Plant Buddy — An app Plant Buy and Resale — UX Case Study

10 min readNov 10, 2023

Making your experience More then worthwhile!

Project Overview

Plant Buddy is an application designed platform that facilitates the buying and selling of plants that makes it easy to buy and sell plants with safe delivery. It allows users to easily browse through different plant categories and search for specific plants. Users can access detailed information, including photos, descriptions, and seller credentials when they find a plant they like. Sellers can showcase their plant offerings and connect with potential buyers. The app also guarantees safe plant delivery with convenient door-to-door shipping for both buyers and sellers.

The Problem

Plants are a great addition to our homes and lives, especially for their physical and psychological benefits, as well as their decorative value. However, plant enthusiasts in metropolitan cities often face challenges with transporting their expensive or long-grown plants, especially when relocating. One common solution is to give away these plants to nearby neighbors or nurseries. However, with busy lifestyles, it can be difficult to find the time and energy to do this effectively.

Solution

When people find themselves in the position of having to say goodbye to their beloved plants during a relocation, they often consider selling them. Alongside this, they are met with the task of finding new homes for the offspring of these cherished, well-established plants. They understand that offering these plant progeny to nearby neighbors or donating them to local nurseries is the most fitting and environmentally responsible approach.

Roles and Responsibility

As a part of 3 month UX/UI design from scratch course at Designerrs Academy, I worked on this project. The problem brief was provided by Designerrs and I completed it under the guidance of a mentor.
As the only UX/UI Designer on this project, my responsibilities included everything end-to-end, following all the aspects of design thinking. Right from conducting user research, defining the problems, brainstorming solutions to creating wireframes and finally conducting usability tests, I designed a functional prototype.

Design Thinking Process

I followed the design thinking process to design a solution for this problem.

01.Empathize

To design the best solution, I needed to empathize with the users. Through secondary and primary research, I gained a deep understanding of their needs and pain points.

Secondary Research

To effectively guide the user research process, it is essential to clearly define the objectives at the outset. The primary goals are to comprehend user preferences, identify pain points, uncover expectations, and examine user behavior's related to the specific problem or product.
During this initial phase, I conducted secondary research by thoroughly exploring online sources, collecting screenshots, images, texts, statistics, and links to videos or articles. This allowed me to gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem statement, articulate the issues that needed to be addressed, and gather sufficient data to inform the next steps of the UX design process.
Once the information was gathered, I carefully summarized the findings and extracted key insights from the online research. These insights are essential for shaping the subsequent stages of the design process, informing design decisions, and ultimately creating a user-centered and effective product.

Goals

Understanding the plants types
User can able to do sell and buy the plants
Customer able to add the plant photograph and price
Understanding the workflow of the plant selling and buying
Customer add the plants age and types

Insights

Plant enthusiasts in metropolitan cities who buy expensive plants or grow plants for a long time often face challenges when relocating. They find it difficult to transport their plants, especially with busy lifestyles. Additionally, they struggle to accommodate the baby plants born from their long-grown plants. The best solution they have identified is to give away their plants to nearby neighbors or nurseries.

Primary Research

With the secondary research insights in hand, it was now time to validate them by obtaining first hand information from the actual users themselves. So I conducted user interviews to learn more about the different experiences people have had in Plants.
Planning for the interviews, I first created a questionnaire that was based around the actual context of the problem. I recruited around 5 participants aging from 20–50 for the interview.

Question

1. What are the difficulties you faced while shifting plants?
2. If you are not carrying plant then what will you do?
3. what are the problems arise while buying a resales plants?
4. How was the experience about your last purchase?
5. If there is no nurseries then what will you do next?
6. Which makes you feel frustrated in reselling?
7. How would you select the plant while buying?
8. Why you are interested in buying a reselling plants?

Key Insights

Plant reselling apps provide a budget-friendly way to expand plant collections. Instead of buying new plants, users can trade or sell their existing ones to acquire new additions, fostering a sustainable and economical approach to gardening and plant ownership.

Plant reselling apps enable users to obtain unique or uncommon plants that may not be readily available at local nurseries or stores. This expands the selection and allows plant enthusiasts to curate a diverse and unique collection, enhancing their gardening experience.

Plant resale apps carry the potential risk of scams and deceitful sellers. Users should exercise caution and be vigilant for red flags, such as unusually low prices and sellers with limited or suspicious profiles. Verifying sellers’ credibility and carefully evaluating offers can help mitigate these risks and ensure a secure transaction experience.

Sellers may not always provide accurate information about the plant’s health, size, or condition. This can disappoint buyers who receive a plant that doesn’t meet their expectations. Transparency and honest representation of the plant’s attributes are essential for building trust and satisfaction between buyers and sellers in the plant resale market

02.Define

In the first phase, I empathized with the users. Now based on my research insights, I have to establish a clear idea of exactly which problems to solve for my users.

