Healthy Plants
Background
Our product is a plant health application for home plants. Most plant lovers have multiple plants in their homes. However, depending on their species and the environment they are in, different plants have different watering schedules, making it difficult and time-consuming for the user to keep track of their watering schedules. To address this issue, our app includes features that allow users to keep track of multiple plants' watering schedules in one place, remind them when it is time to water a plant, and keep documentation of when they water their plant.
Timeline
Fall 2022, 2 weeks
Team
Features
💡 Task 1: View/manage the garden
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This feature allows the user to view a full list of plants they currently own, including their species names and the number of days away from their next watering. The user can manage this list when needed (i.e. delete a plant when they no longer want to keep track of its watering status.)
💡 Task 2: Add plant
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This feature allows the user to add a plant to their garden. They need to select the plant’s species, its distance to the window, and the last time it was watered so that the system can set the most suited watering schedule for it.
💡 Task 3: Individual plant
watering schedule
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This feature allows the user to check the watering schedule of each individual plant. The user can also indicate that they have watered the plant on this screen, and the countdown timer will be set to the next watering date.
Design for Mobile
💡 Task 1: View/manage the garden
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💡 Task 2: Add plant
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💡 Task 3: Individual plant watering schedule
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Design for Desktop
💡 Task 1: View/manage the garden
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💡 Task 2: Add plant
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💡 Task 3: Individual plant watering schedule
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From mobile to desktop, what are the major changes, and why would we do that?
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We added a “select” feature under “my garden” (task 1). We realized that when users want to perform the same action on multiple plants at once, they might want a one-click solution. The screen size of desktop/laptop is significantly bigger than mobile, which allows them to view/select different cards with minimal scrolling.
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We added a “mark as watered” feature under “my garden” (task 1). The bigger screen size of the desktop/laptop allows us to add additional action buttons on top of the screen. When the user waters multiple plants at once, they can select them all and click on this button to indicate that they have watered them without having to click on each plant individually.
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We added more detailed information on the individual plant’s page (task 3). Due to the limited screen size, we included only the most important watering information in the mobile version. However, desktop sizes allow us to display more in-depth information about our plants, and the devices' nature also enables our users to accomplish more complicated actions. Therefore, we decide to make use of this advantage by adding additional information to make our application more complete and comprehensive.
Design for Smart Watch
💡 Task 1: View/manage the garden
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💡 Task 2: Add plant
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💡 Task 3: Individual plant watering schedule
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For this task, we decided to not implement this feature on the watch format. Instead, we decided to redirect our users to finish this task from desktop or mobile applications. We do this because the size of the watch is simply not big enough to hold much information, and the task of adding a plant requires searching and entering information, which is too complicated for this device.
For this feature, we deleted the original interface designs and use another set of interfaces to finish the same task. The reason we do that is because of the nature of this device. Smartwatches have small screens and cannot finish complicated tasks, but it comes in handy in terms of pushing notifications. Therefore, we decide to take this advantage and fit our designated task into this framework.
What's special about smartwatch applications, and how did we address these questions?
We recognized the special properties of smartwatches, and we tried our best to accommodate our existing designs for this device. The major actions we’ve taken to accomplish this goal are as follows:
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Reduce unnecessary features and UI components and information. Since the size of the watch is very small, we would only keep the UI components and information that are really necessary on this device. For instance, pictures are good content for our previous designs, but there is no space for that on smartwatch screens, and removing the picture does not fundamentally affect our task, so we decided to drop it.
Using the watch as a connecting medium. By nature, smartwatches are not designed to be fully functioning devices. We took this into consideration and make use of it by adding screens that can redirect our users to desktop/mobile. In that way, the watch closes up the ecosystem of our application and makes the user experience more complete.
Making use of the existing advantages of smartwatches. As is mentioned in the previous section, smart watches have small screens and cannot finish complicated tasks, but it comes in handy in terms of pushing notifications. So instead of doing a watch version of our task, we take the content of it and put it into what the watch already offers by default.
We think task 3 is well-suited for this device, or could be adapted in a way that suits the device well. The most important part of task 3 is to remind our users to water the plant, which fits with the watch’s properties very well. Task 1 is neither well-suited nor poorly suited for this device: we could do it here, but there’s nothing really special that makes it really good or bad. Task 2 is poorly suited for the watch because the task was too complicated and the information is just overloaded for a watch’s tiny screen.
In general, because of the natural limitations of the watch device, we ended up reducing the features and using fewer screens compared to our previous designs. As is discussed above, we make use of the fact that watch is the interconnecting medium of different devices, and that watches are handy when pushing notifications, to leverage our design.
Reflections
What did we learn from designing for different devices?
In our experiences designing for different platforms, we realized that different platforms have different properties, and it is hard for us to create a one-fits-all design workflow. We should make use of the different advantages and design a user experience ecosystem that’s complete and interconnected. The good things about designing for different platforms are that we got to learn more about cross-platform design, and that it allows us to approach our topic in a more comprehensive way. The challenging part of it is that we have to be very flexible and think about what’s best for each platform, which highly increases the workload and level of difficulty. We think the pain point of our design is the lack of balancing different features on different platforms. There are no features that are specialized for a certain platform, so our users might not be motivated to use them all. Also, the details of our UI design and content could be further improved if we had more time.
We started by designing for mobile. Why?
We would start the same way if we had to design another app because we believe that the mobile app is a good balance in terms of screen size, the amount of information it can display, and the level of difficulty in the tasks it can handle. It also has a good balance between being comprehensive and convenient. We can use a computer to do very complicated tasks, but we cannot walk around carrying a laptop all the time. And we may wear a watch and look at it all the time, but we won’t be able to complete difficult tasks on it. Therefore we will still choose to start with the mobile app if we were to design another application from scratch.