Bloomunity was created as an app to connect gardeners, help monitor plants in community gardens, and explore other gardens in the area. The app can help users find out more about plant care for their existing and potential plants. Bloomunity was an idea and a group project worked on by Renee Cheng, Owen Widdis, and Sam Abele. We conducted user interviews, created an affinity map, designed wireframes, and made a prototype.
Our team wanted to focus on the project specs Environmental Conservation and Food Accessibility & Waste. We thought about a grocery app, but scratched it after coming up with the focus of community gardens. It felt like there was a lot of potential in designing this app and I personally got into gardening a couple years ago. The team spit out several ideas and features the app could have to help users be and feel apart of a gardening community.
We wrote out 11 interview questions based on community gardens. We wanted to gather information about what problems people face with community gardens. In total, we conducted 9 in person interviews. We used a shared Google Doc to write down our notes and met the next week to build an affinity map on Miro.
Our team moved all the interview answers into a Miro board to begin sorting the data into categories. Based on our interview data, we categorized the barriers that would prevent people from wanting to participate in community gardens. We found that the most frequent concern was general plant care, which included watering, sunlight needs, and staying on top of tasks. When designing, we took these factors into consideration to ensure we met the concerns of our prospective user. We used this data to also create Bloomunity's problem statement.
During the growing season, people who have an interest in gardening and plant care struggle with participating in a fruitful community garden. People often have difficulties with coordinating and maintaining these gardens because of a lack of education, time, and structure. Because community gardens are not as successful as they could be, community members are pushed to consume more food grown with unnatural chemicals.
Our team decided to conduct a comparative analysis to research into what community garden related apps offer. To our surprise a community garden app similar to our idea did not exist in the Apple App Store. So our team looked into gardening related apps and community garden websites to compare to our app. The main takeaway was that our app needed to feature online messaging, plant guides, scheduling capabilities, plant identification, and locating community gardens.
We wanted to sketch out a storyboard for an example of how the app would be used. We used this storyboard to help us develop our user flow diagram below.
We created our user flow be based off a user who would already have an account in Bloomunity. So the user in our flow chart would go through the process of finishing a task for their community garden, learn about a plant, and sign up for a new task.
Our next step was to create some medium fidelity wireframes based off our sketches, storyboard, and user flow. We divided the pages amongst the group. We wanted to have fun with the project and give the design a personality. My design idea for the group was to incorporate some fun plant puns into the app which can be seen above on the Party Thyme Garden page.
We used these wireframes to conduct a user usability test to identify any problems users may run into while using the app.
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