Homegrown

App Concept

2019

I’ve got a lot of plants at home, and have a particular penchant for buying exotic plants if I can find them. Plant care can be hard to navigate. Homegrown is my answer to this problem.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying different plant apps, and came away frustrated with each one. One app may allow you to upload a photo of a plant and connect it to plant info in the app’s library. Another app may be great at scheduling watering and feeding, but has no real plant library. I have yet to find a plant app that has all the features necessary to make caring for plants easy and comprehensive.

My goal in designing Homegrown was to create an app that is with users through every point in their plant care, while providing a database of plant information to draw reference from. The app is meant to be helpful in any stage in plant collecting, whether the user is a low commitment plant owner or a master gardener with years of experience.

User Personas

It’s super important to consider the users who would be using Homegrown. Users would have a wide range of expectations when they download a plant app, and those expectations would largely be dependent on individual personalities and life experiences. I created three user personas that would cover a wide range of “plant people”, from low to high experience levels.

Empathy Map

Features

Add your plants manually or from the Plant Library
Create named collections of your plants
Research plants in the Plant Library
Follow a care schedule for each of your plants using Homegrown’s Calendar
Push reminders for when your plants need care
Share your garden with friends and followers
Create a wishlist of your favorite plants
Meet other gardeners to chat about plants and give/receive plant advice

Plant Detail Page

Each plant in Homegrown has its own plant detail page, which displays photos, care instructions, and fun plant facts. Each plant has tags such as hardiness zone and plant type. These tags allow users to search by tag to find the best plants for their area or lifestyle.

Viewing an owned plant will display a slightly different layout than that of an unowned plant. Owned plants will display care cards reminding the user when they should water, feed, trim, or repot their plant.

Gif of Homegrown's Garden Page functionality

Garden Page (Center)

Once you sign up for Homegrown, your default homepage will be your Garden. Your Garden displays all of the plants you’ve added as ‘owned’. From this page you can organize your plants into collections, which comes in handy if you are trying to separate your plants by location or care needs.

Editing your Garden is easy. Buttons at the top of your garden allow you to add a plant or collection. Additionally, long pressing on any owned plant will display option bubbles for easy editing, duplication, and deletion.

Calendar

One of the biggest issues for gardeners is being precise in caring for each specific plant. No two plants have the same needs, which can make owning plants confusing and stressful.

Homegrown’s calendar mechanism is a core function of the app. Viewing the calendar in monthly view allows you to see which days are care days. Clicking on a specific day will bring up your tasks for that day.

Plant Library

Another core feature is Homegrown’s Plant Library. Here a user can browse and search plants by name or tag. The Library would have entries for a variety of plants, but is intended to be a constantly-growing resource. If a user is unable to find the plant they’re looking for in the Library, then they have the option to add the plant to the database.

Garden Profile

Community needs to be a key part of Homegrown. There is so much information about plants on the internet, much of it conflicting. By having a community of gardeners adding and interacting with plants on the app, we should come to some consensus on the best way to care for each type of plant.

Of course, the profile serves another, more obvious purpose: for people to share their gardens with each other.

Homegrown Webpage

Image of Homegrown's Webpage on Mobile, Macbook, and Imac

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Isometric mobile view of Homegrown's Webpage