UX case study: Plant care app
“Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul.” — Linda Solegato
Design brief
When my mentor suggested I create my first UX design project based on a problem in my own life that I’d like to solve, I looked guiltily at the shrivelled Kalanchloe plant next to me and decided this was my opportunity. I love having plants in my home. Living in a tiny flat in a huge city, they bring me a much-needed reminder of nature and a sense of calm. But due to a busy lifestyle and lack of knowledge about their care, I often neglect them.
The goal: Make houseplants easier to take care of.
My role
Design the product from ideation phase through to the early implementation stages, with support from my mentor Senior UX Designer Sara.
Design thinking
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” — Charles Kettering
We started with a short workshop on design thinking. I worked through a six stage process of first understanding the goal of my design brief, followed by defining the audience, understanding the user, brainstorming what I could build, prioritising these ideas, and settling on a possible solution.
Working through this six step process gave me a great first insight in to design thinking, but it was all based on me and my assumptions. I needed to better understand my other potential users and their needs.
User research
I conducted five interviews, asking my interviewees questions around their living situation, why they like to have plants in their home, how they currently manage the care of them and whether they have any frustrations with this.
My interviewees were in these situations:
- A 24-year-old UX designer living with three housemates. About 20 plants in the house but 5 or 6 not his. Likes looking at the plants but finds them a chore to look after, often forgetting to water them.
- A retired couple living in a house with a large garden. Both keen gardeners with plants inside the house and in the garden, including fruit and vegetables. Generally care for them well with few problems.
- A 32-year-old software developer living in a flat with her partner and cat. Owns two plants bought as gifts that don’t require much care and generally do well, except when the cat digs them up.
- A 31-year-old architect living in a flat with one housemate who is rarely there. Owns two plants. Deliberately looks for plants that are easy to care for because he’s aware he doesn’t know much about plant care.
- Early 30s couple with 3-year-old daughter, living in a house with a garden. Plant care is a hobby for the husband who finds it therapeutic. Daughter enjoys feeling and smelling the flowers, and sometimes pulls them up!
Key findings
Themes identified from the interviews were:
- Plant care is a hobby
- Plant care is a chore
- Plant care is often shared between members of the household
- Plant care is often informal and judged on looks
- Not remembering to water and lack of plant care knowledge are most common problems
- Plant care can be a problem when going on holiday
- Those who enjoy plant care will try to find information where they lack knowledge, or experiment
- Those who don’t enjoy plant care know they lack knowledge but don’t want to seek it out
- Weather needs to be factored in when caring for outdoor plants
- Children enjoy the garden and helping out with plant care
My users
Looking at the findings from my research, my users fall in to the following categories:
- Young professionals living in small and/or shared accommodation with no garden
- People of a range of ages who enjoy gardening and live in houses with gardens
- People who like having plants in their home but don’t enjoy taking care of them
- Families who want to involve children in garden care and enjoying plants
Ideation
With my users now more firmly in my mind, I could move on to brainstorming some potential solutions:
- A device that goes in the soil of the plant and measures the moisture of the soil and how much light it’s receiving.
- An extension for the calendar on the user’s phone, to send reminders.
- Alexa - information and reminders using voice activation.
- An app that contains details of different plants and how to take care of them, with an option to set reminders to water plants.
- user can indicate that they’ve watered the plant.
- other users can see/are notified when a plant has been watered.
- access to a forum where users can share tips with each other.
- contains weather data for outdoor plants.
- educational content/games for kids.
Competitor analysis
An app appeared to be the solution that would most suit my users’ needs, and this could also work with voice activation, like the SmartPlant app does. I downloaded the top three plant care apps I found on Google Play and tried them out for myself.
Vera
Things I liked:
- Can add photos so you can see how the plant changes over time.
- Watering schedule is easy to set up.
- Plant profile shows useful information in an easy-to-use layout.
- Current plant care needs are shown on the home screen.
Things I didn’t like:
- Have to supply your own photo of the plant and add care details yourself.
- Sends notifications but have to go in to the app to indicate that watering has been done.
My Jungle
Things I liked:
- Library of plants and plant care information in the app.
- Requirements section contains useful information in a nice layout.
- Able to create custom tasks.
Things I didn’t like:
- Options for how to manage upcoming tasks, e.g. hold to view plant, swipe to mark as done, are not obvious. Instructions are in the app but are not easy to find.
