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Planity - Plant Care Management App

Overview
Planity is a community-based plant care management app. It helps planters find out what to grow and manage their garden easily. Planters can connect with friends and share their plant’s beautiful moments, which motivates and helps them grow plants continuously.

☘️ Plant care + community = Planity ☘️

Background
This is a 5-day remote Design Sprint project. We got the inspiration from the fact that home gardening blooms around the world due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. As people pick up new hobbies while they remain in self-quarantine, interest in gardening grew a lot. However, beginners need a platform to get guidance while staying at home.

Role
UX research, UI design

Team
Yunbo Shim, Hailee Lee

Tools Used
Figma, InVision, Miro

Duration
Design Sprint(5 Days)  
#Social App #Personalization

Problem Statement

  • Beginners who grow plants for the first time find it difficult which plant to grow and need help in managing plants effectively.
  • Plant growers find it hard to maintain motivation from start to finish.

Opportunity

  • Users can find out the plant they want to grow from the personalized recommendations feature.
  • Users can actively grow plants while interacting with other planters through the community.

The Solution
Planity is a community-based plant care management app. It helps planters find out what to grow and manage their garden easily. Planters can connect with friends and share their plant’s beautiful moments, which motivates and helps them grow plants continuously.

Project Timeline

User Interview
The goal of the interview was to understand what problem people have been facing and listen to their opinions regarding plant care. We conducted remote interviews, and synthesize the findings from plant communities. After conducting user interviews with 6 people, we discovered areas that Planity could address.

Persona / HMW
After conducting the interview, we created these personas to synthesize and illustrate user research findings.Based on the Persona, we came up with these questions.

  • How might we help Mason
    grow their plants well?
  • How might we connect Mason
    to the other planter?  
  • How might we recommend plants that are suitable for Lauren?

Empathy Building

Affinity Map

Heat Framework & Competitive research
To determine how Planity would compete in the market, we researched similar plant care apps.
By researching these platforms, we got a sense of the pain points from each, and the types of
the information which is expected on these platforms.

Crazy 8’s
We began looking for solutions through a Crazy 8’s session. Our goal was to try to get as many ideas as possible to answer previous questions. We found out what information to include, potential user flows, and information hierarchy.

Information Architecture

  • Guidance - Find out the best plants by recommendation and learn from care guides
  • Community - Connect with friends and share plant’s beautiful moments with other users
  • Plant Care - Gather all plants in one place and manage the entire garden easily

User Flow

Wireframe

UI Design

Usability Test
We conducted remote usability tests based on this test plan.

What I Learned

  • This design sprint challenged me to create
    an end to end experience under intense constraints in just five days.
  • With the complex level and short time frame of this project, I learned how important it is to stay focus on the most important areas(Prioritizing minimum viable product features) without going too deep in detail.

Next Steps

  • With more time, I'd like to add a feature that beginners can ask questions and get answers from the professionals which could be another form of community app.
  • I would also consider project scalability. As this is an MVP, some of the interactions would be hard to apply if more plants are added. In the future, it’s important to consider how we could make the interactions work on a bigger scale.
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