Flora, Plantcare Mobile App
Creating a greenspace where wellness can thrive.
UX/UI Design
Flora, a plant care mobile tool, helps keep track of all plants for both new and experienced plant owners, improving organization and productivity.
Problem
There are an amount of hardships as any new or even experience plant owners. From not having basic plant care knowledge to owning too many plants to take care of, building a green space is beneficial to an individual’s wellness.
Goal
Create a delightful app that increases someone’s wellness.
Duration
3 weeks
Team
Holly Phan
Abinaya Babu
Roles
UX Research
UI Design
Skills
Whiteboarding
Usability Testing
Wireframing (Adobe XD)
Prototyping (Figma)
Motion (AE)
Concept
We wanted to create a simple, delightful interface that easily reminded the plant owner not only that their plants needed care, but also a usable interface where it can store heavy pieces of information.
Empathizing & Defining
Competitors Anaysis
Created a competitive analysis to explore apps that tracked plant health and gave tips and general plant information. We found there were numerous other apps that manually tracked health however did not give basic, live data on the health on a simple, clean interface.
User Research Survey
We surveyed 82 plantowners, from new to experienced, about their personal experience with plant care along with hardships.
Insights from survey
- Researching online is the main way to find how to care for a plant, however there is an abundance of information and it can become confusing of where to turn to.
- Plant owners are more likely to check up on an app when the plant is not doing well.
- Reasons to not buy more plants is lack of space and costs. If not taken well care of, money can be lost by dying plants.
Persona + Journey Map
Based on our research, we created a persona with assumptions. We followed through with this persona to guide our design decisions and priorities. Mapping out a user journey helped us visualize the persona’s exact thoughts and feelings at a certain time, as well as pain points.
Solution
Flora guides you through all of your plant care needs. It identifies your plant, the sensor placed in the soil gives you live data on how your plant is doing, and it also provides tips on temperature, soil, water, light and feeding in one convenient location.
Wireframing
Going through an abundance of various interfaces, creating a mobile application was optimal (versus an AR system) due to it’s convenience. With 5 participants in our usability testing session, we learned the information hierarchy plant owners may want information, optimizing our flow even more.
Visual Treatment
We wanted to create a simple, delightful interface that easily reminded the plant owner not only that their plants needed care but also a usable interface where it can store heavy pieces of information.
Adding a plant to the collection
A unique name is given to each plant to distinguish between each other. Pairing the plant probe with each plant – and to the device – is essential in receiving live information of one's plant data.
Plant Profile
The information database is accessible both from this page and from the nav bar to find synthesized top advice on caring for a particular plant and potential problems.
Reflection
In design terms, intaking the collective data on a plant's profile page may not be as digestable. Our measurements are not as specific and clear to every user, from new to experienced. Although we addressed this in our usability testing sessions, we do not clearly display the measurements used for each feature.
If this project continues, we hope to build out functions focusing more on productivity and education – versus live data reminders. We believe more in-depth user interviews with a range of types of plant owners would be essential in understanding how to better take care of personal plants.