PLANT monitoring and CARE SOLUTION, IOT APP

Product Design I UX/UI Design I Visual Design I User Research I Wireframing I Interaction Design I Prototyping

RESEARCH

Jennny and I neatly fell into the two proto-personas we generated, with Jenny being a novice struggling to keep plants alive and me representing the enthusiasts with over 20 houseplants. We hypothesized that making plant care easy and fun would appeal to novices, people who have no plants or just a few plants. Enthusiasts would be excited to optimize their plant care with data-driven recommendations. Exact growing conditions and powerful insights would enable enthusiasts to care for trickier-to-grow plants.

We set out to figure out the emotional depth, frustrations and benefits of plant ownership. We interviewed 1 subject matter expert (a plant biology professor), 3 novice plant owners, and 2 plant enthusiasts. Here's what we wanted to know:

• Plant Benefits What benefits do plants add to people’s lives?

• Watering Do people struggle with amount, frequency, or techniques for watering?

• Light & Soil Conditions Are people aware of the optimal light and soil conditions for their plants?

• Care Schedule Do people need help tracking their plant-care tasks or watering schedules?

• Plant Relationship How much effort do people put into their plants? What level of emotional attachment do they feel for their plant children?

RESEARCH RESULTS

We surveyed 43 individuals via Google Forms. The results are controversial, with 88.4% who think that plants are awesome, 33% most concerned about watering and 95.3% stone-cold plant killers.

AFFINITY DIAGRAM

We captured all the different facets of plant-care using an affinity diagram. We identified all the key points from our user interviews categorized them into buckets, then arranged the buckets into categories. This helped us determine possible feature groups, themes and user pain-points.

This is what we found:

• Some people name their plants and even talk to them. Most are emotionally distressed if a plant dies in their care.

• Compared to sunlight and temperature, people have most issues with watering.

• Even enthusiasts often aren't sure if they're doing the right thing, until plants show symptoms.

• People love the mood that plants introduce into their space.

• Knowing when to re-pot or fertilize is a big unknown, even for experts.

USER PERSONAS

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

I had fun compiling data from four competitors in the plant care category. We compared their values, features, cost, and price point. What was deterring some consumers from one product or another? Which products were well-received in the market and which were less so and why? We wanted to identify all these points before making a decision on features, functionality and positioning of our product.

SOLUTION

STORYBOARD

I had a lot of fun sketching the frustrations of plant ownership, followed by plantio discovery, and resulting in plant delight.

INSPIRATION

We had no shortage of sources of inspiration, from different styles of plant illustration to applications currently on the market and product concepts by other designers. Jenny was excited to gamify and animate the plant care experience, while I studied competitor visual styles, seeking intuitive and elegant solutions.

PROTOTYPING

USERFLOWS & WIREFRAMES

Finally, we had an idea of the direction we want to go in. Jenny sketched out our first on-boarding, plant listing and statistics user flows and I added daily tasks, individual tasks and plant identification flows. We iterated on these sketches twice before moving forward. Jenny kicked off the wireframing process and I contributed to the on-boarding, plant identification and daily tasks screens. We went through 2-3 iterations of the trickier elements before we felt we had a robust flow.

STYLE GUIDE

USABILITY TESTING & FEATURE ITERATION

NAVIGATION Lacking controls to go back to plant profile page, from tabs.

IMAGE RECOGNITION “Would be cool if I could take a picture and have it automatically identify my plant.”

ONBOARDING Confusing as to how the device should be used. Need clearer illustrations.

ANIMATIONS & PHYSICAL DEVICE ”Whooa.. Whaat”

FINAL PROTOTYPE

We made several iterations concurrently via Figma with Jenny focusing on prototyping, interaction design and data visualization, while I focused on visual design and illustration.
Here are the links to: Figma High-Fidelity Prototype I Demo I Slide Deck I Live Presentation

KEY TAKEWAYS

• Co-editing in Figma was fast, intuitive, and awesome!

• User and expert interviews were very insightful.

• Our complementary strengths boosted the team’s performance.

• Meeting in the middle with respect to our individual styles and vision.

• Short timeline with numerous iterations and feature updates.

• I learned from Jenny’s agile development and interaction design expertise.

Product Roadmap:

• Implement soil pH readings and photosynthesis monitor (to track overall plant health)

• Adding sensor re-calibration functionality to the settings tab.

• Integrating Plantio with the Apple Smart Home ecosystem.

• Explore using multi-pronged extension to track depth of watering. 3D-model to show real-time moisture readings.

• Implementing fertilizer subscription service, enabling tracking the fertilizer soil level by sensor trained to detect an flag organic indicator compound.

• Allowing users to easily switch plant profiles using the same sensor.

• 3D printing the physical sensor mold.

• Engineering proprietary multi sensor device and calibrating its readings.