This is an app designed for plant parents. The goal of the app is to help diagnose plant health issues.

While there are many apps that help users identify their plants and offer general care advice, there are only a few that offer health and pest issue care. The existing apps offer suggestions of health issues but they don’t provide a comprehensive treatment plan.

Our plant diagnosis app will let users identify common plant health issues which will affect users with houseplants by diagnosing the problem and providing a treatment plan.

Becoming a plant parent is a popular life event for many people, whether it occurs when receiving a short-lived bouquet of flowers or inheriting a vining plant from grandparents. While some people are naturally gifted with a greenthumb, not everyone has this talent and struggles to keep plants alive. 

There are many apps available to help keep track of watering schedules and helping to identify types of plants. However, plants are susceptible to inadequate living conditions, pests, and disease which can lead to untimely deaths. These users need a an app to help diagnose these issues and provide a treatment plan to ensure their plants thrive.

My main focus was to design an app with one clear purpose - diagnose and treat houseplants. I wanted to invoke the feel of a medical app, but keep it friendly and approachable.

For the homepage, my focus was to ease the user into the experience with a friendly tone (similar to walking into a doctor’s office) and highlight the main functions of the app.

I really liked the idea of referring to plants as patients. This continued the theme of using a medical app, and it personifies a user’s plants. Many plant parents name their plants and I felt this would personalize the experience even more.

The lo-fi prototype can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/3MZAkkU

A unmoderated study was conducted to help determine the usability of the app and ease of completing the entire user flow. The biggest challenges for users were:

1. Difficult to identify icons

2. Photos representing symptoms was confusing

3. How to add a new plant was not clear

New iterations for certain pages were made to address these concerns. For the symptom selection process, the conversational tone was helpful, but it confused users when they wanted to add a new patient to their profile. I adjusted this to a single-click button to simplify the process.

Additionally, users were confused by the photos for symptoms and then overwhelmed by the list of options. The design was iterated several times and it was determined that a drop-down selection menu was the clearest way to present this information.

These revisions can be viewed in full in the hi-fi prototype here: https://bit.ly/3MVZctR

The usability study was extremely helpful! Even though I had friends and family as participants, they provided helpful feedback that improved my initial design.

A few comments they had:

"I love the concept of the app and the user interface was easy, straightforward, and worked as expected.” - Participant B

"Interface is clean and I like the use of the word patient." - Participant D

I would also like to design a compatible, responsive website for the app. Competitors were missing this and I believe it would appeal to users that don’t primarily use a mobile device.

The full case study can be reviewed here!