Seedling is an app that helps new gardeners find their green thumb.

Caring for plants is a way to connect with other living things in an time that feels disconnected and polarized. Spending time outside and with plants, boosts mental health!

It can be incredibly frustrating to invest time and money into a garden that fails. I’ve had this happen more than once.

When Victory Gardens were in vogue, regional manuals were distributed that told people exactly what to plant and when, and there were campaigns that promote gardening. 

These manuals would not work now because of climate change and affecting temperatures and planting schedules, and because people have different motivations for gardening now. 

New gardeners want to plants that interest them, rather than gardening to supplement their food supply. Gardening is a creative outlet.

The goal of research was to uncover what kind of tool can provide short-cuts to success for new gardeners. 

The importance of finding early wins is is a recurring theme.

The research for Seedling took place across 13 weeks, following the "Double Diamond" pattern of Discover, Define, Ideate, Deliver.

Research began by holistically studying the gardening “problem space.” I did not want to invent or assume a problem and continued to move forward in “discovery” mode for a couple of months until the core problem crystalized.

● 12 User Interviews

● Desk Research

● Extensive Competitive Analysis across 11 apps and platforms

● An Online Survey that reached 122 participants. 

Research lead to low fidelity wireframes which were iterated to an MVP app concept.

An interview script supported discovery conversations and collected first-hand qualitative insights with expert gardeners, new gardeners, and everyone in between, looking for patterns that might lead to success shortcuts. 

The interviews, were transcribed in Otter.ai and then analyzed to reveal core themes. 

During this time, desk research also helped to identify current gardening trends and themes.

A Mind Map combined themes from interviews and Desk Research, like factors that lead to gardening success, motivations and frustrations.

And they often generalized their successes and failures to represent their overall aptitude, i.e., having a green or brown thumb. 

The positive spin is that interview subjects were highly motivated to build on the small successes they’ve had with plants. When something survives or blooms, they feel aptitude with that type of plant, and are encouraged to try other plants.

They reported that the most rewarding parts of gardening are putting your hands in the dirt, getting fresh air and exercise, feeling connected to seasonal rituals, and sharing what they’ve grown with family and neighbors.

It was essential to determine what currently exists in the "gardening support" space. 

I reviewed 10 plant and gardening apps across 26 features to gauge what’s out there, to compare features, and to read reviews to understand what people like and dislike about existing apps.  

Features like plant identification, plant care instructions, and watering schedules are baseline and won’t provide a competitive edge in a new offering. 

Most apps offer advanced features behind paywalls; some of which seem gimmicky, like light meters. Other paid features include automated care schedules for larger volumes of plants, or creation of multiple gardening plan spaces. 

I didn’t see much in the way of social sharing, or community, within the apps so I ran a second competitive analysis on 4 social media platforms. I found that these forums are primarily:

● Focused on sharing

● Finding gardening inspiration

● Gardening communities.

What I did not find was a sophisticated solution to help new gardeners get started and make good decisions.

I felt like I’d identified a combination of user needs and potential gaps in the existing market and began to explore scenarios of the app supporting first-time gardeners.

While I had a direction, I needed quantitative data to back my assumptions or point towards better solutions. I wanted to dig deeper into what specific features would be attractive to gardeners at different levels of expertise so I could make user-driven design decisions.

I created a detailed online survey in Survey Monkey that was informed by all of the previous research activities.

122 people completed the 13 question survey, with around 70 people volunteering for follow-up usability testing.

The survey asked participants to rate their experience level as a gardener, and covered a lot of the same questions that had yielded good information during the interviews. Participants were also asked to rank how useful specific features would be to them. This allowed me to compare how responses varied across experience levels and to define what was attractive to new versus experienced gardeners.

● There’s no substantial correlation between age and being a new gardener. It seems that gardening is a hobby that people might begin at any stage of their life as they gain free time and a suitable planting space.

● 93% want to spend 2-4 hours a week gardening, which means they will need help to scale their plans.

● Motivations were pretty consistent across the groups – people want stress relief, to create a nice outdoor space for entertaining and relaxing, and many people want to attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.

● Most people choose a combination of garden locations including beds and pots.

● Generally people want to grow some edibles – herbs and vegetables, along with some perennials for their landscape, and maybe flowers.

Everyone likes the idea of a quiz to help them select the best plants, and a calendar for gardening activities based on their location. 

Only new gardeners are interested in clear instructions for setting up and planting their garden. This is part of what I consider to be a standard set of baseline features, as mentioned earlier. I did not build these activities within the wireframes, but they would be a focus for an app geared towards new gardeners.

With the survey information, I solidified two personas. There are a lot of similarities between them, so I’ve focused on Natriya.

Now that her kids are a little older, she’s ready to take on a new, creative hobby that she can incorporate into their home life and food. She's a great cook.

● Fresh veggies that her kids like to eat and herbs for cooking. 

● Asian foods that her parents can pick from her garden.

Survey results identified key features that will help new gardeners, like Natriya, achieve their top tasks and helped to solidify the initial concept for Seedling. 

● It’s my theory that if we can help people reach early gardening success, they will be motivated to continue.

The cornerstone feature of Seedling is the “garden plan quiz,” which recommends plants likely to thrive in your space based on responses to 8 questions about location, garden space, your plant preferences, etc.

I socialized the wireframes, and incorporated feedback, at all levels of fidelity and conducted in-person usability testing with 4 participants. 

Usability testing identified needed UI enhancements such as unclear labels and descriptions, and clarified what behaviors users expect within the Results page.

I love this quote from one of my testers. It epitomizes what I hope to accomplish with Seedling; enable small, garden successes that make new gardeners feel like they can take on more.

​​​​​​​An MVP prototype of Seedling the plant quiz user flow, and could be used for continued usability testing and iterating towards a more mature version of the Seedling app. 

https://os514v.axshare.com/#id=ekkfql&p=home

● Competitive analysis could have been more valuable if I had purchased and used each app (in addition to what I learned about app capabilities and user reviews). Some apps are more capable, and closer to the solution I was aiming for, than I had realized.

● AI transcriptions cannot interpret many accents, which foiled my ability to automatically pull data from at least 4 of my interviews. 

● Seedling should specifically focus on outdoor gardeners, and exclude indoor gardeners because their needs and circumstances are be different.

● Reach out to 70+ volunteers and work with them through this spring/summer planting season.

● Test and iterate everything! (Design, text, interactions…)

● Add a few more questions to the quiz and fine-tune the order/logic. When people are on a path related to something they love, they do not perceive answering questions to be a chore. They prefer to invest a few more minutes and get better data.

​​​​​​​More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/business/economy/how-we-spend-our-days.html

Time spent alone increased by an hour per day in 2020 https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/time-spent-alone-increased-by-an-hour-per-day-in-2020.htm

Most popular social networks worldwide as of January 2022, ranked by number of monthly active users

Americans Now Spend More Time in Their Backyards Than They Did Before the COVID-19 Pandemic

Social Connectedness, Excessive Screen Time During COVID-19 and Mental Health: A Review of Current Evidence

Gardening trend that bloomed during the pandemic is here to stay

Suppliers Field Growing Demand For Seeds From Pandemic Gardeners

What are the Long Term Effects of Climate Change?https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-are-long-term-effects-climate-change

Pollinators

GARDENING TRENDS AND STATISTICS

National Gardening Survey 2021 Edition

Survey says more people are gardening, even Millennials

Love and happiness in garden conservation

Place Keeper: Oak Spring Garden Foundation