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Flora Finder
Project Overview
Redesigning and Improving an Educational Plant Identification App
Duration
Five weeks
Tools
Figma, Parrot AI, Maze
Deliverables
Research, product design, UX/UI design, concept, prototype, and testing
Problem
As a prairie plant enthusiast and frequent user of the Illinois Wildflowers plant identification app, it was quickly apparent that its UI was severely lacking. In delving further into the issues at hand it was observed that it is made by and for those already familiar with plant taxonomy and scientific literature, thus excluding casual users and those without a scientific background.
Solution
Flora Finder was redesigned to not only make plant identification more inclusive, but to broaden the knowledge and history of local plant life. In addition to learning how to easily and correctly identify plants, it was expanded to include colloquial knowledge, history, and projects to further educate and engage users of all scientific backgrounds.
Understand
User interviews
Affinity mapping
Personas
Define
Competitor analysis
Problem statement
Feature roadmap
Ideate
Site map
Low-fidelity wireframes
Composition exploration
Design
Style guide
High-fidelity wireframes
Prototyping
User Testing
Research plan
Insight indentification
Ideate
Finalize design
Because people use plant ID apps for a wide variety of purposes, it is important to see the differences and commonalities in competitor apps. One of the main shared features observed is using instant photo uploads to identify the plant. This feature is great for a quick ID, but does not include puzzle-solving or teaching the plant identification process.
Competitor Analysis
Market Analysis for Plant Identification Apps
IL Wildflower
Photo-based ID
Scientific Info/Location
“Fun Facts”
Plant Logs
Manual Identification
Picture This
Photo-based ID
Scientific Info/Location
“Fun Facts”
Plant Logs
Manual Identification
PlantNet
Photo-based ID
Scientific Info/Location
“Fun Facts”
Plant Logs
Manual Identification
iPhone Visual Lookup
Photo-based ID
Scientific Info/Location
“Fun Facts”
Plant Logs
Manual Identification
6 interviews were conducted to ascertain users’ plant identification habits and needs. The biggest problem identified was incorrect and/or inaccurate results from automated photo upload apps. Not only would manual identification eliminate most of the inaccuracy, putting knowledge and power back into the users’ hands, it can also make identification fun and game-like.
One of the biggest differences in the original hypothesis was related to the ID wizard- despite the initial assumption that a single-page wizard would be preferred, five out of six users shared that they preferred a multi-page wizard with a single question per page.
User Interviews
Understanding How, Why, and Where People ID Plants
The primary problem is incorrect or inaccurate results from automated photo upload apps
Users want a single question per page when manually identifying plant life
The primary motivation for using plant ID apps are education, curiosity, and problem solving
The majority of users access plant ID apps to identify botanicals in their own communities, yards, and on walks in their neighborhoods
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While the original Illinois Wildflowers app focused on those familiar with scientific texts and procedures, it was important to redesign Flora Finder with a focus on diverse users with a variety of scientific experience and backgrounds. This provided the opportunity to be more inclusive to the full spectrum of laypeople and professional botanists alike.
Research Synthesis
Understanding the Users’ Needs and Wants
POV
POV
I’d like to explore ways to encourage people to engage with the natural world around them in order to help users connect with nature and bring awareness to local flora and conservation efforts
How Might We
cross-collaborate with local conservation groups and efforts to ensure plant safety and effective conservation efforts?
I’d like to create a platform that is beautiful and easy-to-use in order to make learning plant identification simple, engaging, and fun because it’s often a disconnected process that yields inaccurate results
How Might We
make learning plant identification easy, fun, and accessible?
POV
POV
I’d like to explore ways to help users build community into their day-to-day lives because finding outdoor activities that foster connection can be difficult.
How Might We
foster human connections between diverse groups of people and experiences with a shared interest in plants?
User Interviews and competitor analysis provided key insights to guide design decisions moving forward. By focusing on both scientific and colloquial language, botanical information, “fun facts,” and personalized logs, Flora Finder could prove itself to be engaging, fun, and educational for a wide spectrum of people.
Project Goals
Defining Priorities and Roadmapping User Focused Solutions
Identified Needs
Feature Solutions
Prioritize both academic and laypeople terms, descriptions, and data to ensure pedagogical accuracy and accurate user edification.