Affinity Mapping

After the interview, I gathered all the users statements and then sorted them into groups, based on their natural relationships. I divided the data into 7 categories : What the user’s Types of Plant like, Options, Reason to relocate, Feeling to left old plants and resell app, Excited to buy new plants, Price Options, Pain points. This helped in uncovering the major common pain points of the users and prioritizing them.

User Persona

03.Ideate

In order to ideate the possible solutions, I first wanted to find where exactly the users face the hurdles in their journey. So in this phase, I mapped out the current state experience of the user and started creating the flows for the app that fills the gap of the current experience.

User Experience Map

Based on the insights gained from user interviews and my own hands-on experience buying and selling plants, I have identified the following primary phases of the plant buying process: planning, exploration, selection, Buying, Reselling and post-plantation. This breakdown has been instrumental in highlighting areas where users face challenges, enabling me to devise effective solutions to improve the overall plant buying experience.

Task Flows

With the understanding of how the user’s journey was using the experience map, I created user flows for the app that will fill the gaps in the physical journey of the end user.

Register and Login

User must register themselves. Make login and registration forms as simple and straightforward as possible. Allow users to recover their passwords if they forget them.

Resell the Plant

Once the user is logged into the application, if the user is interested in reselling the plants, the user can easily post the plants, if there are any questions to contact the support team, they will get an easy solution and quickly sell the plants and satisfy the customer.

Buy the Plant

The user wants to buy plants without any damage or diseases, the user wants to enjoy the product and provide the resale value of the plants. After placing the order, the user can easily track the order, they want to accept all kinds of payments and provide the plants at low cost to the user.

User Flow

A user flow is a comprehensive visual representation of all the essential steps a user must take within a journey to achieve a specific goal. It depicts the complete path a user would follow to successfully complete a task or reach their desired objective, providing a clear and detailed understanding of the process.

Site Map

A sitemap is a visual representation of a website’s content that helps users understand the organization and structure of the site. It provides a clear overview of all the pages on the site and how they are connected, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. Sitemaps can be in the form of text or images, but image-based sitemaps are often more intuitive and easier to understand.

04.Design

In this fourth phase of the design thinking process, I started creating low fidelity wireframes. After many iterations, I finalized one version and converted them to high fidelity wireframes. I also prototyped them so that it can be tested out with the users in the testing phase.

Low fidelity wireframes

I created many versions before getting to the final wireframes. My earlier wireframes did not match the requirements, so I recreated the layout of the screen on the basis of the user flows.

High fidelity Wireframes

After finalizing the low fidelity wireframes, I added details to the exisiting wireframes by putting the content information and upgrading the components.

Style Guide — Color & Typography

To create a color palette that’ll evoke a good mood in the users while they use the app, I made a mood board which consisted of images of plants people having plants etc…, The colors that were extracted from it were mostly Green. The final chosen color palette also passed the contrast checker with a very high ratio.

Considering the possible use cases where the app will mostly be used, the typeface had to be highly readable and should also reflect the user need. After exploring lots of typefaces, the geometric sans-serif typeface ‘Poppins’ was chosen because of its legibility and distinct letter forms.
The text in the app had to be readable for all of the target audience which ranged from ages 18–55. With careful considerations of accessibility, the body text size was set to 16pts.

Heading 1 — Bold, 24 pts
Heading 2 — Semi bold, 20 pts
Body 1 — Medium 16 pts
Body 2 — Regular, 14pts
Sub headings — Light, 12pts

Final UI

Applying the style guide to my final high-fidelity wireframes, I started creating the UI mockups.

05.Test

It was time to test the live prototype with potential users and check how the users respond to it. Based on the testing insights, I will decide if the designs needs to be altered or not.

Moderated Usability Testing

Usability testing is a vital component of the user experience design process, allowing for the evaluation of a product’s ease of use and efficiency through real user involvement.

After finalizing the screens, I proceeded to conduct usability testing with five participants representative of my target audience. The focus was to gauge how users perceive the app’s main features.

To structure the testing, I devised specific tasks and developed a questionnaire to guide the testing session. Some of the scenarios presented to the participants were…

Scenario 1

Sarah is a busy working professional who wants to add some greenery to her apartment. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with plants, so she is looking for something that is easy to care for. She also wants a plant that will look good in her living room.

Scenario 2

Ashley, a stay-at-home mom with a passion for plants, has turned her hobby into a profitable side hustle by reselling plants online. She sources her plants from local nurseries and growers, carefully selects healthy and attractive specimens, and sells them through her social media channels and online marketplace listings. Ashley provides detailed plant descriptions and care instructions to ensure her customers have a positive experience.

Final Prototype

Learnings & Takeaway

While working on the Plant Buddy project, I realized how important it is to empathize with the users and understand their needs clearly before designing the solutions.
Discovering that the major issue for most plant enthusiasts was finding a reliable and convenient way to resell or sell their plants was enlightening. This insight helped me to prioritize the core features of the app, such as easy listing and browsing, secure payment processing, and efficient shipping.
As I started ideating, there were also other add-on features that came up, such as plant care tips and community forums. However, it was important for me to stay focused on the primary set of features first, given the time constraints of the project.