UX Design
GardenCare
A mobile app for indoor plant owners that consolidates daily care tasks, room-by-room plant tracking, and access to plant experts. It replaces guesswork with a structured, personalised routine.
Project Overview
Introducing the Project
A mobile app for indoor plant owners that consolidates daily care tasks, room-by-room plant tracking, and access to plant experts. It replaces guesswork with a structured, personalised routine.
Role
UX Designer
Duration
40 hours
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Problem Statement
What problem are we solving?
A clear problem statement is what keeps design decisions honest. Without it, every feature choice becomes a guess.
Context
Indoor plant ownership has grown steadily in urban households, but the diversity of plant species makes consistent care genuinely hard. Each plant has its own watering rhythm, light tolerance, and seasonal needs. Most owners manage this through memory, generic reminders, or nothing at all none of which are built around how plants actually work.
Problem
When care is scattered across phone alarms, mental notes, and occasional Google searches, owners miss tasks, apply the wrong care at the wrong time, and have no reliable way to diagnose a plant showing signs of stress. The problem is not motivation. It is the absence of a tool that understands plants, rooms, and schedules together.
How Might We
Indoor plant ownership has grown steadily in urban households, but the diversity of plant species makes consistent care genuinely hard. Each plant has its own watering rhythm, light tolerance, and seasonal needs. Most owners manage this through memory, generic reminders, or nothing at all none of which are built around how plants actually work.
Role & Constraints
Context of this project
Naming constraints is not a sign of weakness in a portfolio piece. It is a sign that the designer understood what they were working with.
Solo Designer
I handled the full process from research through hi-fi screens, without peer review or a developer to pressure-test implementation assumptions.
No Primary Research
Time constraints meant the research phase relied on desk research and competitive analysis rather than direct interviews with plant owners. The personas are directional, not validated.
One-Sided Design
The Plant Support feature covers the owner's flow in full. There is no corresponding interface for the expert receiving and responding to queries. This is a structural gap in the end-to-end experience.
Sprint Scope
Several screens in the add-plant flow exist in a single state only. Edge cases such as empty states, error handling, and first-time onboarding were not explored.
These constraints shaped every prioritisation call I made. In a production context, the immediate next step would be five to eight qualitative interviews with plant owners across experience levels, paired with a dedicated sprint for the expert-side interface.
User Research
Understanding the users
Given the absence of primary research, I relied on desk research, plant care community content, and behavioural patterns from analogous productivity apps. The personas below should be read as design hypotheses, not validated profiles.
Personas
Marta Colombo
31 years old
Goals
Marta wants to keep her plants alive without having to research each species individually. She is looking for simple reminders and clear step-by-step guidance that fits into a busy daily routine.
Pains
She forgets watering schedules and cannot tell whether a plant is sick or just dormant. Online advice feels overwhelming and rarely applies to her specific situation.
Davide Ferri
38 years old
Goals
Davide manages a large plant collection spread across multiple rooms and wants a structured library to track each plant's care history and individual needs. He also wants a direct channel to get expert advice when unusual symptoms appear.
Pains
He loses track of which plants have been fertilised and when. Existing apps treat all plants as contextually identical and do not account for the fact that conditions differ significantly from room to room.
Emphaty Map
Marta Colombo
Thinks and Feels
- Slightly guilty when she realises she has forgotten to water for days.
- Uncertain whether her plants are thriving or just surviving unnoticed.
- Does not want to kill another plant, but does not know where to start.
Hears
- "You just need to water it once a week" from plant shop staff."
- Some plants basically take care of themselves" reassurances that do not match reality.
- Friends mentioning reminder apps but finding them too imprecise to be useful.
Sees
- Friends with lush, healthy plants on social media.
- Generic care labels that say "water occasionally" without useful specifics.
- Online forums with contradictory advice about the same plant species.
Says and Does
- Waters all plants on the same day regardless of individual needs.
- Searches for symptoms online only after noticing something is wrong.
- Buys plants on impulse, then struggles to remember their species or needs.
Davide Ferri
Thinks and Feels
- His plants are part of the home and deserve proper management.