Embracing amateur and expert information and techniques to explore a wide variety of topics including plant classification, “Plant of the Day” gamification, and extracurricular projects including art and recipes.
Learning plant identification and classification through manually entering the necessary data including plant type, petal number, and leaf structure, thus encouraging a closer look at our natural world.
Prioritizing inclusivity for all users regardless of education or ability.
Scientifically accurate
Educational
Interactive engagement
Accessible design
Sitemap
Developing Interactive Navigation for Exploratory and Engaging Design
One of the main intentions of Flora Finder is to make plant identification more akin to solving a fun puzzle, and to encourage users to engage with the botanical life in their community. In addition to simply revealing and selecting the correct plant(s), it was important to incorporate “fun facts” and engaging activities that can be practiced using local flora.
Low and Mid Fidelity Wireframes
Ideating and Early Stages of Design
In figuring out the basic layout, it was extremely important to prioritize the variety and personalization of users’ plant identification journeys. This necessity required wireframes that focused on simple navigation and robust filtering, while maintaining easy and intuitive flows.
Onboarding
Wizard
My Logs
Log List
Moodboarding
Design Influence and Inspiration
Because Flora Finder is based on nature, it was important to source inspiration that relied on natural, organic colors and shapes. The natural world has a full spectrum of color, so it was an exciting challenge to find UI elements that were flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of results, while still staying grounded in brand reliability and identification.
Visual Design
Brand Identity and Visual Language
Thoughtful consideration was given to the visual design of Flora Finder. In addition to elements such as font and color, it was necessary to be mindful of the fact that all of the data is going to be viewed on a smaller screen, and most often used outdoors. This lends itself to a very earth tone color palette and components that focus on readability.
Home Page
Finalized Designs for Mobile
The newly designed homepage offers clean, simple UI that invites the user to build logs, create projects using local botanicals, and explore their communities to find and tag the plant of the day.
Onboarding
Tailoring Suggestions to Your Interests
The data gathered from the user interviews indicated that plant ID users include a diverse variety of interests, background, and willingness to engage with the app. Most of those interviewed expressed enthusiasm toward personalized and/or gamefied features such as history of a plant, art projects incorporating plants, and exploring “Plant of the Day” finds to accumulate points.
This lead to the development of an optional onboarding questionnaire for users to indicate which themes most interested them for eventual personalization.
Identify a Plant
Learning Plant Taxonomy
Learning scientific methods and language as a layperson can be overwhelming and difficult to the average user. By simplifying the identification process, users can easily tackle the unique combinations of features of all plants to narrow down and select the correct option. By incorporating tags, users can learn easily digestible data about the world around them such as whether the plant is a pollinator and/or native to their region.
My Logs
Clear, Easy, Customizable
Part of the fun of manually identifying plants is the cataloguing and review process. This is accomplished through the My Logs feature which allows users to customize their saved lists and share them with both their contacts and other users within the Flora Finder community.
The feedback received after user testing with five participants was overall very positive with a few minor cosmetic updates. Testers responded well to the UX functions and flows themselves, with the primary feedback relegated to a few screens indicating that they could be redesigned to be either more elegant or to make the content more easily readable.
Usability Testing
Elevating User Experience Through Valuable Feedback
Plant Color Before
Plant Color After
Plant Profile Before
Plant Profile After
Reflection
Looking Back and Moving Forward
Key Takeaways
One of the biggest joys in this project was talking with people about their plant ID experiences and seeing the diverse ways and places people put them to use. It was extremely rewarding to take an existing product that I love, but is definitely clunky, and crafting it into something that many more people can use. By cleaning up the UI, making the UX more user friendly, and adding features such as community tags, plant fun facts, and less-scientific language, I believe that Flora Finder can be a great tool to teach people the puzzle solving of plant identification and encourage people to explore their outdoor communities.
Next Steps
If there were no major time or budget deadlines, there are a variety of features that would be interesting and engaging to build out, particularly around community and gamification elements. For example, it would be great to build out the “Plant of the Day” engagement to allow users to search for and tag daily assigned plant finds to earn points and in-app rewards.
Additional feedback that garnered enthusiasm was focused on creating specific “tag maps” including themes such as natural dye plants or edible plants. By incorporating these features, one can reasonably assume that user engagement and time spent on the app would increase.