Product Design, Research,
Design System, Prototyping
YiFan Dai — Designer
Liqi Zhong — Designer
Figma, Illustrator, After Effects, Spark AR
Jan - Apr 2023
Pollinators are essential to our biodiversity and food production. Derived from conversations about sustainability and a mutual love for gardening, Liqi and I partnered up to imagine design as an agent for environmental change.
Despite efforts to create green spaces within the cityscape, beginners are challenged by the various learning curves and lack of rapport when starting their gardening practice.
A mobile app that alleviate the barriers to entry by connecting beginner gardeners to resources, mentors, and local events. Beginners gain access to a wealth of information on gardening techniques, plant care, as well as a supportive community of fellow gardeners who can offer advice and guidance.
Discover your hardiness zone and receive personalized and localized guidance
Plan and test garden designs based on your needs and preferences
See your garden plan come to life in real time
Find what you need through community exchanges
Access localized insights and information based on your climate
Get involved in the local gardening community with workshops or volunteering
In the current ecosystem, beginners rely on self-studying to build up gardening knowledge, while experienced gardeners lack conduits to share their resources.
What if there was a way to build rapport and mentorship from the very start by highlighting the resources available across the community?
People often feel uncertain in their understanding of pollinator gardening, causing hesitation in getting started.
Beginners are tasked with extensive amount of research, fact-checking, and testing before breaking ground.
Finding good quality seeds (& plants) that are native to the area poses a challenge.
"How might we connect beginner gardeners with resources & mentorship to overcome the challenges in starting a pollinator garden?"
To alleviate the pain points reported from beginner gardeners, we derived features to help beginners with their gardening journey.
Garden Planner (& ability to save different configurations)
Sourcing seeds
Community page
Plant recommendations
Instructional content
Plant care reminders
I used sitemaps & low fidelity frames to determine how the features consolidated into one coherent flow. I considered how the users would navigate from the initial onboarding to ultimately ending the experience, feeling confident about their garden plan.
Initial lofi frames for Garden Planner
.png)
Userflow for starting a new garden
Sitemap to establish information architecture of the app
At each level of fidelity, various options were tested and iterated upon to ensure an intuitive, usable, and seamless user experience.
The style guide was created to emanate the warmth of a mentor, gently guiding users along their gardening journey. The app carries a comforting and accommodating tone of voice, providing an educational and helpful experience for both novice and experienced gardeners alike.
Extending the style guide, I created a versatile family of scalable and interactive components that maintain visual coherence and enhance readability on mobile devices.
Below are some selected high-fidelity mocks utilizing the design system, emphasizing interactive hierarchy and a seamless flow across the experience.
For this project, I worked closely with my design partner Liqi to produce the MVP. The collaboration process didn't always consist of sunshine. We ran into tricky situations regularly in our journey. To counter this, we asked challenging questions towards each other’s designs and assumptions. We openly communicated our thoughts and struggles to unblock each other without judgement. In the end, we were able to weave our ideas harmoniously together to ensure proper integration of all the flows within our common system.
This explorative project was intended to be a vision statement. Thus, there were ideas deprioritized in favour of user value and/or time. If given the opportunity, I would develop the secondary features as well as strengthen the information architecture more to prepare for product scaling.
