Overview

Garden Pro is a DIY garden design mobile application that brings the most suitable plants as well as plant care information for users, and outstands by providing reliable design consultants for your backyard to have a nice and beautiful relaxing day!

Project Type

Individual Academic Work

Year

2020.1- 2020.3

Role

UX / UI Designer

Background

I’ve worked as a landscape designer in Southern California for around 2 years. Landscape consultancy has a high demand in Southern California, however, professional designers are limited in this field, also, design fees may not be affordable for common people. While I worked there, I often received friends and neighbors’s questions about how to design and maintain their backyards. When I helped with them, I gradually had an idea about creating an app to help them find inspirations of designing backyard, as well as providing professional knowledge about maintaining plants.

User Research

In order to have a better understanding of the needs and concerns that people have with designing or maintaining their gardens, I conducted user interviews with 5 participants:

After the interviews, I concluded and classify people’s concerns and organized an affinity diagram, from the diagram we could find that there are 4 topic that people mentioned and focus on: Getting inspirations, selections plants, maintenance and finding expert.

Persona

In order to have a better understanding of the needs and concerns that people have with designing or maintaining their gardens, I conducted user interviews with 5 participants:

Information Architecture

In order to have a better understanding of the needs and concerns that people have with designing or maintaining their gardens, I conducted user interviews with 5 participants:

My Reflection

This project is a milestone for me, because it is my first UX project. As I mentioned, I was being a landscape designer for 3 years. I think the biggest difference between traditional design work and UX design is that UX is a collaborative craft, it is very important to be able to communicate effectively. There are so many tasks that require it, like interviewing users, requirement gathering from stakeholders, usability studies, etc. I have to say currently I am not great at it, but I should be able to get it after doing more and practicing more.

Another thing that I learned from this project is, sometimes we may find many questions after interviews or surveys, but we really need to simplify our focus, prioritize the organization into a clear hierarchy. Otherwise, the design will lose focus and deviate from the user's needs.