Overview

For my first design challenge at General Assembly I developed a mobile app to help my classmate in his struggles to maintain a vegetable garden. Based on the research I conducted, I designed features to aid users in planning their gardens, caring for their gardens, and maintaining the motivation to care for their gardens.

The initial project deliverable was a low-fidelity prototype, but I recently revisited the project and upped the fidelity.

I conducted user interviews with people of varying gardening experience. 

When interviewing users with gardening experience, I focused on questions regarding the challenges and rewards of gardening, techniques, and knowledge.

When interviewing users with little or no gardening experience, I focused on questions regarding similar hobbies and learned skills requiring longer time commitments. 

Here's what I learned:

Based on my user's pain points and needs I developed a set of design objectives to guide my concept ideation. 

I explored a number of concepts including an in-person gardening class, a gardening pairing system, and an in-store gardening planning session. During concept testing, users felt that in-person options would be too short-lived and voiced the need for daily reminders and quick access to information. So I decided to go with a mobile application solution.  

Below is a user flow with my second iteration of low-fidelity wireframes.

Garden Hero is a comprehensive vegetable garden planning tool with the purpose of motivating and assisting young adults with their gardening experiences.

This mobile application breaks down the barriers preventing users from getting hooked on gardening and  helps users stick with their gardening intentions to see positive results.

My Garden Feature

Advises user on vegetable plant choices based on factors including climate, date, garden size, user experience level, and time commitment.

Allows user to track garden progress with social media-shareable photos and a produce tracker that estimates when plants are ready for harvest.

Teach Me is a database of videos, articles, and FAQs pertaining to common gardening topics.

This feature is meant to be utilized throughout the gardening process from the initial planting phase to any additional challenges that the user may encounter along the way.

Plant profile is a searchable and scrollable vegetable encyclopedia that provides basic information about plants including difficulty level, as well as required sunlight and watering.

Plant Hero creates a watering, care, and harvest schedule tailored to the user.

The To-Do feature allows users to see a long-term view of necessary actions via the calendar function as well as a detailed to-do list for the current day.

Users receive notifications when plants require watering and harvest, or if plants have been neglected.