Plantera

A help for plant lovers to have a better understanding of their plants.

Plants have exploded in popularity in the past couple of years, regardless of if people have a green hand or not. With the resources and accessing the Internet, it seems like millennials don't see that as a big problem. However, they still need to care for the plant to keep it alive.

ROLE

Research / UX - UI / Branding

01

Abstract

Plantera is an application that helps plant lovers with low experience or knowledge about plants to be able to keep their plants alive.

image of a person trying the app with plants

Inspirations

image of a person trying the app with plants

Collecting plants has become an increasingly trendy approach recently. People are more into buying plants and match them with their modern furniture.

Plant bloggers have been getting more attention from people since 2018. As an example, the popular Instagram account @houseplantclub, founded by Morgan Doane and Erin Harding and as they approach the one-year anniversary of the account, they have begun selling a signature Houseplant Club tote and collected over 160,000 followers. The account has a consistent growth since. The chart shows the increase of followers in 14 days.

Current Situation

I conducted some research, interviews, and observation of people who are interested in indoor plants in two phases and below is a quick summary of what I learned.

Findings one:

The interviews and observations show that people who hesitate to have indoor plants in spite of their interest mostly have excuses that concerns one of the below options:

Lack of knowledge
Lack of time
Lack of focus

Findings two:

As the next step, I asked 5 plant enthusiasts from the previous interview to download online applications on their smartphones and try to use them for a week.

3 of the users refused to download the apps, because they said it requires too many apps.

Two of them liked the services they found on plant recognition, but they didn't find it useful for their daily basis. They think they need to spend too much time reading the information about how to care for each plant and examining if they are doing the right thing or not.

current situation sketch

Current Problems

Based on the observations and experiments I consolidated the current problems, into three main points.

Lack of knowledge about caring
for plants

Limited access to accurate information specified for each plant

Many apps required

Proposed Solutions

In response to the above problems, my proposed solutions are

Comprehensive knowledge in caring for plants

Efficient communication
with experts

All in one

02

Research

Competitive Analysis

Name	Garden Answers	Sunseekers
Description	Garden Answers is a plant identification app that instantly identifies over 20,000 plants and gives you accurate and detailed information about it.	Sunseeker is a solar tracking & compass app. The app allows you to add sun-event notifications & has a widget showing the day's solar data & position on an arc.
Pros	Prompt reply from experts. Gives the user options after identifying the plant to reduce fault answer	Smart technology. Estimates sun exposure, sun angle, and sunrise and sundown.
Cons	Visual design. The identifying isn't accurate. Charge for counseling before proving it works.	Visual design. Hard to find instruction. It doesn't calculate shadow inside the building. User has to enter the location each time.

Survey Demographics

Alongside with my online research, I created a survey and passed it to 32 people to fill it out. I wanted to clarify what percentage of people who are interested in plants, are willing to get some digital help in terms of handling their plants.

survey charts

03

User Experience

Brainstorm

Brainstorming sketch

Target Audience

Based on the observations and experiments I consolidated the current problems, into three main points.

First time indoor plant keeper

A plant collectionair who his plants started dying

An indoor plant lover who wants to expand his network with other indoor plant keepers

Personas

Ashley

UX Designer | 32

San Francisco, CA

Ashley works 8 hours every day. Ashley had to give away her cat because she didn't have time to take care of her. Ashley's new interest is indoor plants. This is the first time she is taking care of a plant and she doesn't know very much about it. She normally reads the description on each plant. She needs to get a full direction to avoid falling.

Sam

Computer scientist | 36

Cupertino, CA

She believes in minimal style but this rule doesn't apply to her plants. One year ago Sam got interested in indoor plants as a new trend to follow. Sam has 19 plants in her apartment and started to worry about how to take good care of them.

Preliminary Sketches

Studied different user journies.

preliminary storyboard sketch

Information Architecture

Sketches

I started designing with rough sketches to show how I envisioned the tasks.

sketches

04

User Testing

I conducted two rounds of user testing with 4 participants in each round. I gave my participants my low-fidelity wireframes and had them complete the three tasks. I then recorded their comments and went back to my wireframes to make changes.

