UX Case Study: Watering Plants App
In this article, I will be sharing the case study of my design process that I’ve done in order to design a mobile app to help users with taking care of their plants by remind them about watering time for each plants they have.
Tools: Figma and Miro.
Project duration: 1 week.
Methodology: Design Thinking.
Phase 1: Empathize
In the beginning, I had couple of background information such as people are struggling with watering plants “properly”. Often, people are over/under watering their plants, which causes a huge damage on their plants’ health. Another issue is that plants die when people travel and leave their plants unattended for couple of days without watering. Not to mention that sometimes people get busy and forget watering their plants. However, after conducting generative research I found out that different plants need different watering system, which means different frequency, time, and amount of water. Moreover, based on the weather, all the three factors of the same plant could change on a daily basis.
To validate these assumptions, I decided to conduct interviews with potential users, and I set couple of goals to be achieved when interviewing potential users, which are:
1. Understand the users’ actual purpose of growing plants. Is it for eating, selling, or decoration?
2. Understand the users’ feelings when they watering their plants. Are they happy, relaxed, or even focused?
3. Understand the users’ motivation for the “process” of watering their plants. Is it just for keeping their plants alive, mediating, or something else?
4. Understand the users’ actual problems of watering their plants. To validate my assumptions and background info.
Phase 2: Define
After conducting couple of interviews, I had valuable answers that helped achieved the goals of my researsh. Then, I created an affinity map to categorize the answers and extract insights from the users.
After analyzing the users’ answers and insights, I defined the following problem statement:
“Plants lovers who are personally taking care of their plants need to be reminded to take care of their plants in an easy, convenient, and proper way in order to keep their plants alive for a longer time.”
Phase 3: Ideate
Then, I spent couple of hours brainstorming about possible solutions for the defined problem.
I decided to build a reminder app that remind users when it is time to water their plants, also, recommend a watering schedule based on the plant’s type.
Phase 4: Prototype
Firstly, I designed the user flow based on the users answers about how they usually water their plants, then integrate my solution to it, as below:
Secondly, I sketched a draft design for the app, followed by an initial wireframe:
Phase 5: Test
In this phase, I conducted usability testing with five different users to observe their behavior when interacting with the user interface. I had three main criteria: log in, create a reminder, done watering.
All of the five users were able to do these three tasks, however, they have provided valuable feedbacks.
Based on the first iteration of usability testings, almost all of the users were confused about the watering schedule and why it’s just per day. Some users stated that they don’t even know how many times they should water the plant, while others stated that they want to water it once a week. To illustrate, please see the below image. A possible solution was to provide the users with a recommended schedule based on the plant’s type, while maintain the flexibility and ability to manually set the watering schedule.
Finally, to enhance the screen above, I designed the following screen.
In conclusion, this was my very first UX design with structured methodology. It wasn’t that easy, but I enjoyed every step of it.
In addition, I’m glad that I had the opportunity to make new friends when I was doing the user research, not to mention that I’ve received many priceless tips and feedbacks.
