PlantThat Case Study

Your Plant Companion

Project Deliverable: Mobile App Prototype
Team: David Haynes, Tena Johnshoy Barasa & Melissa Wolf
My Role: UX Designer
Tools Used: Adobe XD, Google Forms, InVision, Miro, Lucidchart, Storyboard That

The PlantThat app was developed to address and solve a problem for our users’ everyday lives. The problem we identified is that many people enjoy the benefits of growing plants, but may struggle to maintain them. The goal for the project was to create an app that provides tools to help users be successful plant growers.

Research

Definition

Ideation

Prototyping

Testing

Outcome

Research Definition Ideation Prototyping Testing Outcome

User Research

The research phase for this project included 6 twenty minute user interviews and survey feedback from approximately 50 respondents. We asked all participants a series of questions about their interests in plants and/or gardening. The purpose was to understand the highs and lows of gardening and determine if a digital tool would be useful for gardeners.

Through our research, we set out to discover how to help users achieve their goals and maintain optimal conditions so their plants can thrive. What we found is that people have many reasons for wanting to grow and maintain healthy plants, but oftentimes there is a lack of knowledge, time, and discipline preventing them from achieving their desired outcome.

“Gardening vegetables can be daunting because I have so much to learn… My vegetables can be limited because I have so many questions and I'm not very good at problem solving if something isn’t growing right.”

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Definition

We determined the focus for the project should be on plant enthusiasts with beginner and intermediate skill levels. Our survey data showed a positive correlation between skill level and age, so we deduced that the younger age ranges would benefit most from this product. With this information, we narrowed our user personas age to be between 20 and 39.

Our data revealed the two main pain points for the user are:

  1. Experiencing plant die off
  2. Keeping up with plant maintenance

These two points of frustration lead to the user spending more money, time and energy on their plants or garden.

User Insight: Users need a simple way to manage their plant care because they have difficulty remembering to maintaining them, and may experience plant loss due to a lack of reliable information.

How might we reduce the amount of time, money and frustration for users due to plant underperformance or loss, and enable them to be more successful in plant growing and gardening?

Ideation

One problem we encountered in defining the parameters for the app was scope creep. The research and brainstorming process resulted in a long list of wish list items that had merit and were supported by our research findings. Given the timeline and resources allowed for the project, it was not feasible for us to build out all of these tools.

To address the problem, we created a feature priority matrix and mapped out the effort versus impact for the various proposed features. This method allowed us to create a “short list” of manageable yet high impact offerings for the app.

As a team, we experimented with storyboards to come up with a design flow that made sense for our user. We made iterations to our story in order to capture the most useful application of the product and to get the team on the same page before moving into the prototyping stage.

Prototyping

Once we had decided on our core features for the app, we created a task flow diagram to map the various pages and how they would flow together. We realized that although we had been talking about the functionality extensively, we were envisioning slightly different ways to execute the prototype. This stage allowed the team to talk through important details and arrive at the best solutions. With our task flow complete, we were ready to develop our low-fidelity prototype which we would use to perform user testing.

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User Testing

We conducted usability testing with five individuals to discover how the experience was for the user and find weak spots in the design. The primary objective was to determine if they could accomplish three main tasks:

  1. Use the app to look up a Monstera plant and add it to “My Plants”
  2. Update the Monstera plant to show that you watered it today
  3. Navigate to the page where you'll find an overview of how to care for the Monstera plant

The most important finding from the testing was that users were confused by having “Maintenance Log” in a separate section from “My Plants”. The maintenance page was hard to find while the user was organically maneuvering through the app. As a result, we decided to integrate the two sections of the prototype to create a more streamlined user flow. This allowed us to simplify the design of the product, while creating a better experience for the user.

Outcome

We set out to create an app that would help users be more successful with their plant growing. Along the way, we found that a simpler product with fewer features and screens was the most helpful and easy to use. The end product is a high-fidelity prototype that could be developed as a user-centered mobile application.

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