Based on the feedback I received, I created medium-fidelity wireframes and presented the participants in the second round of testing. I then tracked down their feedback and consolidated my findings into three main points.

Medium Fidelity Wireframes

task one

Finding the right plant

A. Gets a list of plant-based on the given light

task one slides

01

Allow accessing location

task one slides

02

Set the compass

task one slides

03

Move the device to see the changes in the result and reads the instruction

task one slides

04

Taps where s/he wants to put the plant

task one slides

05

Gets the result.
a - The kind of light
b - List of filtered plants

B. Share the image with her roommate.

task one slides

01

Tries plants with AR and checks more detailed information about the plant by tapping on the circle on the plant.

task one slides

02

Taps on the planter and the list changes to planters. (Because in this case, the selected planter is free and comes with the plant)

task one slides

03

Closes the slide and takes a picture of the plant

task one slides

04

Share it with her roommate

C. Save the product and access the favorite list

task one slides

01

Likes the plant

task one slides

02

Taps on the menu bar

task one slides

03

Taps on liked

task one slides

04

Sees the result on the bottom of the page changes

task 2_1

Getting care instruction

A. Find care information

task one slides

01

Clicks on "My plants"

task one slides

02

Selects the plant

task one slides

03

Reads through the instruction

task 2_2

Checks the notifications

task one slides

01

Clicks on "Notifications"

task one slides

02

Sees a list of notifications.
Taps on live button.

task one slides

03

Sees the notifications on the plants

task one slides

04

Taps on the plant and reads the notifications for that plant

Main Testing Results

one

The view of the room on the camera and the light lines are distracting and the user doesn't pay attention to the messages. So I added icons and CTA to make sure the user will notice the message.

two

Wrap and move the secondary icons into the menu section.

three

Added an interactive pop up on the product so that the user is able to access the product basic info when the slider is half opened.

view the pdf case study
for more details

05

Final Design

Key Differentiators

one

Takes care of the entire journey from choosing plants to set up notification and communicate with experts if the plant has any problems.

two

Seamlessly indicates a custom filtered lists of suitable plants.

three

A step by step guide to help the users who are interested in handling plants.

Real-time estimating sun exposure.

This feature allows the user to see how much light the place gets and have access to a filtered list of plants based on the photon of light that the place receives.

screens related to functions

screens related to functions

Access to the favored items.

The user will be able to like the items s/he likes and access them afterward in a list to be able to try and compare them with AR functionality.

Share a picture of items with friends.

This functionality allows the user to share what s/he is seeing on the screen with friends to make a more confident decision.

screens related to functions

screens related to functions

Access to knowledge

Easy access to detailed information about each plant and access to notification and videos about handling the plants that have been added to “my plants” list.

AR notification

This function allows the user to see the notifications in a list or live on the plant itself. The user will be able to turn the device around her place and see notifications on the plants that there is a notification set for them.

screens related to functions

Prototypes

please feel free to play and watch the video.

This prototype shows the user flow of the following tasks:

Gets a list of plant-based on the given light.
Share the image with her roommate.
Save the product and access the favorite list.

please feel free to play and watch the video

This prototype shows the user flow of the following tasks:

Find care information.
Set up Notification.
Checks the notifications.

Areas to Improve

More in-depth research about measuring photons of the light
Create and improve the "Contact Experts" concept
Design a storefront and different user logins for 3 categories of Customers, experts, and stores
Gather more information in order to choose whether to link the products to stores inside the app or outside
Iterate and finetune the whole design process based on collected data and more user testings

05

Branding

Naming

Suggested Names

Care for plants
Care like you mean it
Care and love
Go Gardening
Plant care
plantera
pink plants
garden indoor
plantage

Final Name

Plantera

Logo Exploration

Color Guide

Typography

Illustration

Instagram Ad

Created an animation to showcase one of the functionalities of the application.

The purpose of this add is to encourage plantera's target market to read more about the app and try the app.

view the pdf case study

what's next