January 2024 - April 2024

Timeline

Statistics show that plant ownership is on the rise in millenial and Generation Z populations. As people choose to have less kids and pets, plants seem to fill the desire we have as humans to nurture. However, with taking care of any living thing, there are challenges. Plant parents report difficulty remembering and staying consistent with their plant's everyday needs. In addition to task management, plant parenthood takes a village which can be challenging to locate.

Taking all of these factors of plant ownership into consideration, I pitched the idea of “PlantPal” to my interaction design I class and was pleased to discover that some of my peers were interested in my idea! Together, three other designers and I followed Alan Cooper’s Goal Directed Design method to create a mobile app centered around the goals of plant parents.

Problem Statement: It is difficult to manage plant care tasks and find a community of plant enthusiasts, all while remaining informed.

To fully understand our audience and their potential plant related goals, my team and I completed a lit review, competitive analysis, and user interviews. We began our lit review asking two questions:

1. What factors drive this hobby?

2. What all goes into raising plants successfully?

We found that…

• Young adults own plants to fulfill the need to nurture without the expenses of kids/pets

• Indoor plants are more popular for beginner plant owners

• Indoor plants are more accessible as less people have backyard spaces

• Indoor plants are difficult to keep alive due to the indoor climate impacting factors such as pests, sunlight, and temperature

Understanding the users & the domain

The next step in our process was to complete a competitive audit of other plant care applications. Through this research, we found that the competing mobile apps generally…

• lacked customization

• hid their most useful features behind paywalls

• no community or public profile features

In conclusion, we felt that the pre-existing mobile apps on the market provided an isolating and stressful experience. 

In the beginning of our user research process, we created a persona hypothesis of who we thought our users would be like. In doing so, we could begin to understand who we would need to directly talk to.

We concluded that the app would most likely have one primary persona: someone who needs assistance tracking plant care, learning about their plant's needs, and wants to join a community of people with similar interests. 

From this point, we began interviewing 5 plant lovers in our area and gained valuable insights: 

To assist my team and I with drawing behavioral patterns, I led them through a process known as affinity mapping. This process involves each team member quickly jotting down important notes or observations from our interview sessions so that we can visually categorize the repeated behaviors. Affinity mapping helped us to form connections between each of the interview sessions so that we can later have a clear understanding of our app's requirements. 

Affinity map from interview #1

• 4/5 participants viewed and were inspired by plant related content online. 

• 4/5 participants wished that they had help knowing what type of plant care their plant needs and when to do each task

• 3/5 particpants struggle with task management

From the affinity map groupings, we were able to clearly see the common behavioral patterns.

Observations

From the affinity map observations, our team constructed a list of behavior variables to identify our user persona. What resulted from grouping the most common behaviors and goals, was our primary persona: Claira Cobb. 

Creating our user personas

Our list of requirements included:

• Task management reminders

• Personal notes section to create reminders and jot down important information

• Plant nursery to house each of the plants

• Plant awards to increase morale

• Community page for users to view upcoming local events and plant content

• Profile page to share and follow plant content

• Search tool to find plant specific information/tips

Upon gathering the behavior variables to identify user goals, our team was able to make a list of expectations that our persona would have about our product. From this list of expectations, we created a context scenario which is essentially a narrative that follows our personas day to day routine using our mobile app. By describing how the user would use Plant Pal to overcome daily challenges and meet goals, it became easier to understand what features we needed to implement into the final prototype. 

Where our user’s goals became app requirements

To guide my team through the brainstorming process, I sketched out some low-fidelity wireframes so that we could visually start to piece our ideas together. After we had a general understanding of how the frames would be laid out, we moved into Figjam to organize our screens through creating keypath and validation scenarios. A keypath scenario focuses on our persona's main flow and their most significant interactions with the app. The validation scenario is a user's less significant interactions that support the main flow.

Low-fidelity wireframing

Low-fidelity wireframes

Key path scenario: blue

Validation scenario: red

At the start of the refinement phase, we moved from Figjam to Figma and begun bringing our wireframes to life. As team lead, I assigned different screens and flows for each group member to work on. Every few days, we would check each other's progress and work collaboratively so that we would ensure a cohesively designed final product. 

Creating a functional, high-fidelity prototype

Refinement Phase

Once we had fully completed the first version of our prototype, we reached back out to 2 of the participants from our user interviews to gain their feedback. We asked that as they completed their list of tasks that they follow Think Aloud Protocol (TAP) so that we could gather as much of their thoughts as possible. We wanted to know what they liked about the prototype and what were their pain points with it. 

Usability testing

Based on their pain points, we implemented the following changes:

• Added a carousel on the homepage that shows each of the available navbar page names & coordinating icons

• Converted the plant tracker calendar into an upcoming events calendar

• Included a followers/following/posts count on the profile page

• Changed the green to a darker shade to meet accessibility standards and changed the logo font to white for contrast

• Added a stroke to the untapped heart button and changed the grey to meet accessibility standards

From their feedback, we were able to gain some valuable insights to implement moving forward.

• ​We needed to connect the nav bar icons to the names of each page somehow; it was not clear that the leaf icon was the nursery

• The plant tracker calendar is redundant when you already have a nursery page, they expected upcoming events to be located there

• The profile page needed to include a followers/following count

• The primary green that we were using was difficult to see text on

• The light grey untapped heart was difficult to see

Final Prototype

What resulted from following the process of Goal-Directed Design is the mobile app, Plant Pal: an all in one solution for plant care and fostering a community of plant enthusiasts. 

I learned so much from this process as this was my first large-scale design project. Being team lead brought me a new-found appreciation for design, leadership, and teamwork.

1. Leadership is very challenging. Not only was this my first experience completing a UX case study from start to finish, but also my first time leading a group through the process. I learned how important it is to form connections with teammates, understand what they are capable of, and facilitate them in applying their best abilities to the project. Along the way not only did I bond with my team, but I learned something from each of them that I will carry with me into my career.

2. Meaningful design begins with extensive research. I didn’t anticipate how much of this process would take place in the research phase and instead assumed it would be primarily prototyping. However without the involvement of our users in this process, I truly believe our product would not have been successful. The observations and feedback we gained from our users drove every design decision we made moving forward. If we had more time, I think our project would have greatly benefited from a larger, more diverse pool of participants.

3. There will always be project constraints to overcome. As team lead, it was my duty to manage the challenges of completing such a large scale project in an academic setting. I learned how to coordinate deadlines and meetings according to the needs of the project and its members. Due to the short turn around for this project, we had to ensure that our interviews and tests would provide us with enough user research to carry us to the finish line as there was no time to extend the research phase.

Takeaways