Becky Schmader

Gardenio Community Feature

problem

Gardenio wants to bring their app to the next level by adding a community feature that will foster learning, growth, and inquiry.

solution

Design a scalable community feature that includes a Q&A forum but isn’t limited to just discussion boards and would also have a place to engage with the community through inspirational pictures or videos. A feature that would keep the users engaged, feeling prioritized, and empowered to get back in the dirt.

Client Information

Our client, Gardenio, set us up with an initial problem which was that they wanted a new community section on their app that would bring additional value tot heir customers. With this they gave us a problem statement as well as requirements for the solution. These guidelines helped to clue us into who Gardenio really was, what they really wanted, and how we could best serve them. We needed to create this community feature with users in mind, but also our stakeholders at Gardenio.

Client Problem

Gardenio wants to level up their app features and bring the Gardenio community together with a space dedicated to learning, growth, and inquiry both in and outside of their existing app.

Client Requirements

• Identity - the users should not be hiding behind an avatar

• Communicate - communication within the app is important

• Media - visuals and visual learning are a key part of online society now

• Trusted - users need to know the information they’re getting from each other is credible

• Organized - the app needs to be well designed so users don’t get lost with it

• Self managed - the community should be able to monitor itself as best as possible with minimal management from Gardenio

• Engaged - the community should be engaging but should not keep users away from gardening

Click these to jump ahead!

Research

After knowing what our parameters were in order to best meet our clients needs we knew what needed to be researched. Our course of action was to survey people to better understand people at large and their relationship to online communities, interview some of those survey takers to better understand in depth, analysis of the current markets that Gardenio is a part of, and do general research about the importance of creating an online community for businesses.

Survey

Our survey focused on how people interact with online communities, how they go about finding help online, and what their experience was with gardening. This helped us better understand who would potentially be using the Gardenio app in the first place, as new gardening users, and help us understand what people go to online communities for. From this we were also able to get in contact with a few people to interview to better shape this identity further. We attempted to contact current Gardenio users but as their current customer base was so large and so new the stakeholders decided that it wouldn’t be as beneficial as our findings with the online community survey. 

From this survey we found:

• 70% of survey takers would be interested in an online community for gardening

• On a scale of Never to Always, 71% of survey takers sometimes trust online communities for support and advice

• 60% of users currently are part of an online community

• There was a large variety of feedback but features people love from their current online community are learning from others with more knowledge, seeing pictures and videos, and being part of a kind and helpful community

With these thoughts in mind we knew that credibility was going to be a key feature that we would need to look into. Additionally creating a visual learning space was also going to be important. Knowing that a majority of survey takers were part of an online community we went forward with interviewing some of these survey takers.

Interviews

I conducted research with three individuals who had taken our survey and asked questions within the following categories: 

• Communities they currently used

• Where do they get information 

• Credibility

• When starting a new hobby

• Gardening

It was important to gather information from them not just about gardening but how they gather information in general for any hobby that they have. How do they find solutions? Is it from people online or is it from wikipedia? The interviews proved to be very helpful and we had some great key takeaways which were: 

• Things that are popular are not always the best content 

• It’s important for communities to be welcoming as they are sometimes intimidating to join

• Pictures and visuals in general are very important to learning online as well as gaining inspiration

• Credibility is hard to create but comments often cement the credibility of a post

• Local information is highly valuable

Competitive and Comparative Analysis

We first decided to compare Gardenio to Blue Apron as our stakeholders mentioned them as an inspiration to Gardenio. In doing this it cemented the idea that Community was a feature that needed to be brought into Gardenio in order to make them stand with their inspiration. Additionally shopping within the app became a sort of parking lot idea for us.

Next we wanted to compare Gardenio to other plant and gardening apps out here. We quickly saw that Gardenio stood toe to toe very well with these other apps but that including a Community section would allow Gardenio to not only be of value to their customers but additionally valuable to everyone in the gardening world. 

