Overview

Background

Growing plants at home is not an easy hobby. During the COVID-19 pandanmic, as our team members started welcoming these green livings to our homes, all we hoped was to keep the plants happy&alive.

We found Planta to be the top-rated and most popular plant care app in the market and we decided to improve its user experience by finding problems and proposing innovative solutions.

The Problem

Planta is an inclusive app covering most desirable features throughout the whole plant care process. It has a slogan saying “never kill a plant again”. But from its user voice we learned that people complained about the interactions and functions. We conducted interviews and desktop researches and found out that houseplant owners who keep track on  plant care process need an efficient and customized way to manage their daily tasks (water, fertilize, repot, etc.)

Solution

Our team redesigned the task management flow of Planta, making it more adaptive to the changing environment and users’ habits. By having “Edit mode” for completed and upcoming tasks, users have more freedom to manipulate all the plant care tasks. Our design brought a new version of Planta, a powerful helper for houseplant owners.

* This is a passion project. None of our team member is affilite with Planta.

Process

Research

Discovery

We interviewed (25) plant owners who were not necessarily users of Planta and conducted a desktop research on (5) popular houseplant forums. We wanted to gain a broad view of people’s concerns of growing houseplants so that we could improve Planta accrodingly.

“

I keep a small garden at home. Sometimes I would omit adding fertilizer to some plants.”
- Ms. Chen (45, China)

Findings: ‍

• When talking about plant care, people really talked about a large variety of issues. Among which the reminder and instruction were mentioned the most.

As we dig deeper on people's daily plant care issues, we surprisingly found that only a small portion of participants kept track on their plant care process (most people used eyeballing or remembering). After a discussion, we found this topic still worth challenging because for those plant owners who liked to keep track, they had been looking for a handy tool.

User Voice

We went through ~100 reviews from App Store and Play Store.

Heuristic Evaluation

We used Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design to evaluate the current Planta app, with a focus on the task management flow.

*In order keep this project concise, we designed upon the premuim version of Planta app and left aside its subscription model.

Issues we need to address:

Consistency and standards:
1. the task icons have inconsistent visual languages;
2. the location of “sort” could cause misunderstanding as “add new”.
+ miscellaneous unreconciled terms.
Flexibility and efficiency of use:
3. limited options for an upcoming task;
4. confounding of care instructions and task options.
Help and documentation:
5. The care instruction articles always appear even users don’t ask for it.
Visibility of system status:
6. the feedback screen taks too much attention.

Current User Flow

To understand which parts of the current user flow caused users’ pain points, we took watering as an example to map out a typical plant care flow.

Upon receiving a reminder, users have the options to complete or snooze the tasks of today.
But - as we learned from user research - more scenarios could happen in reality. What if a user:

1. Finds the plant needs watering before the reminder;
2. Forgets to register a past completed task;
3. Registers a task by mistake.

As for users with dozens of plants, we also need to take into consideration the scenarios like:

4. It rained and all the outdoor plants became watered;
5. A user will be away from home for days.

We need to design carefully to make the app really usable

Define

How might we give the users of Planta more control over the task management so the app can better assist with users’ daily plant care process accroding to reality?

Design Principles

Ideation

1. Accommodate for Edge Cases

a. Compeleted category
We showed the “Completed” category in addition to “Today” and “Upcoming” so that users can:

• view the records;
  
• modify the date or cancel a completed task;
  
• focus on the uncompleted tasks of today.
  

b. Edit mode
We kept the idea of the original design making the completed and upcoming tasks by default view only. If users want to interact with these tasks, we should allow for this by introducing Edit mode.

c. Sort
‍When Edit mode is on, users can change the sort order. We also moved the sort button to a more resonable location and adjusted its options accroding to category.

2. Design for Customization

We learned from the user voice that the system recommended care schedule doesn’t always work. Therefore Planta should allow the users to judge by themselves. That doesn’t mean the app is not useful, but the schedule could change often. We need to make the adjustment easy to access and enable customization.

a. Remember new frequency
When a user did a task earlier or later than the schedule, they has the option to quickly adjust the schdule by selecting “Remember new frequency”. System will calculate the days accroding to the last duration and update the future reminders. This feature applies to Snoozing for today and Completing for upcoming.

b. Shortcut to Custome schedule
Setting custome schedule is a more advanced and permanent way to override the recommended one. Users find this function userful except it’s hard to access - the path include 5 screens with 8 taps.

We added a shortcut to “Custom schedule” for all uncompleted tasks. Batch setting is available for the same type of tasks.

3. Provide Efficient Interactions

In order to cover more scenarios users are facing, we introduced selection to tasks. In addition to the primary action that users can tap on the right of a task, users now have more options by selecting the task. When multiple tasks are selected, batch actions are available.

a. Multi-selection
We studied multi-selection flows from todo list, mailbox, playlist, and shopping cart.
For plant care tasks, users should be able to:

• quickly select a list
  
• select or deselect a task
  
• easily distinguish the selected tasks with others (accessibility)
  

b. Secondary actions
For each task, a primary action is shown right next to the plant’s name (to complete for today and upcoming tasks, or to undo for completed ones). Secondary actions appear upon selection of the task.
For tasks of different categories, their secondary actions vary. Our solutions are:

Final Design

Use case A:
‍User A finds that it's not yet to rotate the Cactus and the reminders just appear too often.

Solution:
Snooze the task for 2 days and let Planta remember the new frequency.

Use case B:
User B fertilized the Avocado yesterday but forgot to register on Planta. They wants to make up for it.

Solution:
Register the overdue task as completed and go to the Completed category to change the completion date.

Use case C:
User C learned from care instructions to decide if the plant needs watering. They finds the three plants need similar water frequencies but the system recommend schedules don't apply.

Solution:
Multi-select the tasks and set custom watering schedulec for the three plants.

Use case D:
After a rain, User D needs to register all the plants at the balcony as watered.

Solution:
Turn on Edit mode for Upcoming tasks, then choose sort by site. Select all balcony - water tasks by one tap and mark completed. The frequencies remain the same but the schedules are updated.

Conclusion

Usability Test

We conducted a usability test with 5 houseplant owners, including 2 existing users of Planta and 1 user of a competitor app.
Using the high-fidelity prototypes projected to users' mobile phones, this remote test aimed to understand how users navigate through the app to accomplish tasks and to discover future design opportunities.

100% of the participants found the redesigned task management flow easy to use.

80% of the participants believed the app would help them to grow better plants.

Based on findings from usability test and , we concluded three aspects that we would like to improve in the future.

• Improve "Custom schedule" modul by enabling users to set “custom period” and to save the schedules as templates.
• Set up the tag system to better sort the tasks.
• Add calender view to a plant's care schedule.

Takeaways

Define the real problem.At the beginning of the research phase, we got lost in tons of feedback covering all stages of houseplant growing. We used an affinity diagram to narrow the topics, but the problem is still hard to define. It was the key participants that helped us to decide on solving problems of daily plant care task management. I learned from this lesson that too much information might be a drawback for analyzing - you need a keen eye to find useful inputs.

Improving an existing product is as valuable as creating one from scratch. In this project, not only did I discover user needs and redesign partial of Planta accordingly, but I was also able to think from the original creators' perspective of how they solve the problem. Their solution was not perfect but can be a good start for the redesign. In real-world projects, designers spend most of time iterating instead of building new wheels.

Appendix