- Frustrated that no tool maps care to the physical layout of a living space.
- Proud when a plant he rescued starts producing new growth.
Hears
- Experts recommending seasonal adjustments to watering frequency.
- Other collectors warning about species that are sensitive to pot size and soil type.
- Discussions about indoor air quality and the measurable impact of plants on a home.
Sees
- A large collection spread across rooms with different light exposure and humidity.
- Dedicated plant communities online with highly specific, species-level advice.
- Other collectors using notebooks or spreadsheets as substitute plant trackers.
Says and Does
- Names each plant individually and treats care as an ongoing relationship.
- Checks soil moisture by touch rather than by calendar.
- Consults multiple sources before repotting a high-difficulty species.
Competitive Analysis
Exploring the market
The competitive analysis focused on identifying what the main plant care apps do well and where the market consistently falls short — particularly around room context, task management, and expert access.
3 gaps identified
1
No Room-Based Context
Room-based organisation exists in Planta but remains absent across the rest of the market. That partial adoption confirms the need without solving it: users who switch apps, or who start on Greg, Vera, or PictureThis, have no way to map their collection to the physical spaces they actually live in.
2
No Expert Access Layer
Both Planta and Greg offer some form of expert help — an AI diagnostic tool and a community Q&A respectively — but neither provides a direct, synchronous channel to a human expert. Users who need a fast, reliable answer for a specific plant problem are still left waiting on community responses or navigating an AI that may not cover their case.
3
No Environmental Feedback
No competitor provides feedback on how a plant collection contributes to home air quality. This is a missed opportunity to make care feel rewarding beyond individual task completion, and to create a metric that sustains long-term engagement.
Synthesis
From insights to decisions
The synthesis matrix makes the reasoning behind each feature explicit. It traces every product decision back to a specific research finding or persona need, so the "why" is never implicit.
Research Insight
Marta forgets care tasks because she has no plant-aware reminder system. Generic alarms carry no information about which plant needs what
User Need
Schedule care without relying on memory
Feature
Activity Feed
Research Insight
Davide's plants live across rooms with different conditions, but no tool lets him manage them by physical location
User Need
Organise plants by their real environment
Feature
Room Plant Library
Research Insight
Both users lack an in-app path to get help when a plant shows unusual symptoms. They are currently forced to leave the app and search externally
User Need
Diagnose and resolve plant problems quickly
Feature
Plant Support
Ideation
Defining the idea
Rather than building one complex feature, I focused on three tightly scoped capabilities. Each one solves a distinct failure point identified in research. Each one is usable independently
Activity Feed
A daily-first home screen showing which plants need care today and what is coming up next. The feed organises tasks by urgency and plant, so the user never has to remember what needs doing or navigate to individual plant profiles to find out.
Driven by: Marta's inability to track which plant needs what without a system built around plant-specific logic rather than generic time-based reminders.
Room Plant Library
A plant catalogue organised by the room each plant lives in. Within each room, plants are displayed with their key care parameters visible at a glance. New plants can be added through a guided flow that supports both manual search and camera-based identification.
Driven by: Davide's frustration that no existing tool reflects the physical and environmental differences between rooms in a home.
Plant Support
A contextual help layer accessible from within any plant's profile or from a dedicated navigation tab. It gives users a direct path to either a human expert or a curated article library when they encounter a problem they cannot diagnose on their own.
Driven by: the market gap identified in competitive analysis. No competitor provides in-app expert access, forcing users to break their care workflow to seek help externally.
Visualizing with wireframes
The design moved directly to hi-fi screens after rough paper sketches, given the solo sprint constraint and the clarity of the feature scope established in research.
Information Architecture
How the app is structured
Mapping the architecture before moving to screens was necessary to confirm that three distinct features could coexist within a flat, four-tab navigation without creating dead ends or forcing users to make counterintuitive choices.
Design Gap Acknowledged:
The IA covers only the plant owner's journey. The expert who receives Plant Support requests has no designed interface in this version. There is no admin panel, notification system, or response flow. This is a significant structural gap. The expert-side experience would need a dedicated design sprint before the Support feature could be considered shippable.
