Greener is an app that helps users maintain and design their indoor gardens. With the smart plant recommendation, AR design assistant, customized schedule, and more, users could build their dream indoor garden step by step.
While the indoor garden is fun and relaxing for busy urban life, dying plants are frustrated. A lot of people give up their indoor garden dream because of the frustration came with the failure. Even with an experienced plant owner, an unexpected business trip might kill most of the plants. How can I help the user able to enjoy the indoor garden without the frustration from failure?
The goal of this project is to provide a practical indoor garden method for urban full-time workers. Solving the challenge from time, space, and light.
Collect users’ data and need and use this information to personalize the experience.
Narrow down the target group. All feature is designed for urban life.
Here are some numbers from the survey.
Only 19% of users are capable to well maintaining their plants. 28% of users have no idea of the health condition of their plants.
Time 29%, Knowledge 27% , and Natural light 20% are the three biggest challenges users have in their life.
“I like to have plants in my place, but I don’t know how…”
Pragmatic user
- Easy maintenance first
- No preference about plant type
- Limited budget
Decorer without knowledge
- Plant lover
- Some personal preference
- Afraid of failure, most anxious
- Various budget
Green experiencer
- Plant lover
- Strong preference
- Willing to learn more
- Looking for professional design guidance
Though Greener already has unique features compared to the competitors. To differentiate Greener in the market, I need to define the desirable role for the app and how it meets the needs of the target users.
Instead of pouring all the plant information and care guidance to the user, only the necessary information will be given to users. The goal is not to train the users to be professional gardeners but to save them time and effort in maintaining their indoor garden. Users could know major plant characteristics through icons at first glance.
The user’s need is the first consideration when recommending plants. As well as care schedules and other functions.
It is natural to choose green as the primary theme as an app for plant care. I choose orange as the reminder and alert color that pops up enough but feels less anxiety than red. A clean and simple design provides maximum efficiency for the user.
“I always forget watering when I have a heavy workload.”
Greener will recommend the plants that suit the user’s place best. Based on the plant, geographic location, light in the room, and more. The smart plant care schedule will calculate the most efficient timing per space to reduce the maintenance effort.
“It's hard to reference the influencer's design.”
AR design assistant let users virtually place true-to-scale plants pictures into the space they like to decor.
With the various decor idea samples, users could follow it step by step from scratch. This feature will help those users that don’t know where to start to build their own indoor garden.
Some plants grow fast and some are slow, with the aging feature users could have a visual idea about the plant size in the future.
“I can’t find the solution online, I don’t even know what's wrong with my plants.”
Get help from people close by and the latest news about your living area, and more. Imagine if your neighbor has the same plant as you, you could have a “plant sitter” when you are out of town for a while.
Once the prototype is ready, it’s time to put it into the hands of customers. Before conducting the Guerrilla user test, I narrowed down the top risks in the product to be:
- The simplicity of the adding plant process
- VR design experience
During the AR design process, half of the participants skip the instruction session and get lost in the design stage.
Participants say that watching an instruction is a waste of time. This time I use in-time instruction instead of slides. It makes a huge improvement of customers’ experience.
Before
After
Customers want a minimalist experience. Plant care is the core function of this product. Within a busy life, most users don't want to spend much time in plants. It is vital to limit the steps in this route.
Sometimes no choice is better. With the in-time instruction, no one said it's a waste of time and figure out the feature with less confusion.
