Know & Grow: A web app for vegetable gardeners
CHALLENGE: Develop a web app that is a one-stop-shop for gardening information, to take the edge off of starting a new garden, or trying companion planting.
My Role: Research Ops, Research Moderator, site and assets designer.
USERS: People wanting to plant a garden and gain an understanding of what will grow in their climate
Methodology:
Contextual Inquiry
Usability Testing
Affinity Diagraming
Information Architecture
Wireframing
User Personas
Prototype Flow
Comparative Analysis
TOOLS:
InVision
Sketch
The Problem Space
Every Spring eager gardeners begin planning their vegetable gardens. For new gardeners, this means spending a large amount of time researching what to grow, or finding out where to buy starts. In the case of urban gardeners, know how to best utilize one’s space and what to plant in is often daunting.
New gardeners tend to be unaware of their grow zone and how to find it.
Many gardeners (new and experienced) are unaware of their state extension site.
Websites for garden planning tend to not have a great UI.
People tend to not know where to buy soil or that they can buy compost in bulk locally.
Research and Discovery
To gain an understanding of where people are most often going for gardening advice I performed contextual inquiries on gardeners of all ages and gardening abilities located in various places in the United States. I also asked them what the most important features were for them if they were to use an online gardening tool that gave them planning advice.
After creating an affinity diagram, the themes that surfaced were as follows:
Gardeners often engage in peer-to-peer learning from people in their location, or from youtube and social media platforms.
People rely on the information provided on seed packets to know when to plant.
New gardeners seek out advice from their local nursery and gardening shop to learn what to grow.
Companion planting is a mystery to people and hard to follow since much of the companion planting information is academic-focused.
New gardeners are overwhelmed by not knowing what to plant in or how much dirt to buy.
User Personas
To hone in on who I was building for I created user personas based on the potential users I interviewed.
Feature Selection
Using the findings I gleaned in my initial contextual inquiry, I selected the most commonly asked for features.
A garden space calculator, using dimensions you input to determine your viable grow space.
What grow zone you live in
your first/ last frost dates
Companion planting, how does it work?
Soil Calculator
Try Know & Grow
Try to Know & Grow prototype for yourself. https://invis.io/69117BQ2K7FN#/453844598_home_Page