How might we make it easier for college students to connect with other plant owners and promote sharing tailored advice on plant issues?
Timeline
January. - April 2024
10 weeks
Teammate
Milly Zheng
Project Type
Case Study
UI/UX Design
User Research
User Testing
Tools
Figma
Notion
Google Forms
Overview
Problem
So why college students and plants?
Beginning during the COVID lockdown a lot of people adopted collecting plants as a hobby (myself included)! Plants truly light up a room and have been shown to have stress relieving properties, but the issue we're tackling lies in a lack of knowledge on proper plant care, particularly among college age students.
“7 out of 10 Gen Z that are 18-24 years old have killed plants.”
Proposed Solution
My partner and I are set out to develop a community-based application tailored toward plant-loving college students that would increase community engagement and help facilitate the learning and sharing of knowledge about proper plant care.
Research
Competitive Analysis
6 Competitors
User Interviews
3 Interviewees
~30 Minutes
Semi-structured
Surveys
2 Surveys
21 Respondents Total
Scoping out the Competition 👀
This problem isn't a new one, so my partner and I conducted competitive analysis on 6 companies to see what areas of the problem were being solved by current competitors and what areas weren't being addressed.
We highlighted the general pros and cons of our competitors:
Pros
Very Informative
Good for Tracking Plant Care
Cons
Subscription Fees
Difficult Navigation
Overwhelming Number of Features
Lack Social Features
Research Goals
After our competitive analysis, we developed some research goals in preparation for user-interviews. We really wanted to home in on the specific problems our user group faces, so our goals were to:
Figure out what issues and needs users have for their plants
Determine the long-term goals of users with their plants
Explore motivations of being a plant owner
User Interviews
We conducted 3 semi-structured qualitative interviews to gain insights on their problems surrounding owning plants as college students. All of the students owned at least one plant (fun fact: one actually had 40 unique species) and had attended college for at least 2 years.
My partner and I debriefed after each interview and created an affinity map using quotes from our interviews to find common themes among our interviewees.
Key Findings
Students’ College Lives Require Low-Maintenance Plants
Whether due to living in a college dorm with poor lighting and space limitations, or simply being a busy college student, our participants reported that the plants they owned were meant to be low maintenance to accommodate their lives.
Breaks Pose Uncertainty for Plant Care
Surprisingly both out-of-state and in-state participants reported that breaks brought on challenges of figuring out who was going to take care of their plants over break. Even those that were in-state found it a hassle to find a way to safely transport them and would much rather have someone in the area take care of their plants.
Students Seek a Community for Advice
As a source of information, our participants made note of how other people tended to be more helpful than just searching up advice about their plant. They also expressed an interest in in simply being able to interact with people with similar plant-related interests.
Maybe We Should Narrow Our Scope,,,
Recognizing that our project timeline was short (and with some helpful feedback from our instructors), my partner and I sent out a survey asking our users what features they felt were essential for our proposed community-based plant app. The results from our 11 respondents led us to ensure our application had the following:
Discussion Forum
Plant Identification
Events Page
Thus we decided to not focus on directly addressing our 2nd key finding as our potential feature for this didn't gain much interest.
User Research Synthesis
Meet the User
Based on our findings we developed a user persona named Willow Wong who holds the pain points of our interviewees. The key highlights were her frustrations: getting conflicting answers online and not having a community to ask for plant advice.
User Flow
We then developed a user flow to act as a framework for how our app would be structured and what our users would need.
Design
Design Goals
Intuitive
Rather than reinvent the wheel, we wanted to build off of community based applications our users were already engaging with
Community Oriented
Allow opportunities for users to engage with their community
Iteration My Beloved <3
One thing I absolutely love is iterating, thus my partner and I came up with multiple iterations of our proposed solution's features and discussed the different implementations we proposed, picking at key elements from the different layouts we wanted implemented in our app. Our main priorities were in trying to stick with our design goals.
While a collaborative effort, my focus was on developing interactions with the user profile page, plant profile page, and education page, and adding a post or plant to a profile.
