The Idea

What inspired us

It sounds like a strong phrase—Still You Bloom in this Land of No Gardens—that expresses resiliency and the capacity to flourish in the face of challenges or unfavorable conditions.

For each of us, the image provoked different feelings and interpretations.

Based on the women's attire and the photographs inserted inside the leaves at the top, we inferred that they are from Nigeria.

She is envisioned as a single mother who must care for her child and plants. We're assuming that she loves plants and that her child and the plants are like her family. In order to help her manage her busy schedule, we are planning to design an application that will allow her to learn more about new plants, as well as manage and track all of her current plants.

She can use the app as a platform to sell her plants and earn money to support her family and her home.

The project was done in collaboration with Vasupradha Bhat B, Hazel Dunn and Vignesh S.

Learning about Similar Applications

We spent a few days learning about applications that are built around improving planting experiences. This helped us gauge what is already there in the market to understand what people are used to, helping us set a baseline for minimum expectations and what features could be standout features.

The Applications

Planta

"Individual care schedule and reminders for your plants, recommendations, step by step guides, identification, light meter and more. Keep your plants alive with Planta!" - from getplanta.com

NatureID

"NatureID is a nature expert in your pocket. It is a tool based on a striking mix of technology and nature that allows identifying plants by making just a few taps! What is more — the app provides for fast and accurate plant diseases identification and gives recommendations on how to treat them effectively. No more secret seedlings or flowers in your garden! Know all the trees in the nearest park by name!" - from natureid.com

Our Learnings

We made a list of features with screenshots helping us brainstorm on these features. Here is our board from our mini competitors research:

Lo-Fidelity Designs

Our next sprint was deciding for major sections of the application and each member took one section to create flows from that section.

Section Based Flows

1. My Garden

The “my garden” page was the starting point for both of these flows.

Flow 1: In the my garden flow, a user is exploring the plants that they have, and can look at the details, where the plants are located, what care they need, and specific suggestions for those plants. There are two views, one to see your plants by what room they are in, and one to see your plants as a list. By clicking on any plant, you get the detailed view with a few important tags and suggestions for that plant.

Flow 2: Adding a plant can be initiated from the My Garden page. By clicking the plus sign, the user is brought to a “search” screen that allows them to look for a specific plant or do some browsing with categories and recommendations. This is very similar to the general browse feature, but is initiated from a different location. After looking at search results or suggestions, the user can read the plant details and use the large button to add that plant. While adding, they select what room it goes in, what kind of pot it’s in, etc.

My Tasks: These two screens keep track of a user’s tasks they need to do to take care of their plants. It is separated into today, tomorrow, and this week so a user can focus on today but see what’s ahead. Each task has a bubble that the user can check off when complete.

Notifications: A main feature of this app is to notify users when they need to take care of their plants, so this screen asking users their preferences for receiving notifications. Giving them different options allows for flexibility and may decrease excessive notifications.

2. Buying Plants and Accessories

The software gives users a platform to go further into the world of plants, learn what it takes to grow them, and gain a broad understanding of them. The user base might range from inexperienced to seasoned. It would be challenging for a novice who is interested in growing plants to have knowledge about which plants to buy, how to care for them, or where to acquire them.

Therefore, our app serves as a one-stop shop where beginners may filter and search for plants based on a variety of criteria. Learn more about the plant, look at its growing requirements, see their reviews, pictures & talk to other people who have it and buy some plants.

The app also provides a platform for specialists to sell their plants, seeds, pesticides, and offer consultations. Depending on their demands, customers can purchase goods from a certain retailer or individual.

The user can communicate with the seller, purchase a plant, and track and handle several orders.

3. Login/Signup with onboarding

Personalize content: Users can customize the content by answering a brief survey.
To create a better user experience for each use case, users can select their experience level, i.e., beginner or expert. By doing this, individuals who are new to the community of plant parents can avoid being confused by a ton of terms and information.
By allowing them to choose interests (tags), the application will be able to better understand its users and tailor the user experience accordingly. On this screen, users can also specify whether they are more interested in buying or selling.

Onboarding: After opening the app for the first time, the onboarding screens provide a visual overview of the primary features. It highlights important aspects that the user might not be aware of and explains the purpose and value of the application. Users are next taken to the login/signup pages to complete their authentication.

4. Journal

The idea of journaling was to help the user keep log of their plants, we expanded on it by adding a social aspect to it. Allowing the user to add friends and find experts to see their journals, the idea is that they can find information about plants from others journals. This resulted in three major flows in the journals section:

Search for people and their journals: This flow includes the concept of user going to the search and finding people by typing in their names. This page also suggests them quick links to journals from their friends and experts.

Interact with journals: Here is where the main aspect of social side of journals comes into picture, you can open journals and comment on them like they are social media posts. Like the journal, see others journals and also add comments to create discussions.

Creating your journal: You have options to create new journals on the home page as well as journals page, this page allows you to add images from the gallery or camera. It also has a text area with text editing options to allow the user to format their journals for best effect.

5. Home, Settings and Profile

Home: The main home screen has all the information and key features (tasks for the present day, your plants, your journal, recommendations, etc.) to easily and effectively navigate through the application.

Profile: The profile page contains personal information and allows users to manage settings of the account and edit preferences. This might also include their feed, the feeds of their friends, saved posts, and a dashboard of their progress as a plant parent.

Combining all flows into a similar style

For the sake of better reference in the future the above on paper (in a couple of cases iPad) drawings were convert to lo-fi designs with similar style merging similar components like navigation and headings into one theme. A template from figma community was used for the same. Here are the flows ordered section wise once again:

1. Onboarding

2. Journal

3. My Garden

4. Ordering Plant and Accessories

5. Home, Settings and Profile

Moving forward with the next mini-project would be addition of visuals and animations to the platform with some research added on why certain decisions were taken based on story mapping activities.

The Team