Keeping your houseplants healthy with tools and reminders
PROJECT TYPE
Mobile Application
TOOLS
Figma
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe XD
MY ROLE
UX Designer
UI Designer
TEAM
Eric Uhde
Linda Sheppler
Caleb Tracy
TIME
January 2022 - May 2022
Leaf is a mobile application that was created for a Human-Computer Interaction class.
We found that plant owners wanted to take better care of their houseplants, but they were having trouble for a few different reasons. There are several things a person needs to account for when taking care of a houseplant: How much light exposure a plant needs, how much humidity is required, how often to water, when to change the soil, etc. Keeping all of these things in mind can be overwhelming, and plant owners have to follow a care schedule that suits each of their plants’ needs.
ABOUT LEAF
In Brief
How might we help users better care for their houseplants in a meaningful way?
Design Challenge
Solution
We designed Leaf, a mobile application that helps users care for their houseplants in an easy and effective way. Leaf allows users to find the best location in their home for each of their plants, follow a care schedule that is optimized to each plant’s needs, and diagnose any problems that a plant might be dealing with.
Follow a schedule that reminds you when to care for your plants
Adding a plant to Leaf automatically creates a care schedule that you can view in the app’s calendar. You can receive notification reminders that tell you when to water, fertilize, mist, or repot your plants.
View detailed information about your plants and how to care for them
Leaf provides detailed care information about your plants and watering, propagating, pruning, fertilizing, and more. When you add a new plant, Leaf will provide recommendations on where to place it based off of the humidity and light data you’ve recorded in the past.
Find the healthiest location for your plant
Every plant has its own ideal range of light and humidity. Using your phone’s light and humidity sensors, Leaf can help you find the best place to put your plant so that it can stay happy and healthy.
PHASE 1
RESEARCH
Surveys & Interviews
Before diving into solutions, we created a survey to help us narrow down our target user group and to learn about the different ways that people go about caring for their plants. We also wanted to understand what problems plant owners are running into when caring for their plants and how they keep track of care tasks (water, fertilize, etc.). After the surveys, we conducted semi-structured interviews to dive deeper into the plant care problems users are facing.
We created an affinity map as a group to identify themes from our interview data.
Insights
Users want an easy way to remember to care for their plants (ex. “How often should I water my palm?”)
It’s important for users to be able to quickly find a healthy location to place their houseplants (where is the ideal location based on light and humidity?)
Many users think that finding a healthy place for their plants feels like guesswork
Some users don’t know what is the appropriate amount of light and humidity for individual plants
Users want to learn more about their plants, especially how to care for them
Users want to be able to know how to help their plants if they are looking unhealthy
Users don’t know how often to perform certain care tasks for their plants( “I don’t know how often to water my plants, and it’s frustrating because different plants want to be watered at different times”)
PHASE 2
DESIGN
Ideation
With our research findings in mind, our team brainstormed solutions together. We attempted to come up with as many ideas as possible without considering feasibility at this stage. We then went through the ideas and discussed which of them would best support the main purpose of the application: How can we help users better care for their houseplants in a meaningful way?
After our team completed discussing our ideas and distilling them down, I organized them into the following roadmap:
I use roadmaps because they tend to help me and my teammates keep our ideas organized, and they serve as reminder of what the main purpose of the app is. Whenever I get stuck or feel a bit overwhelmed by a project, I’ve found that reminding myself of the project’s main purpose can provide a bit of clarity and guidance.
We settled on the following core functionalities:
Use phone’s light and humidity sensors to determine if a location is healthy for a particular plant.
Keep track of when to complete tasks for each of a user’s plants.
Plants are organized by their location, and when a user adds a new plant, recommendations are given using the room’s light and humidity data.
Users can learn more about their plants, how to best care for them, and what to do if a plan is looking unhealthy.
Add a plant by scanning it with the camera.
Users can use the search function to find any of their plants, tasks, or new plants they would like to add.
Sketches & Wireframes
I quickly drew out the following sketches of some functionalities with the team to make sure that everyone’s on the same page.
We created the following wireframes and brought a Figma prototype to our potential users for feedback.
User Feedback & Revised Design Goals
Most of the users liked the care calendar and the function to scan a location and determine whether or not it’s healthy for a particular plant. This was reassuring for us, since these two functions were our primary focus.
Informing and Empowering our Users
Some of the users were confused by the home page, particularly the condensed care calendar at the top. They were unsure how to access the full care calendar and how to view what tasks were upcoming, and for what plants those tasks were designated to.
Since the goal of the app is to help users care for their houseplants in an easy way, we decided to take another look at the home page and the condensed care calendar. We ended making a few small changes that helped users better navigate the home page and access the care calendar.
High-Fidelity Design - Iteration 1
For the first iteration of our high fidelity design, our primary goal was to validate whether the design helps care for their houseplants in a meaningful way. We also wanted to test the usability of the design in hopes of further improving on it. We used Figma to create an interactive prototype.
PHASE 3
Evaluation
User Testing Process
With the goals I had for this iteration in mind, I moderated user feedback sessions with 6 users with varying preferences towards how they find a place to put a new plant and how they go about tracking care tasks. The users also had different levels of familiarity with interacting with mobile applications. Here's a brief overview of the process:
Introduce the project goal.
Describe the scenario, set up the context, and let users use the app while thinking aloud.
Ask follow up questions and gather feedback.
Let users fill out a questionnaire. Thank them for participation.
Results
I was able to gather a lot of feedback on the prototype from users with different time constraints and different goals in using a plant care app. Here's a summary of how people rate their own confidence in effectively caring for their plants, their speed in finding particular information they’re looking for, how frequently they will complete care tasks compared to how frequently they do now, and their confidence in choosing a location to place their plant.
Reflection
What I Learned
Designing this application helped me understand the importance in finding the correct, specific problem users are facing, and how to best approach solving that problem. When users come from a broad and varied background, and give designers a lot information to work with, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose focus of exactly what the problem is that needs to be solved.
We originally made the mistake of having too much of a vague idea of what users needed in order to care for their houseplants in a more meaningful way. I learned how to distill down a huge amount of data into specific and fundamental pieces of information. Doing this is necessary when coming up with a solution.