thrive
Feb - Jun 2021
Background
The Problem
The Solution
My Role
Houseplant cultivation is an enduring and evolving practice that has recently retaken the spotlight. thrive is a mobile app aimed at making cultivation accessible because with access to the right resources, everyone can become a confident cultivator.
Today's growers struggle to find palatable information regarding their specific houseplants and negative past experiences often dissuade cultivation hopefuls from further engaging in this otherwise pleasant practice.
I set out to design a product that would make indoor growing simpler and more enjoyable. My quest resulted in the creation of thrive, an app for users to locate houseplant care information, receive assistance choosing their next houseplant, and discover additional resources to advance their skills with and knowledge of houseplants.
As a one-person team, I owned virtually every aspect of the project, most notably: User Research, UX Design, UI Design, and Usability Testing.
Familiarizing Myself With the Space
After deciding on a problem space, it was important that I gained a fuller understanding of it. I started off by conducting secondary research, exploring scholarly journals, government-run sites, and news articles. Through my research, I learned that urbanization, COVID-19, and social media are fueling this recent wave of indoor cultivators who often refer to themselves as“plant parents.” Additionally, I noticed that many of the resources available to today's growers require a certain scientific prowess to decipher, are too general to be useful, or are difficult to locate.
Interviewing Users
My high-level goal for the user interviews was to identify potential opportunities to improve the processes of choosing and caring for houseplants. As suspected, the majority of interviewees struggled to find helpful artifacts regarding their houseplants, often settling for the advice of less reliable sources out of mere exhaustion. What I didn’t expect was their interest in exploring beyond just general houseplant care, expressing interests in everything from root care to fertilization to the science behind photosynthesis.
Understanding Users & Their Goals
To truly understand the problem, I needed to take a deep dive into the psyches of my users. By generating affinity maps from key insights, I quickly identified common threads between interviewees, the most compelling being that users lack confidence in their growing abilities.
Next, I went through an empathy map exercise so I could better understand the correlation between the trends I identified with the affinity maps. Through this activity, I found that:
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Users deeply want to see their houseplants thrive and feel an emotional connection to them yet they unknowingly pick houseplants that they are ill-equipped to nurture.
02
The excess of care resources, many of which require time or prior knowledge to unpack, leaves users feeling inadequate as cultivators and with a desire to avoid unfamiliar houseplants.
Meet Our Personas
Several iterations of empathy and affinity maps later, I felt confident I knew my users well enough to create personas - the imaginary ideal users who are based on my research of actual users. Despite what I believed to be clear cut personality traits, motivations, and goals, this phase took me much longer than I expected as I struggled to balance making my personas complex and believable.
Defining the Problem
Having a firm grasp on my users allowed me to zero in on problem statements or “How Might We...” (HMW) questions. Rephrasing the problems in the form of questions beginning with “How Might We,” allowed me to reframe how I saw the problems and therefore how I intended to solve them.
How Might We...
help users feel confident as houseplant cultivators?
make houseplant care resources accessible & digestible?
demystify houseplant parenthood for the beginner & novice?
empower users to continue exploring & cultivating new species?
At this stage in the project, I felt confident that solving the above HMW questions would result in the greatest positive impact for Cam and Lennon.
Brainstorming Potential Solutions
For my first ideation session, I worked through a couple of rounds of crazy eight exercises - generating eight rough sketches in eight minutes. The rapidity of this technique forced me to focus solely on solution concepts. Two of which kept resurfacing - a comprehensive and searchable houseplant database and a houseplant selection quiz. From there, I zeroed in on the functionality of my proposed solutions by drafting user stories.
Devising the Blueprints
To understand how the app would be organized and what screens I would need to design for my Minimum Viable Product (MVP), I developed a sitemap. This allowed me to plan the critical user flows within the broader context of a fully complete product rather than just my MVP. It also gave me a better idea of which screens I needed to design now and which ones weren’t essential to my initial prototype.
