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ABOUT THE PROJECT

Automating your garden plan!
Gardening in NZ skyrocketed in the Covid era. Our Marketing team had made a printable plant calendar which tells kiwis when to plant a fruit or vegetable subject to a particular climate zone. We realized that this could also be a fun, dynamic user-experience, and thus Planter was born - Genia's first consumer app. As the Project Lead, I collaborated with the Marketing team, an Auckland-based designer, and my fellow developers. It was quickly wire-framed and implemented, and through several rounds of UX testing which I conducted, it was further refined into the app today. The purpose is to drive Genia's social metrics and generate sales for their gardening division - Get Growing. In the future, this app will integrate with Shopify in order to further streamline the gardening process.
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ROLE
Project Lead
Developer
UX Testing
Dash of Design
CLIENT
Genia - Get Growing
DATE
2021 - Current

HOW IT WORKS

Users first select their region in NZ and will be presented with viable plants for the month. They can tap a plant for more specific info, and add plants to their cart. Each plant has an optimal climate zone. For example, if you are in Wellington, New Zealand - a Temperate climate zone - and the month is May, then the app will suggest plants like Bok Choy, Carrot and Chives.

The user receives a calendar if they agree to sign-up for marketing e-mails from Genia, via an Azure Function, Mailchimp, and SendGrid. This calendar tells users when to sow or pot a seed, and when to harvest all their selected plants. The calendar itself was made using our proprietary React-to-PDF templating tool.

This is the PDF calendar that is sent, ordered by starting month. Some seeds can be planted straight into the ground depending on the climate zone, and others will need to start in a pot.
These 8 plants the user added will be simply displayed in the calendar.

WHAT I LEARNED

  • The importance of writing well-defined user-stories so that scope-creep, while tempting, does not happen
  • UX Testing can be quite fun and can energize the test subjects in the office. I organized each session into 3 major sections:
    Think-Aloud - Users think out loud what they feel the app is for and what the general impressions are
    Tasks - Users are asked to complete tasks, such as: "You are keen to grow tomatoes. You want to know what level of sunlight tomatoes need and when to begin planting. How would you go about doing this?" I then assessed how difficult it was for them
    Adjectives - Users are asked to circle 5 out of 100 adjectives which indicate how they feel about the UI / branding
    The main finding was that users initially did not feel the app was to help create a plan/calendar. Thus, the designer drafted a different landing page and the results were much better
  • Working within a smaller tech team is great - I like wearing multiple hats: full-stack, design, and UX
  • For storing data on a small app, JSON can be used in lieu of a database
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