PlantCare
their path of happy and healthy plants.
Product Designer / Student
Final Class Project
Fall 2021
I don't feel connected to my plants and they need my help!
One of my pandemic activities was to get into plant keeping, but I had no idea how to keep plants alive. As a clueless newbie, I sought for countless answers for the most trivial questions— how do I water plants? Should I fertilize my plants? How long should I wait before I water my plants again? I’d reach out to experienced friends, ask questions on Reddit forums and browsed the web to absorb as much information before I purchased my first plant. I quickly learned that this is an issue that many first time plant-owners experienced.
An empathetic app to help users understand their plants' needs.
I’ve created a plant app that helps users organize, care for, and empathize with their plants. The app is a one-stop-shop app that helps new plant keepers care for their plants, ranging from when to water their plants to identifying specific conditions the plant may have. PlantCare is an app that will help users learn more about the plant-keeping experience. You can use your camera to identify any illnesses that your plant may be suffering from, and learn how to care for your plant as you embark on your journey to plant-keeping.
The plant-keeping journey is scary for beginners
After conducting interviews with plant keepers of various levels, after asking about the journey to becoming a plant-keeper, I found that people find the learning curve of caring for a plant to be incredibly high, and eventually tapers out a few months to a year of devoted experience. However, the initial hump is where people need help the most and many people often give up if they notice their plants dying. After asking about plant apps to help with plant keeping, I got the following response:
“Plant apps are a burden to use plant apps because they feel like a chore to use.”
“I have downloaded plant apps, but often stop using them after a few weeks.”
“Plant apps are wrong with watering schedules.”
“It feels robotic to care for my plants through these apps”
People are often unsatisfied with using plant apps, as they feel like they’re not helpful and it feels very impersonal to care for their plants using this method. They will stop relying on the app after a few weeks, because they felt like it wasn’t helpful to do so- their predicted water schedules are often wrong, and they frequently overwater their plants as a result.
Other apps don't actively help with plant keeping
Upon reviewing similar apps, it came clear that many plant-related apps were identification apps that were masked as plant-keeping apps. As a result, the primary features were essentially to identify your plant species or diagnose plant illnesses and nothing more. There were a few apps that notified you when to water your plants, but these apps don’t provide the fullest experience to help a beginner user navigate through the plant-keeping journey.
Education. Information. Organization.
Primary Persona: Tim, the clueless plant-keeper
This primary persona encapsulates most beginning plant-keepers; they have no idea how to go about caring for a plant. They are at the start of the learning curve and dipping their toes into the water that is their newfound hobby.
This user needs a way to understand and empathize with their plant so they know what their needs are and how to tend to them.
Secondary Persona: Myka, the black-thumb plant-keeper
This persona is constantly frustrated because their plants are often sick, damaged, or end up dead. The biggest pain point is that they don’t know why their plants are ill and want to diagnose conditions to be able treat their plants.
This user needs a way to determine issues their plants may have to be able to nurture them to health.
Secondary Persona: Xinxiu, the chaotically disorganized plant-keeper
This persona understands their plants and how to care for them, but their issue is that they have so many and often forgets each of their unique schedules. Succulents and various foliages require very different care, and it can get overwhelming to stay on top of your game, especially when life gets in the way!
This user needs a way to organize their plants and track their plants’ needs.
The typical pathway of adding a new plant
Translating research into tangible design
Finalizing mockups + adding interactions
PlantCare
Comprehensive Plant Search Platform
The app is conducive to easily finding the plant you’re looking for, supplemented with a detailed wealth of information to help guide you to caring for your plant.
The interface is simple and intuitive to use, and incorporates elements of empathy to help the user relate to their plants. As you can see on the home screen, face emojis are utilized to personify the plants to help indicate health.
This will help establish a deeper connection between the owner and plant.
Personalized Plant Information
When you’ve added a plant to your inventory, you have various bits of information to help understand your plant’s health. There are four distinct sections to learn about your plant:
Health
Tasks
Notes
Affected conditions (if relevant)
You can automatically assess the health of your plant by pressing the ‘Analyze Health’ button. This feature utilizes the camera to scan the plant to determine characteristics and identify certain needs.
Diagnosing Your Plant
This app includes an encyclopedia of common conditions that affect household plants. There are a variety of ways to determine if your plant is affected by a certain condition:
Manual search
Owned plants
Common conditions (grid)
Camera feature (to automatically analyze plant’s health)
You can learn information about a condition by exploring their respective pages and scan through photos to see what the condition looks like.
Apply Conditions To Your Plant
Using the Conditions Identification feature can help you automatically detect a particular condition affecting your plant, and apply it to your plant’s information page. When the plant is cured and healthy, you can scan the plant again to let PlantCare know that your issue is resolved.
Reflection
What a joy and delight it was to design this app! This app is very much needed for many beginning plant-keepers out there in the world, including me. It was nice to have my professor mentor me throughout this semester to guide me to really reflect upon the most necessary features and components for this app. My design partner, Colin, also gave amazing feedback and advice throughout this journey, and even suggested to pivot into the augmented reality route to analyze the health of the project. Three months was certainly not enough time to really plan out the entirety of the app’s infrastructure, so I would definitely have spent more time planning the interactions between user and their plants. Overall, it was a whimsically fun project to work on!