Learning From the Competition
I wanted to get an understanding of similar products on the market to identify their shortcomings and successes. I conducted a heuristic analysis of three competitors, based on three of Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics - User Control & Freedom, Consistency & Standards, and Recognition Rather than Recall. Although two of the three competitors ranked poorly overall, I found inspiration for my UI, primarily that the use of color-filled primary buttons and uncolored but outlined secondary buttons was a great way to guide users' attention.
From Paper to Screen
My first wireframes included four flows: tutorial/onboarding, searching for a houseplant, exploring a topic, and taking the matching assessment. The usage of social media UI patterns was directly inspired by Cam who in turn was based on users citing Instagram as a resource for plant cultivation and selection. I then worked up wireflows to show how users navigate through the app, UI elements change when users interact with them, and the edge cases deviate from the main flows.
The route users would take to search for a houseplant and save it to their pins.
Where users can browse houseplant resources based on topics like propagation and fertilization.
The signature houseplant matchmaking assessment.
The route users would take to search for a houseplant and save it to their pins.
Establishing a Brand
For my app to truly come to life it needed a clear visual style and brand voice. I studied some world-renowned design systems for inspiration then consulted the personas and user research to formulate my product’s name, personality, mission/vision, and attributes.
Truthfully, I knew my product’s name after I created the first affinity map: “thrive.” Nearly every interviewee used this word to describe what they loved about cultivating. I chose to stylize it with a lowercase “t” so it felt accessible but still lighthearted. I went on to finalize thrive’s style guide which included the color palette, key UI elements, imagery examples, and more.
Designing in High Fidelity
Meshing together the thrive brand and wireframes was the most gratifying yet challenging aspect of this project. I frequently found myself going back to tweak the style guide as I attempted to balance usability and branding. After a somewhat grueling week of designing, a brief critique session with my mentor, and a little more designing, the second iteration of high fidelity mockups made its debut. Although I kept the cards and social media-like UI patterns, I further altered the names and icons of the sections to better align with their purposes and added illustrations to the tutorial screens to increase user interest.
Usability Testing in HiFi
Using InVision, I quickly put together a prototype and devised a usability test plan and script. In order to assess if my solutions were relevant and the app easily navigated, users needed to discover and engage with the Search, Learn, and Matches sections so I framed tasks in hopes that they would organically move through those flows.
The first five moderated usability tests shed light on four critical concerns:
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lack of clarity when saving Pins and understanding Pins’ drawers
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inconsistent use of navigational/informational buttons resulted in confusion
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call-to-action buttons often went unseen thereby rendered inaccessible
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feeling like minimal actions available from the home screen due to a lack of content
Revisions & Final Test Results
I addressed the four critical usability issues predominantly by resizing and reorganizing elements, paying special attention to the card sizes, top navigations, and header layouts. I also spent some time refining the information architecture of the Pins screens. During this last round of testing, far fewer users took unintentional detours, and those that did, quickly recovered, a promising change from the last round of tests. Users seemed to like the aesthetic more this time around as the addition of some drop shadows and subtle card backgrounds added depth.
First high fidelity iteration of the Learn screen (left), final iteration of the Learn screen (right).
First high fidelity iteration of the Search screen (left), final iteration of the Search screen (right).
Next Steps & Lessons Learned
One more iteration of thrive’s prototype should help resolve any potentially overlooked usability issues and some aesthetic concerns before shipping. Next, I hope to continue expanding upon other areas of the app like the account screens and list creation processes. Overall, I can assuredly say that thrive does make care resources more accessible and digestible, and we are in a good position to test its effectiveness at resolving the remaining HMWs.
Through this project, I gained a deep appreciation for the amount of time and effort behind every interface, especially ones that create a seamless and delightful experience. As this was my first UX Design project, I directly experienced the importance of continuously researching, testing, and iterating because without an understanding of our users, how can we truly design meaningful products.