Plant Plan is an app developed to ease and assist the caring of houseplants. By keeping track of your plants needs it optimizes the care schedule to make sure you spend as little time “working” on taking care of your plants and more time on enjoying them instead.
The initial research covered the extent of a house plants needs. The basic factors relevant for taking care of house plants are watering, trimming, replanting, and enriching the nutrients in the soil. Aside from this other elements that come in to play are intensity of light, shade, temperature and humidity. Here are some idea sketches of functions, possible ways to use it, and other criteria that could be important to take into account.
The main task is to remind users when to water their plants. Its secondary tasks are to help users find new plants while informing them of what care is required. You can find new plants by searching for the name, identifying it using the camera or a picture, or getting recommended new plants based on your preferences and history.
Most homes/offices there are multiple people sharing the care of the plants, therefor we decided to lets users connect their accounts to a “house” and have a joint schedule where everyone in the house can see whether or not someone else has already watered the plants, or whose turn it is next.
With the average user having trouble only watering the plants we came up with a “care needed” scale with 3 options; Basic, intermediate, and Advanced. The scale would be clearly shown as the top feature of each plants. This in turn help users make an informed decision and only buy the plants that fit their level of care.
Building on the information gathered from the mock-up testing I put together a high end working prototype. The initial model focused on getting pages and buttons positioned correctly to optimize the user flow. Following this the color palette was developed and also transition between actions.
It offers advice on how to care for plants, ex. placement for sufficient light exposure, replanting, adding nutrients. All features are there to helps users invest in plants they can handle and reduce the amount of plants they throw out.