- No way of marking all tasks as done in one action.
Plant Care Reminder
Things I liked:
- The image of the flower starts to wilt if the user doesn’t water in time.
- The games are a nice touch.
Things I didn’t like:
- Purely a reminder app, no library of plants.
- Hard to navigate, lots of small symbols and confusing language.
Key findings from website FAQs and Google Play comments
Users want to be able to:
- share their account with other people
- override a notification or skip a watering day
- edit when they had marked a plant as watered
- sort their plants in to any order they like
- save date-stamped photos of their plants
- duplicate plant entries
- set up bulk reminders
Storyboards
I used storyboards to illustrate how the potential solutions I came up with might fit in to real-life scenarios, which I took from my user interviews. These helped me to visualise and get a clearer sense of what is important for the user.
Storyboard showcasing a voice-activated solution
In this storyboard, Adrian uses the voice-activated solution to set reminders to care for his plants.
Storyboard showcasing an app solution
In this storyboard, Will uses the app solution to identify a plant and save details of how to care for it.
Paper prototypes
I sketched out the app screens for the user journeys in my storyboards on paper, and created prototypes from these. The paper prototypes provided me with a quick way to see a mock up of the journeys and to test these with users. I recorded the user testing sessions and produced an heuristic evaluation.
Heuristic evaluation of user testing
User comment:
“I guess I’ll click on Send because I don’t have any other choice, but it’s not super clear what that means. It could mean I’m sharing the picture with someone.”
Violation of rule:
Mapping/Help
Explanation:
The user was unclear what ‘Send’ meant in this context, they didn’t know where the photo was being sent to. Perhaps ‘Identify plant’ would make more sense here.
Severity (0 = minor violation, 4 = major violation):
3
User comment:
“I made a mistake with my reminder and I want to go back and edit it, but I don’t know how.”
Violation of rule:
Freedom
Explanation:
The user pressed Save and then realised they had forgotten to set the frequency of their reminder to two weeks. When they were back on the Care Reminders screen they wanted to click through to edit the reminder but couldn’t see a clear way of doing this.
Severity (0 = minor violation, 4 = major violation):
4
Wireframes
I used Adobe XD and Overflow to build and map out wireframes of my user journeys. These included improvements I’d made based on the issues I discovered during the testing of my paper prototypes. These designs went through a couple of iterations, as I ran through them with my mentor and we picked up on additional issues.
Final prototypes
Using Invision, I created final working prototypes from my wireframes to be used in usability testing.
Usability testing and research brief
This is the brief I wrote ahead of testing my prototypes with users, and asking them some more general questions around the usefulness of the app.
A brief background of the project
This mobile app has been designed to make houseplants easier to care for. I have focused on two user journeys:
- identifying a plant via photo and adding it to the My plants list
- setting up a reminder to check if the plants in the garden need watering.
Objective of the testing
The objective of this testing is to assess the usability of the two user journeys and establish how useful the user believes the app would be to them.
Activities and questions
I would like to give the user the scenarios and ask them to navigate through the app, saying their thoughts out loud as they go. I would like them to talk about why they are taking the actions they are choosing to take, and to say what they expected to happen if they get stuck at any point. At the end I would ask them questions around how useful they think the app would be to them, and whether they would like to see any changes/additions.
Draft questions:
- Approximately how many plants do you have at home, inside and outside?
- Do you share plant care with anyone else? Y/N
- Briefly describe how you look after your plants. Is there anything you find difficult about looking after them?
- Do you use an app for plant care? Y/N
- Prototype scenario 1
- Prototype scenario 2
- What do you think could have been better about the app?
- What else would you find useful in a plant care app?
- How likely would you be to use an app like this for plant care? 1–10
Test methodology
I think unmoderated testing would be best for this project, as it is still in its early stages. Breadth of research data would be more useful than depth at this stage, as I am simply trying to establish whether my users would want to use the app. Unmoderated testing would also mean the user is likely to be more authentic in their actions, because they are not being observed.
Who are the participants?
Ten participants, a mixture of ages who are keen gardeners and people who aren’t.
Results of user testing
Once I had finalised my questions, I created a study on UserZoom and sent it out to my participants. These were my results:
Question 1: Approximately how many plants do you have at home, inside and outside the house?
Answers ranged from 2 to 100+.
