Blossom: App Re-design
Blossom App re-design, introducing new features to elevate user value and delivering a significant UI enhancement.
MY ROLES
Content Strategy
Interaction Design
Prototyping
TEAM
Joyce, Arielle, Jenise, Patricia, Tim
MENTORS
Russel Taylor and Jenny Nguyen
TIMEFRAME
3 week sprint, Summer 2024
Preview
A plant health check list that helps build better plant care habits.
Tips that provide detailed guidance on actionable tasks.
A progress bar and achievements that create motivation for user habits.
Problem Space
According to New York Botanical Garden the average plant parent has killed 7 houseplants and 48% of them are worried about keeping their plants alive.
Blossom App
Plant owners use Blossom as a tool to plan, keep track of schedules, and keep their plants healthy. However, plant care is complex and takes dozens of factors into account. Due to the lack of support in their plant health related sections, customers are unable to maximize the value of Blossom, and in turn struggle to keep their plants healthy.
Research
67% of plant owners
find plant care more challenging than they expected.
“Plant stores are great at getting the product to customers, but they ultimately don't care if those customers know how to keep them alive, let alone care for them in a way that helps them thrive.” (Burke, 2022)
22% of plant owners
explain that their apprehension stems from accidentally killing a plant in the past.
1 in 5 of them
said they'd rather have a root canal than look after a plant.
1000 gardeners
who have been gardening for more than 6 months but less than a year, indicate that :
The hardest part of becoming a gardener is making it through the first year.”
FINAL FRAMING
How might we build foundational knowledge and habits over time in order to help users prevent, rather than react to indoor plant death and disease?
UI Revision
We decided to propose a new art direction for the app, building upon the existing color palette to create a more cohesive and intuitive experience. This decision wasn't simply about “enhancing aesthetics” but was driven by the need to establish consistency, improve readability, and reduce cognitive overhead.
New Art Direction
The original design fell short in key visual design principles such as grids, typography, and hierarchy. By addressing these foundational elements, the updated UI aims to provide users with a more structured and engaging interface, making interactions smoother and more visually coherent.
Adjusting the Scope
Condensed User Journey Map
Plant Care Schedule and Journal Function.
For our intervention, we will be focusing on the spaces around the
Primary Feature - Maintenance Checklist
Early Detection to Prevent Critical Plant Distress
To enhance Blossom’s current plant care history and checklist, we introduce a plant maintenance section to further help plant owners keep track of their plant health.
Capture and Reflect: Document Your Plant’s Journey.
Introducing the Journaling feature to Blossom, allowing users to create text entries and add images to record and monitor their plant’s growth and health. This personalized log helps plant owners stay connected to their plants' progress and well-being over time.
Secondary Feature - Tips & Progress Tracking
Customized Care Tips to Nurture Each Plant’s Unique Needs
With the new Tips feature, Blossom provides customized advice on essential plant care tasks like watering and fertilizing. Recognizing that each plant's needs are unique, these personalized tips offer an extra layer of guidance, empowering plant owners to make more informed and effective care decisions.
Gamified Tracking and Achievements for Sustainable Plant Care Habits
To encourage long-term engagement and habit-building, we've integrated Achievement and Tracking widgets directly into the user's homepage. By adding a touch of gamification and personalization, these features motivate plant owners to stay consistent with their care routines, fostering a deeper connection with their plants over time.
Project Reflection
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Project Reflection -
As an experience design team working on this graduate project, we constantly asked ourselves, "Is there a need for intervention?" We needed to identify problem areas within our client’s existing brand and product while deeply understanding customer needs and what they value enough to invest in. This project was particularly challenging for me, as it required working on a final project at an accelerated pace due to the limited time of the intersession semester. We had to adhere to the principle of "garbage in, garbage out," ensuring that our ideas moved quickly and efficiently to meet the tight deadlines.