Introduction
The plant market has been seeing explosive growth over 2020. This growth has been fueled by tech-savvy millennials and social media. Our team had a goal to design a digital experience for the plant department of Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the US.
Our challenge was to establish user needs and create a solution that allows users to discover, plan, purchase, and care for their plants.
Overview
Role: UX Designer | UI Lead
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Tools: Pen & Paper, Miro, Sketch, Flinto, Adobe Photoshop
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Time: 2 weeks
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Team: Anna Kalita, Jackie Bitetto, Kiambu Gall
Our Solution
We determined that Home Depot needs a separate app for indoor plants for its new target audience: millennials. We addressed our goals and users' needs by implementing the features that have a high impact on our users and their shopping behavior.
1
Care Reminders
Plant care reminders
and tips to get notified when it’s time to water, fertilise and mist.
2
Online Store
A next level mobile shopping experience to buy plants, pots, seeds and much more.
3
Tips & Tricks
Plant recommendations based on a skills level and preferences, for beginners and experts.
4
Inspiration
Everyday inspiration and ideas to transform every corner of your home into
a beautiful retreat.
THE PROCESS
How We Got There
Our design process relied on cycles of researching, ideation, prototyping, and testing so that we could create an app while continuing to listen to our users and evaluating whether we were meeting their needs.
Deliver
Discover
Define
Design
Solutions that work
& Users Feedback
Insights into
the Problem
Scope down
the Focus
Potential
Solutions
DISCOVER
Understanding the World of Plants
To get insights into the problem, our team aimed to first understand individuals’ relationships with plants: what types
of plants they enjoy, how they take care of them, and how they go about adding new plants to their collection. As a whole, we wanted to explore the process of plant shopping: from the idea and inspiration to the plant purchase.
Users Interviews
To validate the need for a new plant app and with a new audience in mind, we conducted several interviews with our target users — “plant people” aged 24 - 29, who love plants and enjoy buying them online and offline. We wanted to better understand why they might want to use a mobile application for their plants, and what features they might expect in such an app.
Objectives:
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Define the most important factors for plant-purchasing, how do users choose plants they want to buy.
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Delineate the current process for buying plants, how this process looks like.
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Gauge users’ expectations & desires for
a plant-related mobile application.
DEFINE
Revealing the Themes
The next step was creating an affinity map to reveal underlying themes from the qualitative data. We broke down all the interview observations and quotes into post-it notes and organized them into categories. You can see the examples of 3 of the 9 categories below.
Knowledge & skills
Feeling & Emotions
Shopping Experience
DEFINE
Interview Key Findings
Users are emotional about their plants. Plants affect their mood, and even relieve stress and anxiety.
They are Emotional
They are Addicted
Users who have plants
can’t stop acquiring more
and more green babies.
They are “addicting”.
They are Learners
Users want to know how to pick the right plants for their spaces and care for the ones they already own.
Blossom App
DISCOVER
Competitive Analysis
The next step in our “discover” stage was to conduct a competitive and comparative analysis. Our team identified a clear need to combine many of their features. Creating an app that would offer discovery, care, and shopping in one package would truly be the first of its kind.
Direct Competitors
We were inspired by plant
e-commerce websites like “Bloomscape” and “The Sill” with their online shopping experience, plant apps like Vera and Blossom for their features and design.
Indirect Competitors
To meet our users’ needs,
we sought out some more unconventional wisdom from apps concerned with babies like “Sprout”, “Nifty” for DIY projects, and even our users’ favorite app, “Pinterest”.
DEFINE
Meet Our Persona
?
Who is she?
Her name is Amber Barnes, she's 27 and lives in Philly while teaching a Kindergarten class.
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What she's dreaming of?
Now, she is dreaming of making her online learning workspace a warm, inviting, and plant-friendly zone.
?
Why does she like plants?
Her mom was a gardener, so Amber would love to
bring plants into her home to remind her of her mom.
I love having plants! They help me feel in touch with nature at home and in my workplace. My house would be full of plants if I only knew how to take care of their specific needs and track their watering schedule.
Amber Barnes
Philadelphia, PA
DEFINE
Problem Statement
Following our persona creation, we were finally able to identify our users' problems.
And that is that users want to efficiently shop for, keep track of, and learn about different kinds of plants so that they can have homes full of happy, healthy plant babies.
DESIGN
Generating Ideas
We started generating our ideas in a design studio with paper sketches and wireframes. We wanted a system that our users would want to use and come back to.
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To meet our users’ needs our app needed to have
a discovery feature with inspiration and plant care tips.
A shop that offers products relevant to our users. Some sort of tracker so that the user can maintain healthy plants with reminders. And we needed to treat plants like the little babies that they are.
DESIGN
Key Screens & Features
Discovery & Inspiration
Shop Page
Plant Tracker
DESIGN
Onboarding Quiz Concept
DESIGN
User Flow: Future State
DESIGN
Refining Ideas: From Lo-fi to Digital Prototype
Our app concept really evolved in a grayscale prototype.
Design Studio: Round 1
Design Studio: Iteration
Digital prototype in Sketch
Discover page with ideas for DIY projects
Shop page with filters relevant to user interviews
Product page with AR feature to see plants in the room
ITERATION
Catastrophic Trouble
Going into our mid-fidelity usability testing, our team had our heads held high. We really thought that we accounted for everything the user could need, but we were wrong.
Users had catastrophic trouble with the plant tracker.
One user even asked: "What the heck do these percentages even mean? what do I do with them?"
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Clearly, we had to reconnect with our persona, Amber to get
a sense of what she would need in a plant tracker, and say goodbye to these scary percentages.
DESIGN
Onboarding Quiz: The Final Design
DESIGN
Discover & Shop Page
DESIGN
Checkout Process
DESIGN
Plant Tracker & Watering Schedule
