Sprout Gardening Case Study

Project Overview

Sprout Gardening is an app geared towards those looking to cut food costs by growing some of their own food but have no gardening experience. Food costs are rising and many people are looking for solutions. Users will be able to track the growth of their plants, and get in touch with other users for advice and find a community.

I believe that designing a gardening app that is geared towards beginners will help tackle the problem of rising food costs that are affecting everyone. Having a simple interface and introduction process will help new gardeners feel comfortable with the new skill they are learning. The forum area will provide a community for both new and experienced gardeners to connect and share knowledge.

Project Research

There are a lot of gardening apps out there, but they are all overwhelming with the amount of information that gets thrown at you right away. As someone also new to gardening I felt doomed to fail because there was so much thrown at me all at once. There was also a lack of social functions, which I think are important to have when learning a new skill.

I wanted to make something more simple to use that doesn't overwhelm you with information. I also wanted to include a forum area that will provide space for new and seasoned gardeners to share their questions and knowledge and creat an online community.

App Design

The app has a simple design because during design research I noticed many of the exisiting gardening apps are very busy and overwhelming. I focused on a streamlined design with minimal colors and graphics. I chose different shades of green as well as white throughout the whole design to keep it simple.

I didn't want to use many colors or graphics to keep with my goal of being simple to use and to prevent it becoming overwhelming. I went through a few design changes, mostly resizing things to be more appropriate for mobile viewing.

Tasks For Users

Login or Sign Up The first thing users can do is sign up for an account. the prototype is currently only set up for sign ups.

Create a User Name
Input email address
Create a password
Submit
Click "Let's Get Planting!"

Add New Plant This will take to your home page, from here you can add new plants to your garden, track the growth of your plants, or view your garden. Next we will be adding a new plant to an exisitng garden.

Click View garden or use the menu to navigate to My Garden
Hit the plus button in the bottom
Find the plant you want from the list.
Read the Plant Care Information, the use the checklist to gather supplies.
Follow the planting steps then click done to see the plant added to your garden.

Track Plant Growth Tracking your plant growth is simple and quick. My current prototype only has this ability functioning from the quick task section in the home page, but I plan the ability to track from the menu or garden screens as well.

Use the quick task button to go to My Garden
Click tomatoes to view their current staus, then click Track
Answer the questions
Click Done to see the updates you made

Create a Forum Post The last task I've created fot this prototype is to create a forum post. Users will have the ability to create, edit and delete forum posts, comments on other peoples posts and search the forums for what they need.

Use the menu to get to the foums page, then use the search bar to try to find what you need.
You don't find what you need, so click the plus button at the bottom to create a post.
Fill out the post details and submit it to be taken to your new post.

Usability Testing & Further Development

There were a few issues during usability testing, mostly pages where you would get stuck at the end of a task and couldn't get out of it. I had to go through every screen to make sure my menu was implemented on each page. I also had some readability issues where parts of the top menu would get obscured on some phones so I had to resize some things and experiment until I got it to display properly on all devices.

There are some features I still want to add and update. I think the forums need some work as far as functionality. I would also like to add a learning area with articles and tips posted regularly so users can expand their knowledge.

Summary

I've learned so much over the course of this project, and I feel much more confident about reseraching and designing a mobile app. I liked learning how to do the prototyping, it was very rewarding to see the app I invisioned coming to life and being able to interact with it.

This project forced me to think in smalls steps, which was hard for me. I am a quick thinker so I was often farther ahead in my brain then I could create the screens. Sometimes I skipped steps and didn't notice until I went to do the prototyping and realized I didn't have all the screens I needed.

There are some things I'd like to change, like the navigation feels a little clunky to me. In general I just want to polish it up and make it look more professional because it feels a bit amateaurish to me still. But overall, I'm proud of completing the project in general, there were a lot of things outside my comfort zone and the overall size was daunting.