take the shape of large in-ground plots to smaller containers on balconies. Regardless of the size, gardeners will either buy already started plants or grow them from seeds. Oftentimes (especially when starting with seeds) gardeners will find that they have sprouted more plants than they have space for. The abundance of plants comes back again once it’s time to harvest plants. Gardeners will commonly find that they are producing more food than they want or can eat.

Problem

Gardeners are often burdened by having too many sprouted plants in the spring and too much produce in the fall that they don’t want to go to waste.

Solution

Design a user friendly go-anywhere plant community space around a environmentally conscious mindset.

Target Audience

This app is going to be designed for anyone between the ages of 18-70 who have an interest in gardening and/or minimizing food waste. 

Key Features:

  • Develop user profiles 

  • Utilize mapping features

  • Share gardening advice/pictures

  • Post extra plants/produce that can go to new homes

  • Seek out wanted plants from other gardeners

Scope

80 hours to create an MVP (minimum viable product)

Tools:

  • Figma

Role:

  • UX Designer

  • Researcher

The Process

The foundation of Plant App’s design process was configured in a way in which to build off of multiple iterations. The goal was to create an app which favored easy communication with other users and encouraged asking others for help.

PROCESS

1. Research

Research Methods:

  1. Competitive Analysis

  2. Interviews

Research Goals: 

  1. Understand how individual gardeners could benefit from one another 

  2. Help cultivate local gardening communities

  3. Develop more pathways to fight against communities experiencing food insecurities

  4. Create an app to share plants and excess produce

Competitive Analysis

One of the most interesting parts of any project is investigating what other products are already out there in the world.

In terms of plant swap competitors there really weren’t many and showed to be a niche market. Therefore, I expanded the competitive analysis to focus on a broader range of plant “competitors” to understand and create a full picture of the online plant world.

Summary

Ultimately, the competitive analysis proved that the online gardening world was a mess, hard to navigate, and in desperate need for a user focused platform.

Interviews

With the competitive analysis offering more ideas rather than answers, interviews were needed to properly design this product. Participants were interviewed to understand possible demographics as well as their interests, motivations, and behaviors towards plant exchanging. The interviews also served as a measure for determining which features to prioritize to improve App engagement.

Affinity Map

The interviews provided a lot of information and proved to be the most influential piece of information. What became more evident was that my product needed to be less specific and more accessible for allowing the user to be in more control.

Summary

Originally when planning out this app I thought that plants would be the most import aspect to design around; however, after analyzing the affinity map it became clear that plants were merely just a vessel for happiness and community building. Therefore, the design took a dramatic shift towards being more community oriented.

PROCESS

2. Define

Persona

Amy Washington was cultivated from the combination of the demographics of people interviewed and their responses, which guided her personality.

Therefore, Amy’s persona comes from an environmentally aware perspective that emphasizes community building and being a well-round person.

Page Sketches

I wanted to design the app to be something that would be familiar and user friendly enough to use all the time and be a strong foundation to support its own community. As Amy’s persona shows, the app needed to be designed for a way to share experiences and moments of joy with others.

Sitemap

This is the sitemap for the Plant App. I really let the information gained through the interviews shepherd what the pages display.

This is where the various types of community engagement come into focus.

PROCESS

3. Design

Task Flow

With the App’s focus being on community paired with Amy’s persona of having a strong sense of independency. I wanted to create a task flow that would help empower her.

Therefore, the task is for her to post her own Plant Swapping event.

User Flow

One of the goals of user flow for this product was to have multiple loops that would encourage the user to continue cycling through content.

The multiple loops the user can experience allows for multiple ways for the user to explore the community.

Wireframes

The wireframes ended up going through a few revisions in an effort to make the app more engaging for users.

Through the iterations, what remained consistent was a strong attempt to provide content in various ways to prevent boredom and user fatigue.

Brand Logo

Just like with the bold and courageous decision to name the product Plant App, the logo needed to be equally sturdy yet simple. The icon originally started as a pot growing a cursive “PA” for Plant App. From there I continued to manipulate it until it looked like a sprout.

UI Kit

All together the Plant App’s UI Kit harmoniously ties together a sense of community and an invitation to explore.

Mood Board

The goal was to create a mood that felt down to earth and embraced community.

Detailed Mockups

The mockups here begin with a sign in screen before walking a user through highlighted screens to show them how to message a seller about a plant.

PROCESS

4. Test

Prototype

I found creating the prototype to be one of the more difficult portions. However, ultimately the challenge led to a delightful final product.

Testing

Through user testing I discovered that my original design struggled with proper hierarchy and users struggled to properly locate and navigate the app.

Revisions

Ultimately, the app ended up being more revisions than intended but I was able to use each revision as an opportunity to improve.

PROCESS

5. Conclusion

Challenges

The challenges with this app really came to underestimating the number of elements required to be designed for the app to really flow smoothly.

Final Thoughts

The idea for the app came through my own gardening experiences. However, the app I originally went out to create in the beginning changed dramatically after deciding to let the responses from my interviews guide the entire app’s purpose be for maximum usage.

Originally, the point of the app was to be a place for plant enthusiasts to come together and help each other be more effective growers. However, following the interviews the reason for the app transformed to be a vessel to bring together and maintain a plant community.

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