Urban jungle application for green thumbs — a UX case study.

Published in

Netguru

9 min readMay 23, 2019

Background

Plants and urban gardening have become a hype. Most people have a Monstera at home, we all lurk in store aisles looking for that one last Pilea left someone mentioned in some urban jungle Facebook group or asking friends if they were maybe thinking of propagating their Begonia Maculata (I know you want it too 😉). We’ve all been there. We, people, love to be experts, to know what’s trendy, and to be a part of it. But with plants it can be difficult and a bit different than usual — gardening is something that you embrace and that often becomes a lifestyle. You don’t stop after one plant, and there are so many of them, and they all need different care. One of the problems we encounter is how to know all of their needs and follow them in order to keep our specimens healthy and happy. Another is even knowing what is this inconspicuous individual you brought home with you from a store. Or from grandma. All these questions, doubts and hopes could be addressed, and I intended to do it myself.

Design process

Building a product is a process that varies from person to person, from one company to another, and can be different based on the product’s needs. At Netguru, we have been working on making this process better for a very long time, at the same time remembering that every project is different.

In order to gain knowledge and understand what I am dealing with, I have prepared a workflow and I bet on research.

I spoke to people who got hooked on plants to get an insight on them, what are their pains and gains, where they get their knowledge from, and what is it that they lack the most, if anything. Guerilla interviews with friends, people from work and around me, creating personas, and analysing existing tools available on the market drew a good picture of what I am dealing with and how I can enhance the gardening experience and bring it to the next level.

Strategy

I started with a bunch of questions I would normally ask a client during a kickoff or even pre-kickoff meeting, as this stage of UX Strategy takes place at the beginning of the product’s life-cycle, before the design or development of a product begins. It is used to gather insights about the market, competitors, users, and their needs, so that the solution is validated with real potential customers to prove that it’s desired in the marketplace. I have answered some of these questions myself basing on a proto-persona and talking to people around me who are urban gardeners about their experience. I treated these answers as assumptions which let me plan and conduct my research — they were to be verified during later steps. An example Q&A may be seen below:

Discovery

I brought up many questions during this stage and conducting thorough research helped me answer most of them early as well as bring benefits in the later stages. Not only did research save my time, but it also gave me a deep insight into and a better understanding of the product’s specifics.

Market research

Such analysis provides both offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats, as well as the possibility to understand what is already on the table and what to avoid in order to build a better product.

I decided to go with competitor analysis, for which I built a custom matrix to measure what was most crucial in my case. I did the same for a more detailed features matrix. Combined together they helped me to understand that most plant/gardening apps have one purpose they focus on. I have analyzed 9 direct and indirect most known applications and clicked through twice as much.

Usually a plant app is a camera-based plant identificator or a database with a possible watering reminders feature. Two of them had the option to find other user’s plants on a map (eg in PlantSnap), which seemed to not be a good idea for house plants. It would work for urban plant-spotting, but unfortunately it was not its purpose nor context.

Additionally, it gave me an idea about how to introduce a smart monetization strategy and add some in-app social features to make more space for users to show off their specimens, which turned out to be a thing (eg. very active, big community on Pl@neNet or PictureThis).

During analysis it turned out that most of the applications that are available on the market have issues with the actual camera identification AI, which for most of them is a crucial feature that fails and it seemed to be a deal breaker.

Ideation and concepts

Once the Strategy and Discovery phases are over and the proper research has been done, it is time to get to the Ideation phase. Thanks to all the data gathered in the previous steps I have a strong, solid base which will let me proceed to specify the concept of the Product and describe in detail:

Who (what user groups) the product is going to help
What problems it is going to solve or what needs it is going to fulfil
How (by what means) it is going to do so

In order to do that, I start with the Who part, which in this case is creating a Persona.

Persona a.k.a who is it for?

Jobs to be done

Now, having answers to some strategy questions, competitor analysis and a persona, I went with a tool that gives me a straight-forward insight to what Planty can actually help with. Jobs to be done lets me set a customer profile: his jobs and pains and gains, as well as find touchpoints which I can use in order to prepare a list of features my app will have.

Feature identification

Looking at this list above and based on research on competitors, not all of the features have to be developed right away. The following is definitely more than an MVP and can be seen as a recommendation for the product’s future growth.

Identify plants with camera
Plant database
Search history
Wikipedia links for more info
Add to favourites/wanted
Possible monetization — Cooperation with home/plant stores, price comparison and “available in nearby store” and Cooperation with bloggers/portals — links to articles
Exchange — which friend has this plant? Maybe you don’t have to buy and can just ask to get it from them (possibly by propagation)
Exchange plants with people nearby? See who wants to share/set an alert!
Reminders
Water your plants
Fertilize and prune your plants
Possible monetization — reminders for only 3 plants without subscription or “Free watering reminders, need to pay for different ones (eg. fertilize/prune reminders”.
The user can put plants in groups and set reminders for these groups and not for every plant separately if they have the same needs.
My plant diary — upload plant photos to compare with friends — gamification.

Eisenhower matrix

This tool helps you decide on and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all. Having lots of features, I have chosen this tool to decide which are required for the MVP and which can be set aside for the time being and treated as recommendations for the product’s future development.

Looking at the matrix that along with competitor analysis/jobs to be done, we see that among the most crucial features we have camera identification, plant database, and then reminders which are connected to each other. These are basic features for most applications and give them their fundamental value. For now, cooperation with store or plant exchanges can be put aside. I don’t want to invest too much time into development — instead I want to create an MVP, test it, release it, see what happens, and then adjust.

Prototyping and finally some designing

Information architecture

Basing on the knowledge I’ve gathered during previous stages and defined features, I have prepared an information architecture of the app with both an MVP and future features which at this point was the biggest obstacle. I always strive to see the bigger picture, think ahead, and design in a way that would be flexible in case of introducing functionalities later in time without the need for significant changes in the existing design.

Moodboards for inspiration

Before I got to the wireframing part, I let myself look around to gather some inspiration and see what I actually want to achieve as an outcome. I usually work on moodboards and prototypes simultaneously as UI and UX are highly connected to each other and I wanted to stay inspired about the directions I may choose.

Wireframing and interactive prototyping

Life is full of surprises — the outcome

The research phase was fun, but the design is even more so. Having everything thought out and with a mind full of inspirations and ideas, I have prepared a few iterations of the final UI. It is quite tricky not to fall into a pattern while designing — most plant apps are very minimal and carry a similar curated vibe, as seen on the moodboard. And what actually happened during UI design is that after having gotten into a place where I explored a possible idea, I have prepared another moodboard, since it turned out I have moved on from the previous one to something more fun and illustrative.

Future recommendations and what I have learned

First of all, working on Planty was great fun! It’s always nice to design something that is close to your heart. What I have been reminded about during this process is that it doesn’t matter how good-looking your design is, it will fail if its UX and mechanics/AI/ML aren’t in place. In this particular example, the market is full of neat applications that are not delivering what they promise.

As a future recommendation, I would test my designs with potential users to validate the outcome and test additional social features which, in the competitors’ cases, seem to do quite well by helping people keep people in touch, exchange their experiences, share tips & tricks, and boast about their own specimens. It’s usually a good idea to put some features on hold until the MVP is up and running in order to gain some feedback before putting too much time into development of something that has issues on the ground level.

Interested in more? Take a look at Planty on Dribbble!