Low Fidelity Wireframe
Profile Page
Considerations
Content Hierarchy
Easy Navigation
Focus on Plants + Community Building through shared interest
Plant Profile Page
Considerations
User Visibility
Information Amount
History Display
Education Page
Discussion Page
Mid Fidelity Wireframes + User Testing
After discussing, we implemented our designs as prototyped mid-fidelity wireframes for user testing.
We conducted 4 user tests on college students who owned plants, asking our participants to interact with 5 flows and while overall we had a lot of positive feedback, with users making note that it was very intuitive, we did have a few areas for improvement within each page. Based off of our observations and direct comments from participants we discovered the following:
Flow 1: Discussion Page Interactions
The separation between the main comment and replies was unclear
Our prototype only supported swiping, but users tried to click on the dots when looking at multiple pictures on a post
Flow 2: Making a Discussion Post
While later said to be helpful, our linked plant feature's purpose was unclear to users so they didn't have an incentive to interact with it
Flow 3: Events Interactions
The dates and times were listed on the same line which was difficult for users to read
Users wanted a notification feature to better remember what events they were interested in
Flow 4: Add A Plant
When adding a new plant, users were initially required to name their plant, but this felt restrictive for users who don't name their plants
Users wanted to see the date that their plant was added
Users wanted to see their plant's name/type from the overall profile page
Flow 5: Education Page
To easily navigate within the education page, users wanted the navigation headers present throughout their entire scroll
Wanted to be able to filter content
Found the repetitive display of article interactions odd
Final Product
Introducing…
Discussions
Explore
Users can filter, like, comment, and share questions and progress of their plants in the discussion feed. All comments have the potential to be upvoted or downvoted to allow members to verify content as a community.
Make a Post
Users can quickly select the type of post they want to make and fill out the corresponding information.
Unique to Leaflet is the linked plant feature! This allows users to link a plant on their profile page to a post and give other users easy access to that plant's past history so they can provide more tailored feedback!
Events
Browse Campus Events
Our application uses an SSO system, so all members are able to view events happening on campus related to plants or adjacent interests! Users can share events and receive reminders about when these events are happening.
Profile
Add a Plant
Leaflet uses photo identification to easily allow users to add their plants to their profile page for other members to see!
Education
Explore Plant Types and Articles
User can browse through different kinds of plants by category, filter by alphabetical order, by popularity, or by ease of care for browsing purposes, or simply enter in any of the names the plant holds to get where they want to be!
Reflection
What I Learned:
The Value of User Research and Testing
I found that I enjoyed user research a lot more than I thought I would. It was simply so interesting to hear how what I thought the problems might be aligned or mismatched with our users input and ultimately drove my partner and I in a different direction than I expected!
Advanced Figma Features :
This bootcamp was honestly so beneficial when it came to learning my way around Figma. While I had a basic understand of Figma, I was able to learn helpful features like how to apply color and text styles to my work as well as auto layout to help maintain better consistency.
Areas for Improvement:
User Research and Testing:
(Wait wasn't this what I learned?) Well, yes, but I'm honestly so intrigued by what goes into user research. I want to know how to formulate better questions that give users the best opportunity to voice their issues so I can better address them. I also was co-currently taking a UI Design course where I was introduced to different research and testing methods that I would love the chance to implement to strengthen my designs for users.
Understanding Scope:
While I am so very happy with the results, my partner and I sure did take on a lot,,, It was all in the sake of the user, however I feel some of our features could've been more fleshed out if we had tried to narrow our scope even more by getting more user input on how we could prioritize more.
A Time and Place for Learning:
I honestly love learning to a fault. While creating mockups I wanted users to be able to try multiple ways of completing task so I attempted to use variables and conditionals to try and limit the number of screens I was using. In some areas this was very helpful, but in others it was a bit confusing, and the time I spent trying to learn it could've been spent improving other areas of feedback that we received. I did eventually reach a point where I stopped trying to use them for everything but wish I had done so sooner ;-;. Perhaps I will start a side project where I can test this out to my heart's content.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I'm really proud of the work my partner and I produced in 10 weeks! We put a lot of work into developing Leaflet and still see some areas for improvement so we may just find ourselves continuing this project!
