LeafLink — A Gamified App for Gardeners
The prompt was relatively simple for Flatiron School’s design challenge:
Create a mobile app interface for a virtual gardening assistant. Focus on functionality that helps users manage their plants, such as watering schedules, plant health tracking, and species-specific care tips.
When a colleague, China Saxton, and I decided to participate, we wanted to dream bigger. What kind of app would allow gardeners to meet their plants’ basic needs, while also providing a delightful user experience? Instead of plant care feeling like a chore, could it feel like a game, or like checking in with friends? After some brainstorming, we began our full design process in what would eventually become LeafLink: a gamified, cheerful gardening app that allows users to both manage their gardening tasks and also feel part of a vibrant online community of gardeners.
Early User Research
We wanted to learn more about our target users, who we defined as “home gardeners.” This could encompass backyard vegetable gardeners, apartment houseplant keepers, small-scale homesteaders, or casual windowsill herb tenders. Our users could be any age from 16 years old and up. They could be casual plant owners or quite serious about their garden. Their budget to support their plants could be a wide range — the app should be able to give the user recommendations based on their budget and goals. Our target users did not include farmers or other professional, large-scale gardeners; our app unfortunately could not support gardening at large scales in its current iteration.
As such, we started with a simple 14-question survey that we sent to friends, family, and other colleagues at Flatiron School. From our respondents, we learned about their pain points and frustrations — 5 of the 9 respondents selected “I forget to tend to them — there’s just so much to do” and “When they get sick or look diseased, I don't know how to help them.” This taught us that our Minimum Viable Product needed to have both plant care reminders, and diagnostic tools, as core features. Eight of our 9 respondents expressed they were either “excited” (5) or “curious” (3) about “mixing tech with soil” by using a gardening app; this suggested to us there is a market receptivity to our product. Based on these learnings, we were able to move forward with a product that would meaningfully support our target users.
To ensure we kept our target users front-and-center during the design process, we created user personas that encapsulated our users’ accessibility needs, pain points, and goals. We also built out an affinity map based on our takeaways from the survey, encompassing education and guidance needs, plant health concerns, knowledge gaps, gardener type, gamification interest, community engagement interest, and useful features. This helped us move forward in our design process by considering the most important features and screens our users would need or want from the gardening product.
Understanding the Problem Space
At the very beginning of the project, my co-designer and I wrote several draft problem statements. Following user research and gaining a greater understanding of our users, we converged on the following:
Both indoor and outdoor home gardeners need a solution to manage plant care tasks, diagnose plant issues, and foster a supportive gardening community in order to ensure optimal plant health and improve the overall gardening experience.
We brainstormed myriad ways to solve this problem, and incorporated market research of 8 competitors to better understand the products that our target users either were not using or were not satisfied by (as discovered in our survey, 8 of our 9 respondents had never used a gardening app). As this project was my first time working with another designer, I loved the collaborative nature of our Zoom calls, our Figma and FigJam files being filled with notes and inspiration, and the ability to add onto one another’s ideas. This project was infinitely more creative with China Saxton as my thought partner.
Ideation, Sketching, and Task Flows
Following user research and understanding the problem space, we began working on app design. As is my preference as I find it encourages more creative thinking, we started with sketches — both of us drafted 4-8 options for a given screen, and then brought back our favorite one or two. From our sketches, we built out task flows, considered any screens that were missing, and transitioned from pen-and-paper to Figma.
It was a fantastic opportunity being able to discuss design low-fi screen ideas with a co-designer. From left: her and my home screen, her and my individual plant profile, my plant care guide and community forum, and her and my Pokédex-style plant card.
Hi-Fi Prototyping
Given the three-week time limit of the design challenge, we weren’t able to develop a low-fidelity prototype with which to do usability testing as we would have liked; to meet the deadline, we jumped straight to high-fidelity wireframing and prototyping after our task flows were complete. When developing our style guide, we explored the possibility of making the app in “dark mode,” something I had never done before and was interested to try. After determining accessible color combinations with the help of A11y contrast checker and WCAG, we came up with a cheerful yet crisp color palette.
We worked separately on first drafts and came together to discuss, helpfully critique, and ensure that our app made by two designers had a consistent feel. Working together on final drafts and prototyping, LeafLink came into being with all the features our users expressed they wanted and a clean, user-friendly interface.
Result
We were thrilled with how our app turned out — and thrilled to accept 1st place in the design challenge!
