Planthouse

Primary Research

Overview

Building on a general understanding of the market and the audience after the competitive analysis, I wanted to build a real connection with the potential users and gain direct insights on them through primary research.

I started by creating a survey on Google forms, asking a total of 10 questions about each subject’s skill level in caring for plants, motivation for taking care of the plants, and thought process in finding their next plant. I was able to (virtually) meet and chat with those who were willing to do a follow-up interview after the survey. I created an interview guide to facilitate the user interview process.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Some reasons people started growing plants were:

  aesthetics

  air purification

  house decor

  feeling connected to nature

  calming effect

  bought one plant and never stopped

• Half the people have noted that they only want to keep their plants alive and don’t want to spend too much time on it - only enough to keep them alive

• The other half enjoy spending time with their plants and want to learn more about them

• When choosing their next plant, some things they look for are:

  plants that do not attract bugs

  easy to take care of / hard to kill

  impulse buying at the market

  size, shape, texture, color

• When asked about difficulties about taking care of plants, most (if not all) people mentioned making sure not to overwater the plant.

• Others noted bugs, forgetting to water plants and forgetting when they last watered the plants.

Needs and Frustrations

• Specifying plant diseases and how to take care of them

• Having a place to find solutions for plants, rather than searching through random articles found on Google

• Figuring out which fertilizer or soil each plant likes and thrives in

Final Notes

There were a surprising amount of people who mentioned YouTube as their go-to when troubleshooting plants. Plants seem to be very particular to their environment and their soil, so figuring out how to gather all this information and make it easy to read for people will be a challenge. I also found that many people do not have a community around them who appreciate their plants as much as they would like, so they go to plant communities like Facebook or Reddit to post images or videos. Also, many people seem to look all over the place to find solutions for their plants, so creating a one stop shop will also be a challenge.

User Persona

After the research phase and understanding the general target audience, I created a user persona to represent the key audience. This helped me focus on addressing the major needs of the most important user groups.

User Story + HMW

By using the user persona, I created a user story and a “how-might-we” (HMW) to show reasons why people would need this app and also show potential ways of how this app can help them solve their problems.

Feature Roadmap

Because this is an end to end app, I needed to organize all the features I wanted to add. I had three different tiers. The first being a “Must have” or MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which are all the features needed to have this app function. The second is a “Nice to have”, which are things that are not so necessary, but would be nice to have. The third is the “surprising and delightful” which are things that can come later and are the least important out of the three tiers.

Project Goals

I wanted to make sure this app could be functional by showing project goals for both the business side, such as creating a profit, and the user side, such as satisfying their needs.

Sitemap

Having a sitemap was important because it further organized the feature roadmap. This helped me understand where I would place each feature in the app.

User Flow

The user flow shows how people would go about this app. One of the main things I wanted to focus on was the community page and how people would find answers to their plant diseases. Here is an example of how they would use this feature.

Lo-fi Wireframes

Initial sketches were created to get my ideas going.

Usability Testing

After creating the prototype, I proceeded by testing it out with real people. I looked for potential users and had them test out the app based on a few scenarios given to them. Here were some takeaways from the testing.

Hi-fi Wireframes

After reiterating on the wireframes, I designed the high-fidelity pages. Here is the final result!