Plantem-buying plant app UX case study

8 min readNov 7, 2020

Plants are really important for all of us . We need oxygen to survive and this oxygen is released by plants after absorbing Carbon dioxide.

We also need plant because they give us the food. Coming to the app i am designing, this will be a plant buying app where you don’t have to go to nursery to buy plants. You can order them by just sitting at your home.This is my personal project solely done by me to gain some more experience of UX.

Design Process

User Research
Competitive Analysis
Brainstorming
User Persona
User Interaction Flow
App Flow
Sketches
Wireframes & Prototype

User Research

As this was my personal project so i didn’t have the real users to interact with . So , I surveyed my 5 family , friends , relatives , etc and asked them certain questions. In this way i was able to get some more insights of how users think and what i have to design .

I already have the idea what i have to design , but to get some more information i asked some questions to the people i surveyed.

These questions were :

Will you like an app where you can buy plants online ? or you prefer to buy plant from plant nurseries ?
What do you prefer more ? having a dark mode UI or having a reminder feature to water plants?
Do you have a plant at your home ?
Currently do you use any app to buy plants ? If yes then please tell me the name of the app

And the responses were these which are shown in the picture below.

Problem

People want to buy plants online but they don’t have a proper app to do so and also they are not able to manage their plants because of this.
Users don’t remember when to water plants ,so they need a reminder(alarm) type feature to cope up with this.

Solution

For the first Solution , I will let users’s know how many times they have to water plants , how much space is needed for that plant , category of that plant will also be provided . Basically , these are the steps i will take to help user’s manage their plants .
Here , I will be providing a feature where users will get a reminder to water plant and it will also come up as a pop-up if you are using the app at the time of reminder and as an alarm if you are not using the app at that time .

Competitive Analysis

From the survey , I found out that there is an app name Livenursery (where we can buy plant and other items related to plants ) but it didn’t have the feature to water plants .

Brainstorming

In the 15–20 minutes brainstorming session , i wrote all the points that came into my mind. i.e. related to buy plant app .

As you can see in the picture that many points related to this app came into my mind . I find brainstorming session really helpful because it fills my mind with many ideas. And after that i start to work on these.

User Persona

Unfortunately, for this project i didn’t have the users whom i can interview.So instead of interviewing i carried out the survey and out of that i created a hypothetical user persona of a user.

Here i have discussed about the users goals , motivations, constraints ,etc. to know more about a particular set of users for which i am designing.

User Interaction Flow

After completing the brainstorming session and getting some ideas related to my app. I tried to figure out what will the interaction flow look like.

So , i created a basic interaction flow of a user of what he/she will do in the app . These are the things they can or will do from start to end in my app. Knowing these steps are really essential as well.

App Flow

Now after completing various steps of my design process this was the time to design a basic app flow for plantem mobile application. Making app flow is really good because it helps developers and clients to understand more about the app.

In app flow as you can see below that i have added many ideas here that came into my mind during brainstorming session. And have also added the solutions that the users were facing.i.e.(My plants Screen — where you can manage your plant easily and Set reminder screen — to water plant at correct time )

Sketches

This is my favourite part at the design process and for this step i try to get some inspiration from the active apps that are on the google play store. For this particular design i tried to get some motivation from an app named Livenursery. And along with that i also got some inspiration from a website named mobbin design.

After doing these steps and getting all the inspirations . I took my pen and started to draw some rough sketches . Usually i don’t settle for one idea and this is the thing you all should do as a designer because ‘ first design is not the best design ‘

So i usually end up with multiple design ideas for a single app screen. These pictures above and below are some of the rough ideas that come into my mind.

All this looks very messy but this is an important part of any design process.Here you only have to grab a pen and paper and start to generate your ideas.

Wireframes & Prototype

Onboarding

The pictures shown below are onboarding screens, where the users come to know about the features of the app .

In the screens below i tried to let users know that this app is about buying and managing plants easily. And for a better user experience i have added skip option if the user don’t want to do the whole onboarding.

There are some other screens as well but as you know showing every screen is not possible that’s why i will show you only some of the screens of this app.

Login / Signup

These are one of the most important screens of a mobile app , here the registrations take place if you are a new user. But if you already are a user and coming to the app after long time or maybe you have signed out from it then you have to login again from here.

These screens include login or signin from facebook , mobile no , google , twitter so that the user can easily do this process.

Home

The apps home screen include various sections like Categories , popular section and in the bottom app bar there you will find some ways to do different tasks like opening camera , account , checking your cart etc.

In the top app bar i included a search bar where users can search the plants they want to buy or check out. Other things like price and category of plants are also included in the categories section(cards) of the app.

Century Plant & Camera

Here the user can know more about the plants they are going to buy and can also add the plant into their cart. Users can also get additional information about the plant like what is the size of plant , how much maintenance is needed for the plant , category is also provided along with a short description of the plant.

In the camera screen user can click the photo of another plant and can search it from there if that plant is available or not.

Cart & Myplant

Now after adding the plant in cart user will land on the screen where they can checkout after buying the plants they want . In this section all the information related to plant like category , price , how many times they have to water the plants are provided.

In the My Plants screen i tried to solve one of the problem of the users which was ‘users were not able to manage their plants’. So to solve this problem i included information like how many times they have to water plants , space needed , and some description of them.After that they can set reminder as well.

Reminder & Profile

In the reminder section users will be able to set reminder to water plants in the form of alarm which will go live on the set time. And this is the solution of one of our problem which was ‘Users don’t remember when to water plants’.

Color & Typography

The typography which i have used in my app is Roboto and the colors used are :

#18A558
#21B6A8
#0E766D

Conclusion

This was my personal project that i have worked on , if you have any suggestions then please let me know in the comments section.

Keep learning keep growing❤