Lastly we needed to do some comparative research of online communities and what the design norms were within this. We saw that comments are indeed a norm and additionally that upvotes/likes were also common everywhere. We knew though that likes and upvoting wasn’t the route that we wanted to go as one of our user interviews made a great point to counter this. Often when something is well liked or upvoted it is not always the best content it is just simply the most popular. In knowing this we knew that credibility needed to be built elsewhere. Additionally many of these online communities have ways to make experts stand out with distinction, however a user interview mentioned that often these titles or badges can be very arbitrary. So with both of these key pieces known we went forward with innovating a new way to build credibility.

Development

Going into development we began by each of us creating sketches. I took the lead within this part of the project and began to synthesize the sketches and creating a low fidelity wireframe. We faced an additional challenge during this project as we were all being forced to work remotely. This project occurred during the Covid - 19 outbreak which meant we needed to create new ways to collaborate together. One of the most exciting parts of this project was doing a sort of remote design studio together in which we separated and created wireframes and then reconvened to piece together what our new design would be within Figma. This process proved to be exciting, collaborative, efficient, and a great new way to work remotely.

Shown above are early wireframes of the forum, community home page, new inspiration post, profile, and inspiration pages. Early development proved that designing an aesthetically pleasing forum would be difficult. Forums are not often innovated upon and are typically just a wall of text, something we wanted to avoid. From this we also moved on from a hero image for the community homepage and removed images to denote different forums. Lastly we decided to make all pictures on the inspiration page square instead of allowing for longer images. This would prove to be better for viewing.

When presenting our early designs to our stakeholders they mentioned that we had been designing the community feature in a sort of silo, separate from the original pages of the app. They asked us to try to incorporate them more within those original pages.

Above we have the couplings of the original app page on the left and the new page on the right. We found that incorporating the new communication features into the existing pages was actually very easy. Additionally testers found it to be a really nice and simple way to find more content about their plants.

Usability Testing

Going into usability testing we had a mid-fi prototype which lacked pictures still. The main takeaway from our usability testing was that while the app was easy to navigate, it was hard to distinguish the difference in what information you would receive in inspiration vs the forums. We realized we needed to find a way to show the users that the inspiration section was more visual and for gaining inspiration to use for their gardens. We also needed to show that the forums were more for discussion and while pictures were in some posts, it was much less visual.

Ideation

Here are the different iterations of the community home page. Here you can see that the inspiration representation first went from a hero image, to individual images, to smaller images, to larger images. In testing we found that most users were skipping over the inspiration section and moving right onto the forums. With our final design I decided to simply enlarge the images to allow for more visual hierarchy and allow inspiration and forum to share visual importance.

In this image is the progression of the forum representation on the community homepage. We started with a text focus, then moved to images, then moved back to text based buttons. We ran an early test with the homepage that had forums represented with pictures and the testers quickly became confused what the difference was between inspiration and forum. Moving back to a text based button allowed the users to better understand that forums were less visual than the inspiration section.

Lastly we have the different iterations of the forum page. This proved to be an exceptional challenge. I began with the highly text focused left version. We moved into a cards direction and finally allowed for image previews to be on the forum list. The final iteration I feel allowed for each of the posts to breathe on their own and have their own space. It felt less like a wall of text and more like individual posts which is what we wanted for easier consumption.

Prototype

After testing, speaking with our stakeholders, redesigning and ideating, we finally had a design that we were more than proud of. Our design included the new community features incorporated into the original app pages as well as its own standalone page. It demonstrated proper visual hierarchy to allow the user to better understand the inspiration and forum section, and had a smooth interactions that effortlessly fit within the feel of the original Gardenio app.

retrospective and next steps

This was my final project in my 10 week bootcamp and it was an amazing experience, despite occurring during a global pandemic. Our clients were an exciting duo trying to change the world by getting more people to garden, and we were given the opportunity to help them do that.

The team that I was a part of were highly communicative, great to collaborate with, and people I could trust. It was a fantastic way to end my bootcamp experience. Leaving this project I knew I was ready to take on the world of UX for I had successfully created a polished user experience that fit our customer and their users. From this project I learned how to collaborate remotely, work with a real world client, and utilize every bit of research.

On top of all the designing from above we were also able to create some of the parking lot ideas that had come up during our sprint. Our next steps would be to implement those, which you can see below.