Habitat
Patching the quilt of lost wildlife & building community amongst sustainable gardeners
With thanks to my mentors for guidance and dev-friends for being willing sounding-boards for feasibility.
Wildlife gardeners are eager to connect
Wildlife, or habitat, gardening has been rising in popularity thanks to efforts from wildlife organizations and activists. However, the complexity of sustainable gardening can leave gardeners feeling isolated and overwhelmed which in turn can cause gardening hopefuls to lose their motivation.
Many tech-solutions for gardeners focus on the most introverted aspect of the hobby (cataloging, planning, and educational resources) however during interviews with potential users it quickly became apparent that these are very social people looking to teach and learn from one-another.
Bringing together gardeners & the environment
Habitat answers the question of connection by facilitating communication and collaboration between native plant gardeners. Local and personalized, Habitat helps promote intentionality, native plants, and wildlife stewardship.
Catalog plants and keep track of what's in your yard
Habitat answers the question of connection by facilitating communication and collaboration between native plant gardeners. Local and personalized, Habitat helps promote intentionality, native plants, and wildlife stewardship.
Discover plants native to your region
Habitat answers the question of connection by facilitating communication and collaboration between native plant gardeners. Local and personalized, Habitat helps promote intentionality, native plants, and wildlife stewardship.
Inspired by garden envy
When I notice an amazing yard while walking through my neighborhood in Portland, OR, closer inspection will almost always reveal a Certified Backyard Habitat sign. The program in this region is a co-effort from the Portland Audubon Society and the Columbia Land trust to “support urban gardeners in their efforts to create natural backyard habitats” which helps “make our cities a healthier place, for ourselves and for wildlife.”
Do these gardeners all know each other? How do they know what to plant? How do they keep track of it all? What kind of tools would be most useful for them? How did they get started gardening for wildlife?
These questions became the foundation for this project.
Plant care apps are an introvert’s playground but struggle to offer community connection...
Competitive analysis of four existing apps — focusing on their features and successes as well as their shortcomings — helped me validate that there was room for social innovation.
...but gardeners are largely extroverted users!
I put out a call in a number of native plant-specific online groups and conducted 5, hour-long, interviews: 3 with long term accomplished gardeners and 2 with new homeowners breaking ground in new gardens.
Gardeners are motivated by a sense of environmental responsibility and a drive for wildlife stewardship.
“The backyard garden is one small patch of the bigger quilt and it would be nice if everybody could make their patch as colorful and inviting to nature as possible.” — Sam [Research Participant]
Gardeners are are looking for personalized tools. Something that's tailored to their region and goals.
“When I was starting out [with gardening] I wanted to do was find information on native plants that bloomed at different times of the year but couldn't easily find it” — Kayla [Research Participant]
More than anything, gardeners learn from and want to interact with other gardeners.
“I am totally obsessed, so I tried not to like overdo it [in conversations with friends] because like, every time I see them, I'm like, OK, let's talk about native plants.” — Terry [Research Participant]
Connecting neighbors through design
Meet eco-neighbors Daniel and Ramona. Daniel is our experienced gardener. I approached designing Habitat with a goal of facilitating communication between these two so that they can learn from each other and help each other achieve that backyard sustainability they’re seeking.
🤔 How might we bolster community amongst habitat gardeners?
Plant with broad strokes and leaving room for growth
Based on my research, I determined that a solution for Daniel and Ramona would need to address product features in three main categories:
Social
For communication between local gardeners.
- User profiles.
- Friends and following.
- Community board.
Educational
For beginners to learn and everyone to access expert advice.
- Native plant database.
- Expert advice/articles
Personal
For record keeping & planning in the garden.
- Personal Garden.
- Onboarding Quiz.
- Plant wishlists.
Ultimately I decided that a broad-but-shallow MVP — namely, varied features with limited capability at launch — would be best. This strategy lays the groundwork for agile feature-growth based on user feedback.
Plot the garden
With an outline of what kind of features Habitat needed, I crafted a sitemap to determine where they would go an how users could move between them.
Visualize the solution
I find that laying out low-fidelity screens to visualize how a user would move through the final product really helps bring it to life at this stage. This is when you can show a non-designer what you're working on and say "Look, it's real! It's like this!"
Analog inspiration helped keep the UI familiar and learnable.
Some of my biggest inspiration for the information and visual design of this product actually came from gardening books that my research participants recommended.
I discovered that Gardeners have certain expectations about how information will be presented and I wanted to rely on familitary to help make my product learnable.
A look and feel rooted in nature
Earthy but not too earthy. Hip and modern enough to attract our younger users while not alienating our older ones. We wanted this app to feel friendly, cooperative, encouraging, and eco-conscious.
Bringing key features to life through iteration
Let me show you a bit of the process from "it's just an idea" to "hey, that looks functional!" Here's a look at how the social profile page
Users resonated with my solution and their feedback pushed key adjustments
After constructing high fidelity prototypes I conducted two rounds of usability testing — both moderated and one unmoderated — to validate and improve my solution.
6
Moderated Usability Tests
8
Unmoderated Usability Tests after iterations
100%
Success rate on key flows
Customization and localization
In iterations, I took advantage of the space to incorporate a new localization feature: a weather widget and make an edit button more apparent outside the menu for users to add their own cover photo.
Form clarity
In iterations I reordered elements and added supporting text clarifying the purpose of these fields and adding context to the autofilled elements.
Labels and icons
In iterations, I added additional icon options and basic labels to this screen. I also added an asked for “save to wishlist” option.
Live prototype
Click you way through this prototype to experience the design for yourself.
My solution allows users to:
