PlantDepot - An all-in-one solution to help users design and maintain beautiful indoor and outdoor gardens.
The indoor and outdoor plant market has seen explosive growth over the last couple of years. We were contracted by Home Depot to establish user needs and create a design concept for a mobile prototype that will allow users to discover, plan, purchase, and care for their indoor and/or outdoor gardens.
The Team
Shelby King - UX Designer & Project Manager
Kat Pham - UX Designer
Widlin Ducatel - UX Designer
Destinee Camacho - UX Researcher
In my role as project manager, I focused on project planning and division of labor based on team member’s strengths and learning goals. I also assisted at all phases of research, design, and iteration. My focus was to keep the team on track for project completion and to adjust project scope as needed based on an Agile methodology.
Project Duration: July 27 - August 7, 2020
Initial Hypothesis
FOCUS ON PLANT MAINTENANCE - Our team originally thought our app would focus on plant maintenance with some support for design and purchasing built into the app features.
Initial Research Methods
A competitive analysis showed that many maintenance apps already exist, and users reported issues/challenges with all of them. While we still felt it was important to address user maintenance needs, we decided to focus our efforts on design and purchasing in order to create an all-in-one solution with plans to further build out and address problems with the maintenance portions at a later date.
Our business analysis gave us insight into Home Depot’s overall business goals as well as user-centered initiatives, such as the One Home Depot Experience. This further supported our decision to focus on design and purchasing in our app, as this would free up Home Depot associates to provide in-store support and allow our app to meet users’ design and purchasing needs.
We also reviewed Home Depot’s current site (web and mobile) in a heuristic evaluation to gain insights into the current checkout/purchasing process. Our initial purchasing process mimicked Home Depot’s existing design. We also used this process to gain insight about the visual design of the existing Home Depot platform.
User Insights
Five users were interviewed as part of our first round of user research. All users had some experience with gardening (indoor and/or outdoor). We wanted to determine what pain points users experienced and which products already existed that assisted users with gardening needs.
No Design Support.
Users reported that existing apps had little to no support for plant research, design ideation, or educational features. This led our team to focus on building these features into our app which would further support the One Home Depot Experience initiative’s goal of helping users bridge the gaps in their digital and physical shopping experiences.
Challenges with Maintenance.
Users reported several challenges with maintenance features of existing apps:
Inability to trust maintenance reminders
More difficulty with indoor vs outdoor gardening needs
Inability to diagnose plant issues via photos or text support
We created a sample persona to summarize user needs.
This helped our team further ideate solutions, and we consistently referred back to this persona during our design process to help us keep our eye on the prize.
New focus: design, purchasing, and maintenance for indoor and outdoor gardens that is customized to users’ needs, skill levels and design preferences.
Based on our initial research, our team decided to shift our focus to the design and purchasing features of our app in order to create an innovative all-in-one solution with curated recommendations to meet users’ needs.
Establishing user trust in the onboarding process
Our user reported not always feeling they could trust plant maintenance reminders in the existing gardening apps, we felt it was important to establish trust in our onboarding and design process. We felt this would help us to establish a trusted relationship between our application and users by providing them with an initial curated list of plant recommendations based on the following: skill level, commitment level, climate, and geographical region.
Innovative & customized design and support
Our real innovation to existing apps came in the design features of our app. By allowing users to select their favorite designs from a series of images, we were able to provide them with a customized list of recommendations. Users could then use AR features to design for their space. We felt all these features would help establish trust with users of the app from the beginning of the process.
Design Studio Process
Our team completed a three-step process to get to our initial digital wireframe:
Ideation in design studio - each team member work separately to create paper sketches for various pages of the app
Consolidation of paper sketches - all team members came together to collaboratively decide which designs to take into the digital wireframe
Wireflow process - team worked together in Miro to develop a lofi wireflow of the onboarding and design process
Initial sketches were brought together. We used the best ideas from the sketches to begin ideating our solution.
Initial low fidelity wireflow process (designed in Miro)
Greyscale prototype - Putting ideation into action.
Confident that we had developed a creative design solution, our team moved forward with developing a clickable greyscale prototype in Figma.
See our clickable greyscale Figma prototype here.
Usability tests revealed some challenges with our initial design.
Users wanted the option to skip steps in the onboarding process.
Although our focus was to provide curated and customized recommendations to users, we decided to add these options within the app. However, we also added text to each step of the process that would explain to users why completing the steps would help them to get the full benefits that could be provided in the app.
Users were confused about the access requests in the app (photos, location access, etc.)
We added a short description of why this access was being requested and redesigned our location access page to make it clear how these permissions could be granted while still allowing users the option to enter a zip code instead of allowing these permissions.
Other challenges
Checkout process - The design of how delivery and shipping options were displayed was based on Home Depot’s existing features. However, we redesigned these pages to make it easier for users to select delivery or pickup options.
Maintenance - Users did not intuitively know how to use the calendar in the app. We updated this with an event key and standards such as horizontal scrolling to address users’ concerns.
Final High Fidelity Prototype
By taking care to address users’ needs and feedback, we made changes to our greyscale design to develop a beautiful hifi prototype.
Next steps and future recommendations
Our team worked hard to develop a robust solution to address user design and maintenance needs in an innovative way. Given more time, we would have liked to develop more features to include in our app.
Further refine maintenance features of the app
Utilize AR features for plant diagnosis and identification
Expand design options to include landscaping and outdoor designs as well as indoor garden designs
Allow users to retake the design quiz for each new project
Allow users to update skill level, commitment level, and location as they learn more
Incorporate forum support features
Build out “explore” feature to allow users to find plant inspiration in their community (museums, arboretums, botanical gardens, etc.)