Encyclopedia Botanica Mobile App
Encyclopedia Botanica is a podcast that explores the world of edible gardening.
After three successful seasons and a growing audience, the podcast has decided to launch a mobile application in an effort to grow it’s audience and attract sponsors.
The application will focus on vegetable garden planning and crop management for the home enthusiast.
Primary Goals
Existing vegetable garden mobile apps have small user bases and consistently receive poor reviews for usability.
The Encyclopedia Botanica app will focus on four key ideas:
Ease of Use: Other apps on the market have confusing interfaces and poor architecture.
Visual Design: An aesthetically pleasing design is essential to the adoption of this tool.
Respectful Notifications: Sending users timely and helpful updates while respecting their privacy.
MVP: Releasing a useful application that is not bogged down by features. Updating the tool through time as the most important new features become apparent through user data and feedback.
Process
DISCOVER
Interviews and Surveys
Competitive Analysis
DEFINE
Affinity Diagram
User Journeys
TEST
Paper Prototyping 1
Paper Prototyping 2
DESIGN
Visual Mockup
Prototype
Interviews and Surveys
I conducted interviews with beginning and experienced gardeners. These conversations provided essential insights about the features and types of information users would be looking for in a mobile gardening application.
Features
• To-Do list
• Calendar
• Tips and recommendations
Information
• How to plant
• How to care for crops
• How to harvest, prepare, store crops
• How to manage pests, diseases, weather
Competitive Analysis
I analyzed the features of the top seven existing vegetable garden applications. The competing apps fail to meet user needs in several key areas:
Product Placement: Several large seed and vegetable transplant companies have build garden applications. These apps are overly structured to increase sales and users are consistently redirected to outside websites to make purchases.
Architecture: Many reviews for existing applications complain of the difficulty of navigating the programs. This appears to be due in large part to confusing labeling
Lack of Information: Many applications lack basic information about vegetable crops. Some applications are limited by geographic boundaries and others simply exclude popular crops or do not provide adequate information about popular crops.
Affinity Diagramming
I sorted and prioritized the information collected during the discovery phase with an affinity diagramming exercise.
Data points were grouped into four categories:
• Tasks
• Goals
• Factors
• Features
User Journeys
I developed a series of boards to illustrate user flow through the app. These progressions are based on three common user journeys:
Onboarding: When initially using the application, users will be asked to create an account so that the app can store data for their garden. An account will enable the app to access local weather and USDA growing zone data to help plan the garden calendar.
Crop Exploration: The most important information on the app is stored in a series of “crop profiles”. These are pages that list all pertinent details for popular garden crops. Users can add crops and their associated tasks to a personal calendar.
Alerts: The application will provide seasonal alerts and suggestions based on current and historic weather data.
Paper Prototype Testing
Based on the information gathered during the research phase, I developed a series of paper prototype tests.
Test 1: The initial test was performed with 5 prospective users. Several key challenges were identified with the first design:
• Users wanted an opportunity to try the app before entering personal information. To address this issue, I added a button to the onboarding page to allow users to skip the account creation process.
• Users wanted more feedback after performing an action. The second iteration of the design included certain feedback messages requiring dismissal to ensure users were aware of the actions taken.
Test 2: I conducted a second round of testing with 5 different users. This round of testing allowed more efficient activity and yielded a better overall experience.
Visual Mockups
Based on the results of the paper prototype tests, I developed a visual mockup of the application in Sketch.
Prototype
I created a prototype of the application using Sketch. Usability tests on this iteration of the program will be conducted in summer 2019.
Next Steps
Encyclopedia Botanica is currently producing it’s podcast for the 2019 season. Further work on the design and development of the mobile app is slated for August 2019.