BUDDY
Planting the Seeds of Potential
This one week sprint was a solo UI project to design an app for 'new' budding gardeners. As an amateur gardener, this was an exciting project for me to put my learnings of design systems, colour palettes and mood boarding into practice.
In a hurry? Click Go to Solution to see my final product and key learnings.
CONCEPT UI PROJECT | 1 WEEK
THE BRIEF
To design the user interface of Buddy, a conceptual plant app, consisting of a plant shop, plant care section and a plant index to help budding gardeners build their first garden or greenhouse.
DELIVERABLES
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Competitive Analysis
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Wireframes
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High-Fidelity Prototype
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Presentation
DISCOVER
Due to the UI-focus of this project, it seemed important to carry out some specific competitor research comparing Canopy Plants, Leaf Envy and Bloom & Wild. Both Canopy Plants and Leaf Envy demonstrate a more minimalist UI style with the use of negative space and natural colours. Contrastingly, Bloom & Wild demonstrates a maximalist style, allowing less negative space, with more playful alignment and use of colours.
The primary selling point of these competitors are indoor plants/flowers/bouquets with some targeting towards beginners such as Hard to Kill, Unkillables and Perfect for Beginners.
Interestingly, out of these three competitors, only Bloom & Wild has a native app. This surprised me as I assumed that a significant number of plant parents are using their phone to purchase new plants, not their laptop or desktop. This might be an interesting research project to consider in future!
To keep on track and focus on the task at hand, I assumed a proto-persona of the target user of Buddy, instead of carrying out user research.
Rita - The Up and Comer
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24 years old
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Young professional working in a cosmopolitan city, like London, Manchester or Glasgow.
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Keen/recent interest in gardening/building a greenhouse
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Has a small garden, but is keen to maximise space to make a beautiful yet sustaining garden.
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Doesn’t want to spend too much money
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Easily frustrated by confusing gardening jargon. What’s a perennial?
DEFINE
Brand Style
It was important to understand Buddy was only going to blossom with a unique brand that fit the niche in the market. To meet the proto-persona’s needs and wants, the brand tone was therefore modern, friendly and authentic. See below how I chose to align Buddy’s brand on the personality map and scale.
Personality Map
Personality Scale
Moodboard & Design System
To match the brand style guide, I chose a natural colour scheme. I wanted it to represent the process of growth in a new plant and when the produce starts to appear. I also chose two main fonts - Jaldi as the body text and Lobster as the header text.
Before beginning the high-fidelity prototype, I made sure to establish my own design system within Figma, with the 6 colours of the palette and the six typefaces, as you can see below.
This helped significantly for me to keep consistency and to keep organised with my designs. After having done this, in the interest of time, I decided to begin my high-fidelity prototype straight away.
DEVELOP
Onboarding
I chose to do a benefit-orientated onboarding to allow users to understand what buddy offers before beginning their journey in the app. In the final part of the onboarding, I added a gamification element, encouraging users to sign up straight away, so they could earn Buddy points, to get money off their first purchase.
Logo iteration
To match the brand style guide, I chose a natural colour scheme. I wanted it to represent the process of growth in a new plant and when the produce starts to appear. I also chose two main fonts: Jaldi as the body text and Lobster as the header text.
Latest logo iteration
DELIVER
Click the play button to view the Hi-Fi prototype
SOLUTION
The solution here would be useful for Rita. The clear and simple onboarding explains to her how Buddy works. She can sign up straight away to earn Buddy points that will help her save money. The clear categorisation means she can choose categories such as “For Garden” or “For Greenhouse” to help her find the plants that are right for her.
NEXT STEPS
If I were to continue working on this project, these are the next steps we would put into action:
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Build plant care and plant index pages
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A/B Colour palette testing
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Add animations
KEY LEARNINGS
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Colour schemes aren’t always easy! But moodboarding was a great step to help me to learn and improve.
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Progress not perfection. This project taught me that being a good designer means having a good growth mindset and being ready to make mistakes and learn from them.