The What The Fucculent mobile app takes out the effort and confusion of houseplant research with auto-created care schedules, alerts, plant suggestions, and materials subscription, all with a healthy dose of snarky humor to motivate users and appeal to a targeted demographic.
role: As part of a team, assisted with user research, ideation, and initial sketches. Individually created the UI style guide and final prototype. deliverables: Case Study Deck, Mobile App Prototype tools: Miro, Figma, Illustrator, Procreate timeline/scope: 1 month | August 2021 problem statement: Casual plant owners who keep a busy schedule want plants around for improving their environment and mood, but they don't have the time or energy to learn in-depth plant care. They consequently kill their plants without structured accountability and direction.
There's two main types of plant people: those that are direct descendents of mother nature herself, and those that want desperately to surround themselves with plants but can't keep them alive for anything. "Aren't there like, a bunch of plant care apps out there?" Sure, but not for those that need an extra (read: aggressive) push to stay on track for their plant's care. Animals and kids tell you when they're hungry or thirsty. Plants don't.. until now. Our target demographic is the second group mentioned above, and specifically those that don't identify with the current delightful brands of plant care apps or haven't found them helpful. They need to be yelled at, and the plants in What The Fucculent are happy to do so.
plant people
To begin research, our team of course started with who we think would get the most use out of a plant app that centers on hilarious aggression. We ultimately decided it's definitely not a niche occupied by any older-generation, so we modernized our proto-persona as much as possible with educated guesses. It's a decent start.
Meet Rowan!
They’re living by themselves, so they want plants for companionship. Unfortunately, they don’t know much about plant care and forget to water their buddy often
To begin the deep dive into our research, we did a competitor analysis to evaluate what the market might be lacking so we could hopefully fill those disparities, and see what is working for them, as to hold a unique spot in the plant app space. We found that direct competitors target “plant parents” who are already interested in plant care, and indirect competitors personify plants for an emotional connection.
Some research objectives that we used during our user interviews helped guide the case study. The overarching ideas we wanted to explore more were 'What factors lead historically poor plant owners to commit accidental murder?', 'What pain points do they have when trying to care for their plant?' and 'What motivates them to own plants despite the risk?'
Our team's interviews with eight plant-murderers revealed that casual plant owners who keep a busy schedule need accountability because they don't have the time or energy to learn in-depth plant care.
Going back to reflect on our proto-persona, we determined that Rowan 1.0 was mostly spot-on. To create the user persona, we made minor adjustments to their age, motivations, needs, and pain points to better fit the user as defined by our user research interviews to reflect someone who is a bit farther into their career and is seeking company in the form of plants.
your problem is...?
Creating an affinity diagram told us that users weren’t willing or didn’t have time to learn more about plant care, their plants mostly died from users forgetting about them entirely, and that users felt like an emotional connection would help them care for a plant
This led our team to conclude that casual plant owners who keep a busy schedule need accountability and structured direction for how to keep their plants alive because they don't have the time or energy to learn in-depth plant care.
UV lightbulbs
Our small-but-mighty 3-person team used a variety of brainstorming and ideation techniques like a well-oiled machine to design features, avoid scope creep, and create a structured user flow.
It was important to us that we put all possibilities and pain points down on "paper", so using the i like, i wish, what if method seemed like the best way of keeping our initial ideas organized.
Using feature prioritization to fairly decide on main features as a team, we used 5 dots each to identify which features we believed were necessary to the app.
Finally, we took the voted-on features to a complexity vs impact graph, and determined all 6 features chosen are high impact, and therefore all worthy of our time and efforts. This had us slightly worried about stretching ourselves too thin, but decided ultimately that it was worth the risk.
Prior to wireframing, together we laid out the two main user flows (one with a notification, and one from sign-up and through adding a plant) so we could have a visual representation of the direction in which to move forward when prototyping.
After dividing up types of screens to team members to sketch low-fidelity screens, we chose to run with one team member’s style to combine all the wireframes into a mid-fidelity version, as well as adding extra screens for flow clarity to test with. (flip through from low-fi to mid-fi below)
to the test
Six individual user tests were conducted over Zoom using a testing plan with outlined tasks based on the user flow. - 50% were asked to add a new plant by taking a photo of it - 50% were asked to add a new plant by using the app's suggestions.
user testing feedback • make subscriptions clear that they’re physical, and not in-app items • indicate scrollable content • add key specs to plant info screens • use color to make content into more bite-sized chunks • add explanatory copy for how scanning feature works
The feedback we received from the user tests included things like making subscriptions clear that they’re physical, and not in-app items, indicating scrollable content, adding key specs to plant info screens, and adding explanatory copy for how scanning feature works. We implemented each change, and incorporated those features or changes into the high-fidelity version.
pretty plants
To match the app’s dark humor, we decided to go with a theme that would look as if a blacklight was shining on it, as well as rounded corners for added playfulness and outer glows on some buttons for emphasis.
I personally had the pleasure of creating the style guide and applying it to the mid-fidelity to create the final product. I had WAY too much fun with it, too. Compare the screens below with the low and mid versions in "set it up".
now what?
Unfortunately, we were only left with enough time to interview two people with the high-fidelity version. That yielded very little and insignificant feedback, but did leave us with some lessons to learn from the project to budget time and plan ahead for hi-fi prototype testing and subsequent iteration based on those tests
In the future, if we were to move forward with the app, we agreed we would consult a plant expert to better flesh out what users would get out of the subscription plan. We also had lots of fun adding sassy copy to the app, but we realized from testing that plain language was important to use with novices and we had to be careful to strike the right balance.
let's chat.
email me at hirelaurengregorski@gmail.com or go ahead and download my resume, I won't mind one bit.