Solution
Designing the solution
The final design translates the three features into a product that feels calm and personal. It is structured enough for someone managing a large collection, and approachable enough for someone caring for just a few plants.
#
"Activity Feed" functionality
Driven by: Marta's need to see which plants require attention today without navigating to each profile individually.
The home screen opens on the activity feed, organised into two tabs for current and upcoming tasks. Each card shows the plant's name and the type of care required, with a completion state that reflects progress through the day. Above the feed, a summary metric shows the collective environmental contribution of the user's plant collection, turning routine care into something measurable and rewarding.
Activity Feed's functionality Userflow
The proposed user flow for this feature is the following:
Activity Feed's Screens
The following mockups illustrate how this flow translates into the interface:
#
"Room Plant Library" functionality
Driven by: Davide's frustration that no tool maps plants to the physical rooms they occupy, where light and humidity conditions differ.
The Plants section organises the collection by room rather than by species or alphabetical order. Each room groups its plants and surfaces their shared environmental output. Individual plant cards show the custom name, species, and key care parameters. The add-plant flow supports both text search and camera-based species identification, and walks the user through naming and room assignment before confirming the addition.
Room Plant Library's functionality Userflow
The proposed user flow for this feature is the following:
Room Plant Library's Screens
The following mockups illustrate how this flow translates into the interface:
#
"Plant Support" functionality
Driven by: the absence of in-app expert access across all analysed competitors, which forces users to break their care workflow to seek help externally.
Plant Support gives users a direct path to help when a plant shows a problem they cannot diagnose alone. From a plant's profile or from the dedicated nav tab, the user can choose between a conversation with a human expert or a curated library of care articles. The two-path structure serves both users who want an immediate human answer and those who prefer to research independently at their own pace.
Plant Support's functionality Userflow
The proposed user flow for this feature is the following:
Plant Support's Screens
The following mockups illustrate how this flow translates into the interface:
Testing Strategy
What I would test next
No usability testing was conducted during this sprint. This section describes the testing plan I would run before moving GardenCare toward development.
Round 1 — Concept Validation
Before any hi-fi work, on paper sketches or lo-fi wireframes.
- Show plant owners the home screen concept and ask them to describe what they would do first, without any prompt.
- Present the room-based organisation structure and ask whether it matches how they actually think about their plants at home.
- Probe on the environmental metric: does it feel meaningful and motivating, or does it feel arbitrary?
Round 2 — Usability Testing
On the hi-fi Figma prototype
- Task: "Add a new plant to your kitchen using the camera." Success means completing the flow without backtracking.
- Task: "Your Monstera has yellow leaves. Find help without leaving the app." Success means reaching Plant Support within two taps.
- Task: "Check what care tasks are due this week." Success means navigating to the upcoming tab and identifying at least one pending task.
Key hypothesis to validate:
The biggest design risk is the add-plant wizard. The flow is long enough that a first-time user might abandon it before confirming. I would specifically test whether users experience the steps as valuable (they are learning about their plant) or as friction (they just want it added). That result would determine how much of the setup can be deferred to a post-addition profile completion phase.
Learnings
Retrospective
This section is an honest look at what worked, what I'd change, and what I actually learned not a summary of the deliverables.
What worked
Giving plants individual names in the design emerged naturally and turned out to be one of the strongest emotional hooks in the product. It reframes care as a relationship rather than a chore.
Room-based organisation as the core navigation metaphor gave the app a spatial logic that felt immediately intuitive, even without user testing to confirm it.
Keeping the navigation to four items forced hard prioritisation decisions that improved the overall information architecture.
What I'd do differently
I would run at least three quick informal interviews with plant owners before sketching anything. Even short conversations would have grounded the personas in real language rather than inference.
The expert-side of Plant Support should have been scoped and wireframed before finalising the owner-side flow. Designing half of an interaction creates a false sense of completeness.
The environmental metric needs a clearer explanation on first use. As designed, new users have no context for what the number means or how it is calculated.
The main takeaway
"Designing for plant owners taught me that people do not manage plants. They manage relationships. The moment I started treating each plant as an individual with a name and a personality, every design decision became easier and more grounded."
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