Grow Show
UX and UI study of plant growth tracker
Pumpkin fairytale
This UX and UI story started with a package containing some pumpkin seeds. The seeds were sown and quite suddenly the pumpkin plant started to grow! It developed nice big green leaves and didn’t fit in its original pot anymore. So it moved to a larger home and even grew lots of flowers. But where were the pumpkins themselves?
Unfortunately, this pumpkin fairytale does not have a happy end. Because the pumpkins never got beyond the state of a tiny green pumpkin. The reason for this, is that the owner, me, didn’t know you have to help the pumpkin plant a bit with fertilization. And probably, the bigger home it moved into, was not big enough.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I started out with better knowledge whilst planting these pumpkin seeds? And if I was able to track its growth, to see if it was doing well enough? This probably also would have helped with the small graveyard of other plants which have not survived too…
UX Study tracking app
In the Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp, our second project was about creating a native tracking app about a wellness or financial subject. Since I considered plants (and a green environment in general) a big contribution to wellness, I wanted to investigate the pumpkingate amongst other plant owners. To find out if they encounter problems with the growth and care of their plants, and what their user specifics are.
Survey and Interviews
Survey
Luckily there were quite some plant owners willing to fill in my survey. So I ended up with 162 respondents. The main things I wanted to find out about these green fingered people was:
if they like to see the growth of their plants and if so
why, how they check if their plants are doing well
and if they like to share the results of their green offspring with others
Results
“I love my plant #truelove”
Of the respondents with plants (only 3% of them lacked green housemates or, garden friends), 53% of them would like some help with tracking the growth of their plants. Reasons are varying from fun to see the growth process and to be able to check their health. This last point makes even more sense when realizing that 65% of the plant owners just unknowingly try something whilst taking care of their plants, or when planting them. However, they often also ask the internet (68%) or friends and family (56%) for help in keeping their green friends alive.
Interviews
After the survey, I interviewed four plant lovers. In these interviews I wanted to dive a bit deeper in their reasons for loving plants, how they take care of them and ask them what they would think of sharing news about their green successes (or failures) with others.
Nurslings are almost like puppies
Here I learned about a very similar sad experience with pumpkins. I was not alone! And that taking care of plants or growing nurslings from your own plants can feel like seeing a puppy grow up. Most of all, these interviewees shared that seeing plants grow is one of the most fun and satisfying features of having plants and that often they could use help with it. Besides that, sharing their results with or asking questions to other plant owners, is something they sometimes already did (on Facebook mainly) or would like to do in the future.
User persona and journey
Meet Lisa Groeneboom
And join her on her butternut squash journey
At this moment in the process I gave life to my user persona Lisa Groenewoud, who is completely born out of all the data of the survey and the interviews. You can follow her on her user journey in which she tries to grow butternut squash, but fails miserably.
Out of this journey arrived several design opportunities though, which I could address in my design solution. But before that, I formed a problem statement.
Problem statement
Plant owners who would like to know if their plants are doing well, need a tool to track the growth of their plants for comparison and which gives practical advice about their plants, because when having different plants or not much experience with growing or taking care of plants, it can be difficult to find out if they are doing the right things for their plants.
Moscow
After mindmapping came prioritization, and the time to kill your darlings. Because when I had to decide on what would become a must have, should have, could have or won’t have, I had to dump the community idea for this MVP (minimum viable product). No fun growth competition with your friends for you! Or sharing your growing nurslings on a platform.
But a lot still remained in the must haves and became part of what I had to work on. With the most important features of categorizing your plants, looking up care information, setting to dos and to track the growth of your plants and comparing it to an example.
User testing the user flow
User flow
The user flow consists of the tasks of adding a new length to a plant that you have just measured up.
Prototypes
I tested this flow with a paper prototype and made some adjustments afterwards (e.g. getting rid of a confirmation that the photo was uploaded), but it also raised some questions. For example, it can depend on what kind of plant it is and what you would have to measure. The stem, leaves or fruit/vegetables. This is something to take in consideration and is discussed at the next steps.
After the paper prototype, I made a mid-fidelity prototype. When this was finished, the next part was coming up: the visual design of the app.
UI Design of Grow Show
Naming it
At this stage, I came up with the name Grow Show. This app is about the growth of plants, but also of making it visible, hence show!
Moodboard
Since having and taking care of plants, is mostly a fun thing to do, the look and feel of the app has to be cheerful and happy. A bit like a garden diary which also helps you in letting your plants grow and not die.
So the inspiration came from happy and cozy gardens, and plant corners in homes.
Design system
The moodboard gave the kick off for choosing the colors and the typography. With these styles, I created the design system including the icons, buttons, form fields, sliders etc.
Colors
It seems only logical that in an app about plants the primary color will be green. For the secondary and tertiary colors I choose a yellow and a soft orange.
High fidelity prototype and micro-interactions
Prototype
In this high-fidelity prototype, the user is going to the My Plants page and the subcategory of outdoor plants. Here at the pumpkin plant, a new length is added and compared to an example to check if the growth is going in the right direction.
(Please note that the quality of the gif file might not be optimal due to the compression for publishing for the web).
Micro interactions
I have created a micro interaction of finishing and deleting a to do and receiving a confirmation.
Next steps
Since we had two weeks for doing this complete research and design, there are obviously still steps to take. Like mentioned at the MOSCOW section, I could not design the whole community part, so that is definitely something to think about if I continue working on this app.
Furthermore, the illustrations need some improvement. Then it won’t be necessary to use stock photos on the My Plants page anymore. And the background leaves could use some tweaking.
Other than that, scalability is a big thing to consider. How many plants will there be in the care database? Can you add plants that are not in the database yet? How to get the information about the growth curves of plants? And like mentioned at the User testing paragraph, is it possible to make specific to dos and measurement settings of the different kinds of plants? All of these questions are big things to do research on.
But that would be worth it though, because I still aim at being able to grow good pumpkins next year and I can use all the help I can get!
