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Seeds have wide array of germination, growing, and transplanting times, and keeping track of everything can be confusing, expensive, and disorganized.
There isn’t a current product, with clean UI and a variety of plant types (ie, not just vegetables) that supports the user’s day to day growing.
People don’t know when to start their seeds, which seeds to start at the same time, or how to make sure they’re on top of seedling care.
<note_text>Disclaimer: This work was pursued as a personal project. It has not moved into development.<note_text>
To understand the current digital support for home gardeners, I conducted a competitive analysis of five top seed-starting apps.
I found that none of them provided seed-starting information for a wide array of plants in a clear and accessible format.
Users had to dig deep to find information in articles and resources, there were very few images to support text, and the UI was dated and confusing.
To find gardeners, I put a message out on Instagram.
Six people volunteered. (One volunteered her dad.)
In a mix of methods (via Zoom, over the phone, and in person), I asked questions to understand:
After transcribing the conversations in Otter.ai, I created a massive affinity map of key statements in Mural. These themes rose to the top.
Since home gardeners are a diverse group with varying needs, wants, and motivations, I established three personas.
After brainstorming pages of ideas using creative constraints, I established five features to develop.
To explore how someone would interact with the five features, I established three key flows. These were: 1 - The user wants to start a Care Group and add it to the Calendar/To Do List, 2 - The user wants to add a seed packet to their collection with the barcode scanner, 3 - The user wants to add lighting and heat products to their Seed Starting Setup.
I'd originally had them as separate flows, but decided to merge them together into one all-encompassing user flow. This way, I could see where the pages overlapped (in terms of future design and navigation). I could also view and assess all of a user's options at one time, since they probably wouldn't have a completely linear approach to the app.
I want to know all of the official specifics, plus include some notes and pictures of my own, since seed starting experiences can vary from garden to garden.
I want to quickly store all of its’ growing information in one place, and be able to view and sort my whole collection at any time.
I want seeds with similar growing timeframes to get grouped together.
I want to keep track of all my materials. Since this item doesn’t have a barcode, I’m going to enter it manually. How easy will that be?
Five adult gardeners participated in a mix of in-person and zoom tests.
I watched the test recordings, and then filled out detailed spreadsheets for each participant.
Timing the tasks and asking for ratings added quantitative data points.
To determine priority iterations for my narrow timeframe, I mapped out the testers' comments. The gray post-its were given more weight, as they were suggested by more than one person.
I'd like to test out the new changes to see if the clarity of the grouping feature improved.
I wonder, are the new instructions in the task list helpful or overwhelming? Since that section is now very text-heavy, video clips or animations of the tasks might be more engaging to the user.
I refined the features through a lot of research and testing. During my user testing, there was some question as to whether the Materials section was necessary. I still think it's a useful feature to have, but if I was to develop this product further, I would focus more attention on the task lists and calendar functions. These seemed more relevant to the users in growing from seed.
Narrowing down my focus was key in creating this app.
I'd never designed an app before, and I came into the project with an excess of ideas. I love to garden, and I'm always thinking about ways to improve my system. This mean I had a lot of ideas to develop solutions for my users' pain points, and I needed to prioritize.
