Florish is a plant care management app that helps your plants thrive! It allows plant owners to view their plant collection, create profiles for each leafy friend, view individual care guides, and be reminded of scheduled tasks they need to accomplish. Appealing to a wide range of users, Florish is designed to be playful and engaging, while ensuring legibility and a simple, streamlined user experience. Taking care of plants can be tricky, but navigating their mobile app shouldn’t be!
I was tasked to design a solution for a problem I was passionate about. I took steps to identify a problem that a specific group is experiencing and solve it in the way that is best for that target audience.
During my senior year of college, I lived with 10 girls, most of whom were plant owners. Our living room and house was decorated with various types of indoor houseplants, all with different watering schedules and needs. I noticed that many of my roommates genuinely wanted to keep their plants alive and healthy, but with so many types of plants to keep track of on top of balancing a full school schedule, it was a struggle. This sparked the idea to create an app named Florish to solve the problems a plant owner may experience.
I began this project first by brainstorming problems new plant owners might have by posing “How might we” statements. The goal was to think of what the user is possibly thinking or feeling and what is most important to the user.
• How might we remind plant owners to care for their plants?
• How might we educate plant owners on how to take care of their plants?
• How might we help plant owners manage which plants they have?After brainstorming, I came up with a hypothesis to the user’s problems:
The problem I suspect is that the more plants an individual owns, the more needs and varying schedules there are to keep track of, making the plant care process very overwhelming for a new plant owner.
It was time to put my hypothesis to the test by conducting user interviews with my target audience. This step is crucial to truly place myself in their shoes, empathize, and realize actual user feelings, what they are seeing, hearing, doing, and their current environment.
Research Goals: Discover the issues new plant owners have with owning plants
Target Audience: Young adults, aged 18-30, who are interested in owning plants or already own plants but are new to the hobby
Some questions asked:
1) How has your experience been with owning plants?
2) How do you keep track of your plant’s watering schedules?
3) What are some problems you’ve encountered while being a plant owner?
Affinity Mapping User Interviews:
From the information gathered from 6 different interviewees, I grouped each person’s experiences into common themes using virtual post-it notes.
Similar to what I had hypothesized, the main issue new plant owners had in caring for their plants was a lack of knowledge about the plant care process and a lack of reminders on how often they should water their plants.
• Those who were new to owning plants were uninformed about how to keep their plants alive besides the need to water them.
• Those were were new to owning plants lacked directions and reminders to keep them on track.
A majority of interviewees expressed:
• “I try really hard to care for my plants, but they still die.”
• ”My schedule is so busy that I don’t remember to water my plants.”
• ”I don’t know how much sunlight my plant needs, if I need to add fertilizer, or if I need to repot my plant.”
• ”I always forget when I last watered my plant.”
• ”I have a hard time telling if my plant is losing color because of the season or if it is dying.”
People have a hard time caring for their plants because it is difficult to research what each plant needs and remember a routine of when to water them.
By creating an intuitive app experience walking individuals through the plant care process, new plant owners can easily and effectively learn about the plants they own and be reminded of daily tasks they need to complete.
• To create a mobile application that makes the plant care process simple and easy to understand
• To standardize a plant information system that helps solve confusion, general forgetfulness, and inform the uninformed
A competitive analysis gave clarity to the current market by identifying what problems companies were already trying to solve. I discovered that most competitors had the basics of plant care management: the ability to add a plant, tasks and reminders, and a simply care guide. However, many of the user interface designs were confusing to navigate and tasks were not always automatically added to the to-do list.
Areas of improvement I identified within the competitors was a need for a strong and simply layout in order to categorize the most important aspects of plant care.
Many competitors relied on the user to set and create their own watering/plant care schedule. These areas of improvement for my competitors presented opportunities for the Florish App to excel over the competition.
