Role
Product Designer
Time Line
3 months, January - April, 2021
Tool
Figma
Project Overview
Seeders is a mobile application designed to offer an extensive gardening experience for home gardeners.
The main goal of this project is to build an all-in-one gardening platform for its end users. This app facilitates users to easily access a wide range of planting information, a mobile shop, a gardening planner, and a photo/gardening equipment sharing service without switching platforms.
Problem statement
Home gardeners face challenges in accessing comprehensive information, planning tools, and community engagement, often requiring multiple platforms to fulfill their needs.
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Highlights
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Context
Setting the stage
Why Gardening?
Since the Covid-19 breakout, home gardening has become one of the most popular hobbies for people seeking ways to spend meaningfully without violating the provincial lockdown restrictions. People grow a small garden or a farm at their homes, having a good time there with family and friends. This simple outdoor activity positively impacts people's mental health during this tough time.
Understanding the Context
I started the research about the project through qualitative and quantitative approaches utilizing secondary resources. Each sticky note contains the contexts of gardening activity categorized into 5 different factors.
Affordance
Constraint
Accessibility
Sustainability
Joy / Delight
Key Insights
More millennials in home gardening
Urban gardening recreates $600 worth of profit
A great way to educate children.
Affordable over time
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Problem
Pinpointing the problem
What stops you from home gardening?
I developed a user interaction analysis map to understand how users execute gardening tasks in a flow.
It demonstrates the phases where users face problems and how they react to them. It helped me to get a clear vision of what pain points I should focus on solving.
What are the key pain points?
​Hard to find the right information about your plant.
Lack of intuitive gardening calendar.
Needs for a better experience-sharing platform.
Lack of secondhand item-sharing platform for home gardening.
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Question
The question I set out to answer
"How might we provide an extensive gardening experience such as shopping, planning and socializing through an informative community hub in a digital environment?"​
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Define
Defining user needs
Who is at the heart of our solution?
Based on the research, I developed 2 key user types to specify the problems that I try to solve.
Jennifer Owens
Hotel Receptionist​
"I'm looking for a gardening community with a used item-sharing platform."
Wants & Needs
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Platform to get used items for gardening.
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Social network platform to share information.
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Accessible shop with affordable prices.
Frustration
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Lack of platforms with used item-sharing systems specialized in gardening.
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Hard to find intuitive gardening apps with a wide range of information.
Adriana Lopez
School Teacher
"I don't want to use multiple platforms to get what I need."
Wants & Needs
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Intuitive and accessible mobile shop.
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Easy-to-use gardening planner with strong customizable features.
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All-in-one gardening application without the using multiple platforms.
Frustration
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Always has to use several apps to complete the tasks that she needs.
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Lack of gardening-exclusive shopping apps.
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Prototype
Prototyping the solution
Site Mapping
I defined that the key functions that this product should include are informative plant search, shop, community, and calendar. This site mapping was a great tool for me to plan the basic structure of the platform effectively.
Wireframing
Based on the site mapping, I further developed the process through wireframing. In this stage, the main goal was to construct the layouts to provide an intuitive and visually appealing experience as well as great usability.
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Final Design
A design that delivers
Bringing the vision to life
In the final design, the main goal was to articulate the overall visual and usability aspects to answer these 3 touch points:
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​Customizable features that help users have easy access to the tasks that they want to complete.
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A user-friendly community where users can exchange, sell, and buy second-hand items from each other.
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An intuitive planting schedule to gain a successful home gardening experience.
Easy to get what you like
​Customizable User Favourites​​​
Users can set up their favourite plants on the user profile page, depending on their preferences. The favourite plants appear on the main page to access the information and shop page directly.​​​
Unlimited Planting Information
Home Gardening Teacher
Through user's favourites or simple search, users can easily access useful gardening information. This search-based archive provides a wide range of information about plants for its users. Users can find how to plant and grow a certain plant with clearly articulated instructions and videos.
Intuitive Shopping Experience
Self-explanatory and Visually Compelling​
In addition to providing useful information for home gardening, this product offers an easy-to-use shopping platform. Users can easily navigate the products that they need and get an intuitive and self-explanatory shopping experience through this app.
Powerful Networking
A Community Hub for Second-hand Item Exchanges
This app offers a user networking platform to share home gardening stories and exchange, sell, or buy each other's second-hand and unwanted items. This gardening network platform functions like other social network systems in the market, making it easy for users to familiarize themselves with their use.
Ready-to-go with Your Schedule
Today's Work Alarm on Calendar
This strong scheduling function supports users to gain successful home gardening experiences.
The Today's Work feature gives users notifications to keep them on track for their planting schedule every day.
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Branding
Shaping the Identity
Colours
# 5E2222
# 48C15C
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Takeaways
Final Thoughts
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Since users' interests in home gardening are various depending on the circumstance, customizable features are critical to provide the most useful and convenient service.​​
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More user research and testing processes are needed, in order to build an all-in-one platform for home gardening
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Further strategies for the social networking platform should be considered in the next steps. It seems crucial to be prepared to deal with possible issues such as fraud and personal information tracking from using social and item exchange platforms.
Next Project
