We recognize that there’s quite a lot of information and resources at plant owner’s disposal, but rarely does one seem to capture all that’s needed to care for their plant baby. We aim to understand and build for what plant owners really want in their plant care planning, helping them keep their leafy friend growing and thriving.
Team of 4
Role : User Researcher and Data analyst, UX/UI Designer,
QA Tester
Duration: 6 weeks
Tools Used: XD, Figma, Invision, otter.ai, Miro
There is a lot of information and resources at plant owner’s disposal, but rarely do they capture all that’s needed to care for their plant baby.
We aim to build an app that allows plant care scheduling reminders, community communication, and an overall place for plant owners to keep track of how to care for their leafy friends.
The steps and process we followed for this case study is as follows,
To learn more about our potential users and their demographics also their ways and methods of plant care we did,
This project began with doing surveys, and the industry, which allowed me to better understand how people take care of plants and their demographics and the methods they use to take care of their plants. In addition to that, it allowed me to learn about the other apps they use to know about their plants. With this research, I began to understand that there are a variety of plant care mobile apps that helps users in the journey of planting and growing.
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Our main objective of the survey is to learn
Plant owners can be beginners, experts, and everything in between. As mentioned, there is a wide range of resources out there, and these people vary on what they need to fit their plant care process. We want to discover the common thread.
We learnt that ,
Some of the reasons that the existing apps are not satisfying are,
"Along with being beautiful, taking care of plants has become an engaging hobby for me. Plant care provides routine and aids in maintaining my mental health through the highs and lows of my depression and anxiety. Additionally it’s rewarding to see how plants develop and shift steadily with time & care. " -A Participant
Five participants were interviewed and one of them using Zoom. The participants ranged from being familiar with plant care to being expert in plant care.
To get an in depth knowledge of what we gained already from the survey by asking the five whys and how?
We did a market research on the other prominent plant care apps and did a SWOT analysis on the same.
Once we had all the user interview data we completed the affinity mapping and grouped the insights based on their similarities and common properties .
Data from user interviews and the affinity diagram influenced the making of this persona. The persona is a new plant owner and looking forward improving the skills of her newly found hobby. This persona feels overwhelmed checking out various websites and couldn't come up with a decision.
Natasha, a mother and entrepreneur, often gets frustrated as a budding plant owner knowing how to care for each plant to keep them alive. We have observed that even well-intentioned plant owners often don't have a system for plant care, usually erring on trial and error. How can we create a knowledgeable, relevant system that's customizable and continually engaging for both amateurs and experts to feel fulfillment in their plant care?
From the affinity diagram we were able to pull out the user needs and come up with the features that has to be added in the future app.
Based on the above categorization we were able to prioritize the features by voting against each of the options as shown below.
User interviews and market research influenced many of the “must have” features to allow for easy browsing. Navigation with clear language was deemed as an important feature by all user interview participants and also transparent details about plants.
Using our persona we created the storyboard which depicts the journey of our persona 0f her plant care.
The feature prioritization matrix, along with user research and storyboard influenced this user flow and its navigation. This user flow seeks to include clear language and navigation for a user and showcases how a user would choose his/her plants and proceed accordingly.
User flows led me to sketches and then to low and mid fidelity wireframes. The wireframes are designed with having the mobile first approach , so that the end product will be responsive across all the devices. We also ensured the copy is as informative and is able to convey the mission of Poppy. After the lo-fi wireframes we did a guerrilla usability testing for the app. The iterations were all done in the mid and hi-fi prototypes. The below image is the mobile lo-fi wireframes.
Guerrilla usability testing is a way to evaluate how effective an interface is by testing out its visual design, functionality and so we aimed at evaluating our lo-fi prototype and our testers were from other teams and some of whom are new plant owners and others have been plant owners for many years.
We iterated our lo-fi prototype and completed our iOS mockups and did another user testing by giving them tasks to complete using the iOS mockup. The test results were iterated in the final prototype.
Once we had established iOS mockups and polished them, it was time to test the app. I was testing to see if the content was easy to navigate to, whether the placement of the content was intuitive and to gauge users’ impression of the branding.
This usability test was completed on iOS mockups for Poppy. The screens tested were the account screen, adding a plant screen , viewing the plant care screen , calendar screen and discussion screens. Five participants who are first new and expert in plant care were tested.
Tasks included were,
