🌵 My Indoor Jungle

Personal project

The problem

Due to the busy life, sometimes we caught up into work that forgets to check up on our "friendzy housemates" and it eventually died. It's common for people to not remember watering their plants on time. They are mostly unaware of individual water requirements on the plants they own. I strongly feel that the new water reminder app can play a significant role in combating this issue.

The goal

Developing a water reminder app that allows user to manage their plants with unique water schedules, be able to track your scheduling to make sure no plant is left to dry, customize your plants (your babies) by giving each a name and taking plant selfies, edit water schedules, clean interface to get simple tasks done and turn a boring task into a fun activity.

Bonus features: fertilizer reminder and LUX meter (measure light levels).

The process

My process will be different in different projects and will be determined by many factors such as the project goals, business needs, complexity of the problem, time and etc. Here I’ll describe my process for solving this problem.

Discover

Understanding the core of the product

Before doing any ideation I started to analyzing the existing design page by page to understand the core of the product. Analyzing comments in the app store also helped me to know the main points and strength of the current design.

Key findings

• Doesn't have a clear UI interaction.
• They don’t feel engage to app.
• Doesn't remind on the correct time set.
• Doesn't have fertilizer reminder. Although it is optional, however it's good to have one.

Initial proposal

Proposed a design with fast access to significant sections (Plants, My Schedule, Lux Meter, My Profile) and made accessibility straight.

• Design principles: clean and friendly UI (colors, icons).
• Plants info page should indicate the water level corresponding how much the plants has dried up.
• Navigation and transition should be easily understandable.
• View/ edit/ delete a plant.

Ideation

Sketching and wireframes

I had a list of screens to cover all scenarios so I started sketching different designs to detail out the flows to discuss and share with team members to get feedback.

Design

Crafting a holistic look and feel

This is a style guide for My Indoor Jungle app. This style guide contains colors, typography, components, buttons and overlays.

User flow

As the saying goes, “A good start is half the battle" . Before going into user interface design, I made sure to polish the features and user interaction flow.

The following feature flowcharts describe the content strategy and user flow through the app, listing potential features users may interact with. The creation of flowcharts are the basis for refining the workload necessary for developers and higher-fidelity designs later on and for discovering potential issues behind the product in a quick and time-efficient way.

When the users start the app, they will be led through a Welcome page then proceeding to their default screen - the Plants screen. The bottom navbar has 4 tabs options:

Plants — where users go to browse different plants, search/ add a plant and delete a plant.

My Schedule - where users go to add/ edit a plant.

Lux meter - where users go to measure the intensity of light, it is a great tool for setting up your greenhouse light settings or checking if your area needs a bit more light.

Profile - where users go to write a review or share the app.

Mockups

Welcome screens

Here I put some of the screens from the primary actions in My Indoor Jungle app. Main screen is to getting to know the user to understand a bit more about them and enable push notification.

Plants collection ans My Schedule screens

Users can add new plants from Plants page or from My Schedule on the top-right.

Plants (My Jungle) page is a place that allows users to search/ delete/ view a plant.

My Schedule page allows users to add/ edit a plant. When you add a plant, you have an option to add fertilizer reminder or no. That's an optional.

Lux meter and Profile screens

If you browsing through App store, you can either find water reminder app in a separate app and Lux meter in different app. To make it convenient to users, I decided to combined both apps in one, helps users to use the most of My Indoor Jungle app.

Project learnings

What I have learned from this project?

• Simplicity is strength. As a designer, we are often lured by attractive, trendy and out of the box designs. But, we must always remember the ‘why?’. Why do we need this app?. Why do we picked these colours?. Why the icons is important?. The primary goal is to understand the user, their problems and then come up with a design that solves it.
• Process in essential. For a project that is vast, it gives you a roadmap to navigate through what can be a foggy route. This is especially useful when you’re starting out.