Lilia

Plant Care Application

Mobile App UX/UI Case Study

Problem Statement

 Challenge

We ultimately discovered that plant care owners lack a free and succinct source for reliable plant care advice.

Background

The COVID-19 Pandemic has created a significant demand for home improvements due to people spending the majority of their time indoors.  As part of this home improvement boom there is an increase in people purchasing plants to enhance the look and feel of their spaces, and to feel a connection to the outdoors.  The purpose of this case study is to uncover any pain points experienced by both new and seasoned plant care owners so that we may offer a solution.  

Solution

The purpose of this case study is to uncover any pain points experienced by both new and seasoned plant care owners so that we may offer a solution. Our app was designed to alleviate this problem by allowing users to access personalized plant care advice from trusted expert sources, all with no cost to the user.

My Role & Team

• User Research
  
• Defination & Ideation
• Prototype
• User testing 

 Avissa Noorian: UX/UI Designer & Researcher

Linda Gomez: UX/UI Designer & Researcher

Tenille Clarke: UX/UI Designer & Researcher

Tools Used: Figma, Google Forums

Goals

As user researchers we want to understand the value plants add to our users’ homes and their current approach to plant care:

Where do they look for plant care information? Is this information useful?  

How can it be improved upon?

What are perceived value added features for plant care owners?

Research questions 

As a user researcher, we want to understand where plant care owners look for advice and information pertaining to the proper care of their plants and if this process can be improved upon.

Objective 1: Where and how do plant owners look for information about purchasing plants? 

Objective 2: What ways do plants add value to the lives of owners and their home?

Objective 3: How might we improve a plant care owners experience of looking for care advice and improve their plant care habits? 

Follow up questions were conducted with interviewees to gather more information in regards how useful and reliable current information sources were and to discover more insight to their plant care routine. 

We added more questions afterwards to elaborate on Objective 3 which was where we found there was a need we could fill for our users. 

Methodology

We have created a survey to understand the general appreciation and preference for plants to gain more quantitative data and we also have conducted one on one interviews to obtain qualitative data to understand our user persona.

Participants

The participants will consist of people who know plants and struggle with finding useful and reliable information pertaining to the proper care of their plants. The participants should be interested in becoming knowledgeable about the care of their plants and open to using apps to facilitate learning. 

Interview Notes and Insights

Interview Quotes

“Is this information reliable or not” 

“sometimes I don't really know how to care for them”

[in regards to finding plant help]“I have to check multiple sources, and information is not really clear” 

“I wish that there was a real person to tell me why my plant’s deteriorating? What's wrong with it exactly?” 

“I like to track my plants ... and follow up to see if it is healthy and… in good condition”

Our User Persona

After interviewing our users, we found out that they like learning about plants but get frustrated by long youtube videos and the difficulty of finding insightful information on google. Some of them don't like googling info and don't have much time to find information online. Here is our user persona.

User Insight

During our user research we discovered there is a consensus amongst plant owners that keeping plants alive and healthy long term is challenging. Plant owners expressed there is a lack of free, efficient, and reliable sources of plant care advice. 

Therefore, we believe we will be able to help by creating a free platform that allows plant owners to ask questions about their specific issues and receive succinct and curated plant care advice from trusted sources.

Problem Statement

Plant care owners are frustrated by the time it takes to find trustworthy and informative plant care advice. Moreover, they dislike that popular plant care apps require payment and only provide basic advice. 

We believe we can help by designing a free app that can serve as a reliable and succinct source of personalized plant care advice.

Our measurable metrics will be based on: User retention, active users and user engagement.

Brainstorming & ideation

Feature Prioritization Matrix

User Journey Map

User Journy Map can helps us envision how our users complete their goal and the emotions they feel along the way. 

Competitor Analysis 

We completed a competitor analysis of 3 different mobile apps. Planta , Flourish and Picture This. We picked apps as we would be competing in this platform. We focused on onboarding, looking at the features each app had and what we could improve on for our app Lilia.

During our Competitor Analysis we learnt there was a gap in the current plant care apps in regards too: 

• App plant care was a paid service
• They contained basic advice
• Unnecessary Information
• Information is not findable expediently 
• Android had less options then Iphone users. 

User Flow

One of our considerations was how do we make this different or special. There are alot of plant apps and in looking at the competitors there was a lot of things done poorly or components missing that we could solve with our app. We tried to keep our user flow as simple as possible. We’ve highlighted the “track your plant” flows for you. 

Wireframes & Prototype

User Testing 

We used this matrix to help us decide what feedback we should work on first. 

Suggested iterations Based on Testing

• Improve findability of “Instant photo Feedback” 
• Improve verbiage of tracker pages to increase findability.
• “x” button on chat flow and photo feedback to give user more affordances. 
• Align pages better
  
• Change Toggle buttons 

These are suggested recommendations based on feedback from usability testing. 

Change the name of the tracker button to My Plants, something more personalized for the user. 

Offer Users better affordances while in the chat with an expert flow and the instant photo feedback flow. See below for updates

Change the toggle on the reminder page to something that is better with the design of the app. In this case we chose radio buttons. 

Offer additional affordances to users after Reminder has been set. In this case we have chosen to give the user the option to set a new reminder or to return to the homepage.

We fixed the findability issue with our “Instant Photo Feedback” feature by adding users another way to access the feature. 

Future Opportunities

• Scanning QR codes to from plant care cards to get advice
• Offer suggested tasks and frequency of tasks based on other users with the same plant time
• Test to find if there is a interest in our persona for more social aspects, like forms or connecting with other users
• Continue to expand the plant shop section, by adding a favourites section and more details
• Add option for local shops to show what plants they are currently selling and include visuals 
  
  
  
  
  

Conclusion

Plant owners expressed there is a lack of free, time-efficient, and reliable sources of plant care advice. 

We solved this problem with our app Lilia by offering expedient,  no cost advice with our ‘Quick Plant Care Advice’ features and  leveraged the fact they like to shop local and get professional advice with our ‘Ask an  Expert’  feature.     

We had to re-shift our focus after the first set of interviews but we have a product that we could see being used frequently and adds values to the lives of our users.