Have you ever wondered how would it be if you can grow your own food? In our own apartment? This design aims to spread knowledge and provide support on how to grow plants in urban localities for sustainable living.
Urban Farming is defined as growing or producing food in a city or confined apartments. Being a plant enthusiast, this intrigued me even though I have no prior knowledge on growing plants. My goal was to build a mobile app that can support beginners like me and teach them how to be more sustainable and conscious of the food we take without having the constraint of restricted space.
Business Background: Lettuce Grow is providing hydroponic growing systems to support growth of greens, fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Their mission is to reduce carbon footprint and save planet by growing our own groceries at the comfort of our home.
Project Purpose: The goal of the project is to design an app that can help millennials learn how to grow their own food and spread knowledge about urban farming.
Deliverables: User survey, Research documentation, Case study, Full-working app prototype (using Figma), Test results
Challenges: Millennials might feel hesitant to learn gardening as a hobby, Doubts about time consumption, Assumptions on raw materials/ manpower required
Firstly, I started off my research with understanding how familiar is the concept of urban farming is and what are the assumptions users are having on this. I wanted to gain an empathic understanding of the people I am designing for and the problem I am are trying to solve in order to have a deeper personal understanding of the issues, needs and challenges involved.
I conducted a survey to extract quantitative and qualitative data from my user groups such as demographics, hobbies, how this app can align to their interests, concern about the environment footprint, common challenges and assumptions about farming and furthermore. In the Empathize stage of a Design Thinking process, my aim was to develop the empathy, understandings, experiences, insights and observations on which I will use to build the rest of my design project.
I started the research by Identifying the main users of the product, including any additional user groups, and determine the intended device or platform for design along with other factors such as user goals, pain points and areas that need support. One of key considerations in this process is the user's mental models and past experiences that may influence their interaction with the system, aiming to align the design with their existing knowledge while making exceptions when necessary.
Results
Problem Statement: Millennials who feel overwhelmed about growing their own food through urban farming or gardening wants to have support that can educate them about the work involved, time required and things to-do but faces difficulty due to mixed resources or half-knowledge from internet.
* How might we make growing home-food easier for millennials who have no knowledge in gardening so that they feel supported through their journey in urban farming
* How might we simplify information for beginners, so they don’t feel overwhelmed
* How might we help users’ keep track of their plants’ health, so they don’t take pressure
The key user for this persona is millennials who are working full-time.
I designed an empathy map to understand user's behavior, approach and attitude towards our product. It helped me synthesize research observations and reveal deeper insights about a user’s needs. I believe it lets the designer to have a glimpse of the user’s world and approach things from his or her point of view before creating solutions
I classified all my data from the research as 3 key parts in my affinity diagram. This exercise helped me derive feasible features from the needs of the users, understand their motivations and emotions behind those needs and also the thoughts around the fears or frustrations.
I performed a competitive analysis, studying the existing landscape to discover who and what you’re competing against and to also reveal any opportunities that might exist in the market. I made note of the most prevalent design patterns being used to solve the problem and also take current UX trends into consideration to understand what I can do to offer my user a better experience.
In my research for market and competitor analysis, I found quite a few apps offering distinct features but unfortunately none of the apps provide all of them together. My main idea was to provide expert support through my app to the users which I did not find in any other apps.
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This is an innovative ideation technique to sketch initial ideas on product features. It is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes and since you have a clock ticking we tend to push ourselves towards creation and quick processing speed. I was able to ideate the primary features of my app such as reminders, personalized instructions, growth meter for plant, every alerts on plant care, day to day plant progress, scan option, and online peer chatting.
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This storyboard shows the journey of my ideal user from the motivations and needs to the end where the product is part of user's success story. It alos provides the context of use in the environment of the user.
My next step in the ideation was to design how the user flows through my app. I wanted to keep the key features accessible from the main screen.
Using Figma, I start with lo-fi wireframes and then moving on to the high-level design and prototyping.
My final step was to conduct usability test through tasks. Participants were given certain tasks to accomplish in the app. The results and the user behavior was observed and measured by several factors such as success and error rate, time on task, how much effort did the user put to complete a task, how many times and where the user was confused or frustrated during a task. Other important elements was usability of the app how easy or difficult was it to perform actions in the app, satisfaction, and users' not so appealing features.
Participant 1: Michael Doan
•Would like to have ready to send messages for a conversation starter
•Was confused on how to exit scan for health page
•Want to have deeper descriptive insights about plants
Participant 2: Duncan Fenn
•Wants to have customized time and Date reminder to add his own list
• Wants to be able to join groups/create group conversations
•Would like to have more details under plant pages
Urban Farmer app is designed to spread the knowledge and benefits of grown own food. By taking the user research into consideration, the app covers all the basic beginner requirements for a newbie to get started. More works need to done by taking the feedback from usability tests and further adding more features to the app.
Let ideas go. I was obsessed about creating the perfect app with every possible feature included but I realized it is more critical to actually solve the user's problem than making it perfect. I re-prioritized the UX by taking a step back and reassessing the user processes.
Effective and Efficient product require design thinking. Following this lean framework was quite helpful in shaping my ux activities and re - framing my problem statement at every stage because it allowed me to keep focused and on track throughout the project.
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