Question 2: Do you share plant care with anyone else?
57% of particpants said yes, 43% said no.
Question 3: Briefly describe how you look after your plants. Is there anything you find difficult about looking after them?
Remembering to water plants was the biggest issue, mentioned by half of participants. Four people mentioned watering when they thought the soil looked dry. One person mentioned their cat digging up the plants as their biggest problem. One person said that it was only their girlfriend who took care of the plants in order to avoid them being overwatered. Three people mentioned pruning plants when needed.
Question 4: Do you use an app for plant care at the moment?
Only one person answered yes to this.
Following these questions, a prototype of the app loaded and the participant was given two tasks to complete:
Task 1
Imagine you have discovered a plant growing in your garden and you’re not sure what it is. Please show how you would identify the plant using the prototype, and then save the details of the plant so that you can look at them again later. Talk us through your thought process.
Key quotes and insights:
The majority of participants found using the camera to identify a plant intuitive and easy. One participant tried to click on the magnifying glass icon in the text search bar for this task. Another participant reacted positively to the care reminders.
“That was very easy. That was what I was expecting.”
“I would instantly go to the camera.”
“Oh Create care reminders, that’s cool.”
“I would like it if it was automated and would remind me to water.”
Task 2
Imagine you want to set a reminder to check if the plants in your garden need watering. You want to set the first reminder for 10th July at 15:30, and then continue to receive reminders every two weeks. Show how you would do this using the prototype and talk us through your thought process.
Key quotes and insights:
The second task created some confusion. One participant tried to go to My plants before finding the Reminders option in the menu. Two participants tried to select single plant rather than multiple plants, and one expressed confusion at the terminology used.
“I don’t really know what we mean here by single plant vs multiple plants.”
However, there were also some positive comments.
“I’ll click the + button, that’s really intuitive.”
“Then I add the time. That’s pretty clear.”
“There’s space for notes there which is quite handy.”
Question 5: Thinking about the two scenarios you just went through, what changes could be made to the app to make your experience easier?
“Get rid of the Identify plant button, it’s unnecessary”.
“Make it clearer what you mean by individual vs multiple plants.”
“It would be great if the camera was accessible throughout multiple screens in the app in case I wanted to quickly access it to take another photo.”
“Something to give you confidence that taking a photo is a preferred/workable option.”
“I got confused with the reminders. To set up a reminder I didn’t know if I had to go to My Plants first or directly to Reminders”.
Question 6: What else would you find useful in a plant care app?
“Info on if the animals will eat it or not and seasonality info would be useful.”
“Fertilising schedule — does this need fertiliser? Type of soil to put in? Where best to put in the house + temp preference.”
“Social sharing is soo valuable. It’s nice to discuss and share with other plant lovers tips for plant care”.”
“App could suggest other plants or flowers from the library to complement existing flowers /plants in the garden.”
“Maybe a feature related to the light, to make sure there’s enough light in the specific area of your house where you are keeping your plants.”
Question 7: How likely would you be to use an app like this for plant care? Participants were asked to rate on a scale from 1–10. Half of them gave a rating of 7, the rest rated lower.
Results analysis and recommendations
The results highlighted a clear issue with watering — mainly remembering to water at all, but also overwatering when plant care is shared. This indicates that the reminder notifications would be useful, especially if there was a way of sharing these with the person you share plant care with.
There was some confusion around the terminology used for the plant reminders, so I would recommend looking at the ‘single plant’ and ‘multiple plants’ terms again and consider alternatives.
I noticed that the least tech-savvy participant in my study didn’t think to use the camera at all to identify the plant at first. Another participant also mentioned not being sure if the camera would be useful. I would recommend thinking about how the camera can be highlighted as a useful tool.
Several participants mentioned extra information they would find useful about the plants. I would recommend allowing users to filter searches with this information e.g. if the plant is suitable for pets, if the plant needs a lot of light etc.
Consider social sharing as a great way for users to discuss plants with friends, and to attract more users to the app.
Recommend new plants to users based on what they have saved in their My Plants list. This could also create the opportunity to purchase plants through the app.
I was surprised to see during my study that the least tech-savvy of my participants said he was very likely to use an app like this for plant care. He thought the reminders feature was particularly useful and it would save him looking through books for information. This highlights the importance of ensuring the app is as easy-to-use as possible for all levels of technical ability.
