My Role
Project Manager
Strategy
Research
Sketches
Visual Design
Protoypes
High Fidelity Mock Ups
User Testing
User Interface
Goals
User Goals
Help gardeners have better experiences and become more successful.
Business Goals
Help Baker Creek, a seed company, sell more seeds to backyard gardeners.
Solution
An iOS application that helps gardeners become more confident and successful by offering a garden tracker, an interactive filter to help define issues that arise during the growing season, and connections to other gardeners who can help diagnose problems with plants and share inspiration.
Details
Team: Team of Two
Outcome: iOS Application
Type: Concept Design
Industry: Agriculture
Timeframe: 2 weeks
Research: 6 users
Iterations: 4
Empathize
User Research
After interviewing advanced and beginner gardeners, it became clear they all needed the same thing: a way to choose plants that would grow where they'd be planted, a way to keep track of their plants and what they needed, and a way to diagnose problems when they arise. One of the people we interviewed even mentioned she had created a Gantt Chart to keep track of everything!
Journey Mapping
By better understanding the users, we knew that we wanted to design an app that would be easy to use and help them become better gardeners. It also helped us define the MVP, and set goals for what we'd like to include on the next iteration.
Define
Persona
We wanted to put a face to our project, and this is where Susan came in. She's a gardener who has just started planting from seed and wants a way to keep track of her garden. All the design decisions were designed to solve her gardening problems.
Susan
"Now that I'm planting from seed, I find it hard to keep track of everything I need to do. However, I think the most frustrating part of gardening is when I feel like I do everything right, my plants die, and I don't know why."
Susan's Goals and Pain Points
Pain Points
- Seed packets are labeled incorrectly
- Doesn’t know when to plant
- Plants often die
- Forgets to water
- Buys unsuitable plants
Goals
- Keep plants alive
- Buy plants that grow well in her region
- Know when to germinate, plant, water, and fertilize
- Identify problems that arise
- Keep track of garden and be reminded of what she needs to do
Ideate
Sketching
After my partner created an App Map, we sketched some different ideas of how the app could look. My partner and I did our sketching together and then worked to generate designs from our best ideas.
Prototypes & Testing
Home Page Iterations
We wanted the homepage to be highly visual and get users excited about the process right away, so we moved from a mostly navigational wireframe to something that was more delightful and engaging.
After our team project was complete, I wanted to align my design closer to the HIG specifications. So I redesigned the entire app, added an additional user flow, and retested on my own.
New Garden Set Up Iterations
Before deciding how to do a filter for plants, I worked with a developer who helped come up with the best and most efficient way to categorize keywords. He suggested giving areas to type words in, but when I suggested using preselected keywords, he thought it would be a much better solution.
In my personal redesign, I created screens that gave feedback to the users by a state change of the selection chosen.
Plant Problem Iterations
Throughout research we kept hearing that gardeners get really frustrated when it comes to issues that arise during the growing season. They worked so hard getting their plants to germinate, spent countless hours getting their ground prepared to plant, and spent time everyday to water and care for their gardens, only to witness their plants die for an unknown reason. We wanted to give them a way to diagnose their plants and then get more information on why it happened and how to fix it. Because this is a very text heavy page, we used progressive disclosure to offer the user what they wanted to know.
In my additional design and testing, I found that users were confused on the accordion drop down, so I went to a more traditional approach and used table view styling based on the HIG.
Next Steps
Because I only did one round of testing on the redesign, I'd like to make a second iteration on the community user flow. I'd also like to work with developers on how to pull in an API and ensure the plant problems and garden set up are functional.
