Overview
A mobile application that allows users to create a watering and care routine for their plants.
Duration:
Role:
Tools:
Jan - Mar 2021
Solo Designer
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
A mobile application that allows users to create a watering and care routine for their plants.
Often times when life gets busy, houseplants can become neglected. Without an established care routine, plant owners will lose track of when they need to water their plants.
How might we help plant owners keep track of their care routine so that their plants can grow and thrive instead of wither and die.
For my primary research I created a survey for my classmates, friends, and family to fill out. I had more than 20 participants fill out the survey and the results were very insightful and highlighted some pain points, motivations, and behaviours that were relevant to my problem space.
After conducting a round of interviews with my classmates, I gathered some key findings and themes. One of the main pain points that came up frequently was having a diverse collection of plants which all have their own unique care schedule. This was a main cause for dying and unhealthy houseplants among my interview participants.
Keeping in mind the pain points, motivations, and behaviours that I gathered, I created a persona based on my research findings and interviews.
Meet Kate, she started collecting plants during quarantine as a hobby and she now has about 10 plants in her home. With that many plants she is finding it hard to stay on top of watering and caring for them. They all have distinct care needs and this can cause some confusion and frustration for her, especially when she sees that some of them are not thriving.
With Kate’s goals and frustrations in mind, I came up with a task flow for a potential app.
I started to do some sketches based off of the task flow. I knew that I wanted the home page to show a list of plants with their watering days easily viewable. I also included a drop down menu for the upload method, either manual or scanning. On the Add Plant page I included the picture of the plant and an option to add the frequency of care.
After establishing a user flow, drawing some sketches, and solidifying a layout, I translated my sketches into a lo-fi prototype.
I conducted 5 rounds of user tests for my first digital prototype. The sessions were extremely helpful and brought to light some specific issues in the design and functionality of the app. Below is a chart which shows the list of tasks that my participants performed during the tests.
Some issues arose mainly in the second and third steps, when users were tasked with adding a plant to their collection and creating a watering schedule. Below are some notes that I took during the first round of user testing:
I took into consideration the results from my first round of usability testing and made the necessary changes to fix the issues for my second Lo-Fi Prototype.
Below I highlighted some of the changes that I made from my first to second round of prototypes based on my feedback from user testing.
I conducted another round of usability testing with five participants. This session confirmed that the changes I made worked. The issues that arose in the first round were no longer present.
Although most of the issues were solved in this round, I still received some constructive feedback from my participants. These were the main themes for the second round:
After two rounds of usability testing, I made some changes to my lo-fi wireframes and added some new functions. I then created a visual identity and implemented some style, colour, and personality into the design. Here is my final high fidelity prototype.
When I first started researching the problem space for GreenLeaf, I already had a visual identity and look in mind. Some of the adjectives that I associate with my app are:
With these words in mind, I started looking for inspiration from photos of plants, bedrooms, architecture, and even album covers. Anything that evoked the feelings of some of the listed adjectives, I organized in my Moodboard.
For my icon, I wanted to incorporate the golden ratio and sacred geometry into the design because of how present it is in nature. Below is the process of how I created it.
For the next step in this design process I would like to tackle a few things:
