Concept Background
As part of a “Future Cities” project, I wanted to create an app that will allow users to monitor their plants and provide guides on growing them. As the population in cities grow, people have less opportunity to interact with and learn to grow plants. Having more people learn how to care for plants will lead to a greener tomorrow. This app is designed to be be paired with a plant sensor to provide the readings and data for your plant, allowing you to monitor and learn about your plant.
Platforms
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator,
Cloud9 IDE, Brackets
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to create a minimum viable product in both a launch website and web app to demonstrate our concept. Through this, we will learn the process of ideating an idea, researching how to materialize it, promoting it, and creating it.
Research
I looked online to find products that are similar to plant health and plant care. While there are existing apps that contain instructions on how to grow plants and separate apps that identify plants, many of them were outdated and had poorly designed user interfaces. Not many of them connected to plant sensors. The reviews on many of these apps were less than stellar and I couldn’t find one that incorporated both a guide as well as a sensor reader. Many users complained about the identification feature, the support for plant care, and bad plant care instructions This research gave me better insight on what plant guides entail and what the apps that accompany plant sensors display. Reading the user reviews also gave me ideas on value added services that could be added on to expand the features of the app.
Solution
From my research, the main areas to tackle are the identification, the support, and care.. The core features that are important are plant identification, monitoring and plant care. Monitoring and care can be more efficient with a plant sensor giving accurate and immediate readings. Since I’m creating a MVP, I think support can be left out for now. If I were to construct a support feature, I would like to research on the usability of a forum or feed versus the on-call supports that many of these apps use.
Product Launch Website
To promote this product, I designed, wireframed, and built a simple product launch website. The goal of this website is to appeal to viewers by presenting the problem, our solution to it, and how it will work.
Web App Mock Ups
Instead of creating a native mobile app for this project, we were tasked to build a web app. Starting with our mock ups, we designed the primary pages our app will use. I went with a minimalistic and clean design to accompany the Smart aspect of our app. Using only black, grey, and white allows the plants, with their various colors, to stand out on the design. Important icons such as the status icons are also colored so users can easily see what plant is in need of care.
Final Minimum Viable Product
Web App Implementation