Flower Buddy
Mobile App for Plant Lovers
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Project Overview:
A concept mobile app created during a UX bootcamp focusing on UI and visual design. Solo work.
Buddy is a mobile app allowing budding gardeners to buy plants to start a garden or greenhouse. It features an index of the most common plants and instructions on how to take care of them. There is an online shop, so the users can start a garden easily. It is an e-commerce and social media app designed for garden lovers. The app allows users to buy plants, learn more about gardening, and be part of a gardening community.
Deliverables
- Onboarding — How users are onboarded when they open the app for the first time.
- Navigation — A menu allowing the user to navigate within the app.
- Product Listing Page — A filterable page listing all products.
- Product Display Page — A page featuring information about the product and the ability to “Add to basket”.
Creative Brief
A creative brief defines the goals and strategy of the project and it helps align client and designer expectations from the beginning.
What are we making? A mobile app that allows plant lovers to buy plants and start a garden or greenhouse.
Why are we making it? To allow users to buy plants and start a garden. There is the potential to allow them to connect and make a gardener community online.
Differentiation (How is the product different from what’s already on the market?): It gets everything into one place, allows users to shop, access information on plants and cultivating, and join a gardening community. Easy access from mobile.
Brand’s tone: Informal, Friendly, Motivating.
Target Audience: 25–60 year old garden lovers.
Persona: Grace (47) from Kent, UK.
Main Competitors: mobile apps (Gardentags, Zalando, Asos), plant nurseries (offline and online), books on starting a garden (offline), gardening websites collating information on cultivating.
Competitive Analysis
Meanwhile, the main objective of this project was to direct the focus to visual design and exclude the research part of UX, I wanted to identify gaps in the market. I carried out a competitive analysis to understand design trends for plant apps and identify areas of development in other provider’s products.
Surprisingly there weren’t many mobile applications that had a decent user base and provided a usable design. Most of the apps were superficially developed and seemingly didn’t have many users.
I analysed mobile applications and websites of nurseries and plant delivery providers to understand key features used and unavailable on these platforms. Are there any gaps in the marketplace I could fill with my brand? Most nurseries still host fairly traditional websites with a limited focus on a visually appealing design. This is probably because their e-commerce site is just “a nice to have” in addition to their main focus on in-store customers. The modern plant delivery companies main focus is selling plants (e.g. Hortology), but there wasn’t any information on cultivation or attempts on building a community.
I highlighted the lacking features on the competitor's platform in purple below. The main areas that could be addressed in our solutions are feedback (ratings and reviews), building a community (community profile, photo gallery, blog), keeping users engaged and a provide a sense of continuity (news) and keeping users entertained (design garden).
Brand Personality
What should the brand’s tone be, and why?
A brand’s voice is how a company connects to their audience — both committed and potential customers. It should have aspects that relate to the company’s ethos, values, product, or service. It should feel unique but consistent with the expectation of the goods and services provided.
I created a brand personality scale to generate my brand's voice.
My design is rather modern, polished, literal and adventurous while it is somewhere between playful and sophisticated, complex and simple, scientific and organic. A slightly more complex and adventurous experience for the modern user.
I created a mood board to collate my ideas and inspirations into one place and to be able to communicate these ideas to others. The mood board helped me to visualise ideas, extract the mood, and bring emotions into my design.
My colour and design choices were centered around the following.
- Standing out. Most plant and gardening apps use the same white-green design with some terracotta elements and black typeface.
- Appealing to the market of young and older gardeners as well. Modern design with old-fashioned elements targeting the persona, Grace.
Style Guide
I created a design system and palette in line with the brand’s voice. I experimented with Muli (or Mulish) and Ovo typefaces and went ahead with using Muli on its own for headings and body. I wanted to use a combination of typefaces that appeared modern, friendly, and elegant at the same time. I wanted to add elements that are more traditional while keeping a modern feel. I felt that Ovo gave the look a slightly more old-fashioned appearance. I wasn’t sure if that is appealing to users so I went ahead with Muli on its own to represent the brand’s personality.
I used “Areo Blue” (BAFFDF), “Light Green” (83F288), and Eerie Black (0E1512) as base colours for the app. The brightness of “Areo Green” and “Light Green” is adding a more modern and youthful touch to the app.
I avoided using pure black typography because the black text on white backgrounds can cause eye strain when users read the text over an extended period hence added “Eerie Black” to the colour palette.
I added “Purple Munsell” (9B0CB8) to the style guide to make the app stand out from current design trends for gardening apps. According to colour psychology purple is often associated with devotion, ambition, peace and extravagance. I also associate purple with a slightly older user base.
Sketches
Please see the low-fidelity prototype below! I focused on creating an onboarding that users go through when they open the app for the first time. The onboarding guides them through the navigation on the bottom from product shopping through community, saved items, and profile.
On the home page, users can locate the products in different categories. If they’re unable to find what they want in these categories they can navigate to the search/ product shopping section and they can enter the parameters for their search. The chosen parameters can be colour, size season, price, and soil. These filters can be adjusted on the PLP (Product Listing Page) later.
Apart from the PLP and PDP (Product Display Page), which was the key deliverable in this project, I wanted to develop the community, saved items, and profile pages as well.
“Feed” within “community” showcases the popular uploads, posts from other users they follow, but it’s also based on the accounts and types of posts they’ve liked historically.
“Latest” is a chronological feed showing uploads since the users' last visit. These are uploads from everyone, not only the accounts they follow. This random content allows them to find new accounts to follow and encourage new joiners to the community.
“Saved items” shows a list of the liked, owned, and saved items. the liked and save items have 2 separate lists. The owned items are a list of already purchased products.
There 2 main parts in the “profile“ section: “My Feed” and “My Garden”. “My Feed” is the users’ main profile page where they post photos and videos. These photos and videos show up in the feed of their followers. “My Garden” allows users to design their garden, allotment, or greenhouse. This is a fun design platform.
Please see the high-fidelity prototype below including all deliverables.
Next steps
- Test accessibility. This is feedback I received during the presentation of this project. “Light Green” (83F288) might not be accessible for some users, and the background illustration might also be difficult to read.
- Test Ovo as typeface. Running a round with the client to see which design is the preference would be helpful. If I had clients! :)
- Test whether it makes sense to list liked items and saved items separately. It might mean the same for the users so we can abandon one.
- Develop community, saved items, and profile frames in high-fidelity.
What did I learn?
- I love to build something from scratch!
- Working without research is difficult! It was really hard to support the design decisions without users and data to turn to.
- Setting up a brand is exciting and there is so much more to learn!
Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed the above please get in touch! :)
