Leafy
Leafy, a two-part product featuring an interactive app and a Bluetooth-enabled sensor, was designed to help plant lovers care for their plants indoors. For gardeners of all levels, Leafy ensures that even the tiniest seedlings flourish in the most beautiful way possible.
Date
Winter 2018
Tools
Adobe Illustrator CC
Balsalmiq (wireframes)
Sketch
Marvel (prototype)
Role
Design Research
UX Design
Skills
UX Research
UI Design
Wireframing
Prototyping
Overview
Problem
Caring for a plant can be difficult. For gardeners, whether new or experienced, there is a list of variables to consider when gardening indoors for a plant to flourish and thrive, or for those who struggle to care for their plants to survive. Navigating the constraints and environmental issues indoor gardening creates for plant growth makes diagnosing why a plant may not be flourishing increasingly tricky.
Solution
Leafy helps gardeners overcome the environmental constraints that result from indoor gardening. Its Bluetooth-enabled sensor records and transmits information to the interactive application based on various variables implicit to healthy plant growth, assisting the gardener in understanding their plants’ needs and helping them tend to them accordingly.
Process
The IDEO human-centred design model was implicated in this project. This model helps create a design solution supported by both the real-life needs of the user and research findings from real users.
Discovery
User Interviews
Before delving into Leafy's features and overall UX, user interviews were conducted. The interviewees included friends and family and one individual employed by a greenhouse. This process was completed to gain a better understanding of the problem.
Key Insights
The health needs of plants vary from species to species, making remembering information based upon individual species’ needs challenging to remember if the gardener tends to more than one plant at a time.
Gardeners often pick the wrong plant species type based on their indoor gardening situation.
Like the outdoors, the indoor environmental elements can fluctuate, and tracking these changes is difficult.
Caring for a plant becomes difficult as maintenance often occurs based on the gardener’s schedule; this schedule may not align with plant needs.
Key Experience Principals
Education: Allowing for in-depth information on plant species will help the user better understand how to care for their plant while aiding in personal growth and knowledge expansion.
Accuracy: Information about the plant’s health, as relayed by the sensor, should be as precise as possible so gardeners can adjust their plants’ care accordingly.
Aesthetic: The product should be aesthetic, as many gardeners stated their main reason for caring for plants was that they made a beautiful addition to their home.
Persona
Based on the research conducted during the discovery phase, Jessica, a persona, was created. Designing for Jessica helped make informed design decisions, ensuring the end-user was always in mind.
Competitive Analysis
We conducted a competitive analysis to inform the design process. This analysis allowed for a better understanding of where this product would stand in the market and the strengths and weaknesses of direct competition. It also assisted in identifying market gaps and idea generation and provided reliable evidence when making product changes. We selected applications for analysis based on the following three variables.
The application could be found and was rated within the App Store.
The application featured a plant library or profiling process.
The application was free.
Key Opportunities
Include a variety of options for user customization and personalization.
Include a more complex, aesthetic, and engaging UI.
Design an experience more in tune with the user’s natural task flow, including instructions where needed.
Journey Map
Keeping Jessica in mind, we mapped her behavioural flow from purchasing a plant to caring for it and finally disposing of it. Understanding her decision-making flow within the plant-care experience allowed for more thorough brainstorming of the features and functionality required for Jessica to navigate the app and utilize the product successfully.
Secondary Research
Secondary research was conducted to uncover the scientific elements necessary for a plant to flourish, with the intention of Leafy tracking plant health based on these elements. Secondary research revealed:
Each type of plant has its own specific needs and conditions in which it flourishes best; like people, no two plants are quite the same.
Six main elements are necessary for a plant to flourish regardless of the species: air, water, nutrients, soil, light, and temperature.
Each of the six elements was incorporated into the design when creating the physical product and the interactive app. It was imperative to ensure that the physical sensor could track and monitor the plant in relation to the six elements and that the app could relay this information to the user in an informative and easily digestible manner, regardless of whether they were new to indoor planting or a long-time gardener.
Ideation
Ideation of the interactive app began by developing a flow in which the user would create and add their plants as individual profiles to a plant library. All information about individual plant species and current health status can be found and monitored in the plant library. This flow was developed while considering four key usability requirements created based on research conducted during the discovery phase.
The experience must be unassuming and simple for the user to navigate, whether a novice or an experienced gardener.
The process should be information-based and consist of as few steps as possible.
The app should walk the user through each step of the process, providing clear instructions and allowing them to reaccess instructions and backtrack in their steps if needed.
The interface should be clean and aesthetically pleasing.
Information Architecture
By analyzing Jessica’s plant care journey, features were narrowed down via card sorting. This revealed the necessary features required for Leafy to function. A content taxonomy map was then created, which gave meaning to the defined features, and a site map was created to organize the app's pages, information, and navigation.
Wireframes
User Flow
Next, a user flow was created. This was done to communicate and visualize the intended flow of the Leafy user through the process and steps necessary to utilize the app, ensuring no steps had been missed. Please refer to the site map when looking at screen numbers as the documents correlate for easy referencing.
User Testing
The wireframes were tested against key tasks within Leafy (adding a plant and navigating through the plant library to individual plant profiles) using an Adobe XD prototype. This allowed for the identification of user pain points that needed to be addressed to improve the original designs before creating a high-fidelity prototype.
The following is a high-level overview of the feedback and observations from user testing.
User 1: Jared
Instead of using the navigational buttons featured on both the Add a Plant and Plant Profile screen, the user tended to utilize the menu to navigate throughout the application.
The user experienced difficulty selecting the Plant Library button on the Plant Profile screen.
Feedback: The user stated he wouldn’t want to view the plant adding tutorial each time he added a plant to his library.
User 2: Stephanie
Once the user reached the Account Creation Confirmation screen, she was unsure how to proceed to the next section of the app.
After accessing the Plant Library screen, the user instantly attempted to edit the listing name of one of her plants.
Feedback: The user stated that the Plant Profile screen felt too cluttered and that the navigation buttons featured at the bottom of the screen felt “squished”.
Prototype
After user testing, changes were made to Leafy’s design based on the results, and a high-fidelity prototype was created. Some changes include decluttering the Plant Profile screen and adding a call to action to the Product Key Submission Confirmation screen.
