PlantKin Plant-Care App
“Whether you’re pretty green, or a seasoned plant parent, the best plant care apps have everything you need to make your little leafy companions happy and healthy. The best plant care apps should offer useful advice, personalized care tips, and
access to a wealth of knowledge about plants.” - Leon Wilczek, The 4 Most Helpful Free and Paid Plant Care Apps
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Project Overview Description PlantKin is a plant-care app that provides houseplant owners with the best experience when bonding and nurturing their plants. The app’s purpose is to give every plant parent the opportunity to go on an intimate journey with their plants and form an unbreakable bond along the way.
My Roles
Design Tools
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Exploring the Problem Preliminary Research Problem With many households increasingly owning houseplants in recent years, there have been many owners struggling with nurturing indoor plants. The goal is to find a solution for plant owners to overcome their struggles with their plants and give them the experience that they can bond with and nurture their plants.
Target Audience ●
Household plant owners
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Ideally millennials (Ages 25-40)
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People that are passionate in owning a household plant
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For beginner and experienced plant owners.
Why Millennials? ●
7 in 10 millennials call themselves a plant parent
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Average plant parent has killed seven houseplants
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66% of American households own at least one houseplant
Millennials
Plant Care Worries
60%
Making sure plants get enough sunlight
56%
Making sure plants get enough water
48%
Keeping Plants alive
37%
Stressing the plants when relocating
21%
Finding a plant sitter when out of town
Source: Houseplant Statistics in 2023 (incl. Covid & Millennials)
Goal
It would seem that the majority of my target audience considers themselves plant parents. The main struggles that plant owners faced were keeping track of their plants' water and sunlight intake, which resulted in their plants experiencing drawbacks. The goal is to find a solution to boost a plant owner’s confidence, regardless of their experience, by assuring them that their plants will flourish in their households.
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User Understanding
In order to dive deeper into the problem, we need to understand what the users desire and what they experience. I utilized two research methods: qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the qualitative analysis, I conducted interviews with four people that fit my target audience to understand the difficulties they faced when nurturing their houseplants. As for my quantitative analysis, I had over 30 participants for the user survey.
User Survey
User Interviews
With the information that I collected from both the survey and the interviews, I have a better grasp of what the users experience with their plants and what they desire. I can then proceed to delve deeper and empathize with the users to understand them on a personal level and to know how to resolve a plant owner’s bad experience.
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Empathy Mapping Empathy map is a tool that can be used to gain a deeper understanding with users. The plant owners that I interviewed allowed me to make connection with them and understand their pain points and gain from taking care of their plants.
The keywords for the pains and the gains are to highlight what the users feel when they take care of their plants. The individual had both a bad and a good experience with their plants, and it is important to empathize with the users in order to understand how to help them overcome the bad experience.
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User Persona
For this project, I conducted surveys and interviews with plant owners about their experience with nurturing plants. With a user persona, it helped me understand the individual’s characteristics and learn more about their goals as well as their concerns when taking care of their plants.
The keywords that I noted from the interview enabled me to understand what the user wants and what her main concerns are when nurturing her plants. With my user persona, I now understand what I need to do for my plant-care app design to ensure users' convenience and confidence.
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Design Process User Flows I created three user flows based on the most common or frequent tasks that the users would do on the plant app.
Design Studio With the user flows in mind, I proceeded to brainstorm and create sketches to visualize what the users desire when utilizing plant-care apps. I sketched layouts of my app and considered what would be the best way to diagnose or identify plants to enable convenience for the users. These were a few preliminary sketches I did for my plant-care app.
Wireframe Based on the preliminary guerilla usability testing, the users provided me with valuable insights that helped me proceed with my prototype wireframing. With wireframing, I was able to layout the contents of what the users want for a plant app. The layout of a screen is very important for users in order for them to understand what they can interact with. While going through the stages of my wireframing designs, the users provided initial insightful feedback on what I should improve to make the contents clear and easy to follow.
Wireframe Transitions
Wireflow This a wireflow that I created based from the refined wireframes. It is derived from the user stories to show the flow of the common tasks users would interact on the app.
Now that I have refined my designs and have a good grasp of how the users would interact with my prototype, we now proceed to build up and vitalize my plant-care app’s brand, PlantKin.
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PlantKin Brand
Building Style Guide
As I built up the foundation of the app, I needed to make it recognizable by implementing a style guide that matches the brand. Choosing the typography, colors, imagery, and icons is important for building a style guide, and I will be highlighting the main aspects of my PlantKin style guide.
Typography I chose Sarabun as my app’s typeface. From the user feedbacks I received, the typography complements the overall theme of the PlantKin brand. The fonts could also be easily interpreted on a light-green surface.
Imagery With a plant-care app, the app must be informative and helpful for the users to understand how to nurture their plants successfully. I chose these images for my app’s imagery to help users see the plants right in front of them and to let them know what plants they want to take care of for their journey.
Color Palette A color palette is needed for building a style guide to enable users to understand what contents they are looking at. Chiffon is the primary color of the background
of the app due to users believing the color is comforting and ensures their plant’s safety when reading the texts. The other colors are meant to signify the color of the icons and symbols in the app.
Icons and Symbols Based on the color palette, I derived these colors and implemented them into the plant app’s icons and symbols. Each of the symbols is designed to be easily read, which allows users to understand their tasks. The icons enable users to navigate around the app to different pages and explore more plants.
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High Fidelity Prototype With the basis of the app and the building of my app’s brand completed, I conducted two usability tests for my PlantKin prototype. The users were given tasks to follow the red routes of the app and see if there were any inconveniences when utilizing the app. The testing users provided valuable feedback on what I should improve to make the contents easy to follow and convenient to read the information that they desire.
High-Fidelity Prototype Transitions
Based on the feedback of the PlantKin testers, the main issue for the users is that the pages initially had too much information and could not be easily deciphered because the texts were too small and close together. The users want the pages to be informative in order for them to understand how to treat and nurture their plants; however, it would be inconvenient to skim through if they had to scroll all the way to find their desired information. Which is why I
implemented a retractable feature for the section boxes so that users could skim through the page with ease.
As you can see on the Reminders page, the tasks for each plant were initially too small and close for other users to read. I heeded the users’ feedback by enlarging the font and increasing the space to make the texts easier to read. As the users
scroll through the Reminders page, they can also interact with the plus button to have the option to add new plant tasks to their schedule.
Figma Prototype Link: https://figmashort.link/QhaS5T PlantKin Prototype Testing: https://vimeo.com/874630555?share=copy
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Takeaway and Future Improvements While this prototype is only a concept design, I have learned a lot about a plant owner’s relationship with their plants during the duration of this project. The reason why I named my app PlantKin is because I want to strengthen the bond between a plant parent and their plants, as if the plant owners are the plant’s guardians and will be willing to nurture their plants as long as they can. The bond between a plant owner and their houseplants is far from superficial. It leaves a significant impact when the owner nurtures their plants throughout their journey with them. Each moment people spend with their houseplants is a memory to behold, and it changes the individual each time they spend with their plants.
Things I Would Like to Have Done More Of: ● Implement a search bar in the design that is functional and allows users to navigate their plants. It is an alternative way for users to add their desired plants to their garden page. ● Implement an add-on feature for both the ‘Reminders’ page and the ‘My Garden’ page. At the moment, it does not allow the users the option to interact with the buttons, which is why I must showcase how those buttons will function once they select the add button.