Work

About

Resume

Brief

Story Board

Early Research

User Interview

User types

Paper Prototype

Final Outcome

Outro

Green Harbor

A community garden app to help people be more engaged in urban gardening.

This application constructs a community to get more people knowledgeable about and involved in urban gardening in Pasadena. We leverage community gardens as our key method to encourage users to garden together and learn together.
Jasmine Li
Mona Wang
Hannah
Yi Wang
2023/12
3 months
UX Research
User Interview
Usability Testing
Wireframing

The Problem

How might we get more people knowledgeable about and involved in urban gardening in Pasadena?

The Solution

A platform about community gardens to enable users to garden together and learn together.

3 Main Features

Join a Community Garden

Read Articles about gardening

Schedule Gardening-Related Events

Story Board Video

If the video couldn't be loaded, please click here:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eD4rePEJP/?vd_source=ee7d9405b77508a584bf330beac9e027

The process behind..

Early Research

Our early research mainly focused on three topics: information about urban gardening, features of our users, and activities related to urban gardening.

Research Outcome Video

If the video couldn't be loaded, please click here:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SD4qemE9o/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0&vd_source=ee7d9405b77508a584bf330beac9e027

User Interview

6

Interviews

3

User Types

Community &
Individual Gardeners

Interview Goals

Challenges while treating customers with food restrictions

What kind of platforms they would like to collaborate with


Non-Gardeners

Interview Goals

Challenges while treating customers with food restrictions

What kind of platforms they would like to collaborate with

Affinity Mapping

Why people love urban gardening

1. Food supply
2. Ornamental value
3. Loving plants
4. Collaborating with others, social space
5. Culture preserving

Tips for beginners

1. Find a gardener to lead you, join a community.
2. Start with something small.
3. Actually put hands to the ground, and keep doing it.

Reasons for not gardening

1. Lack of time
2. Their concern of letting plants die due to the lack of knowledge and skills.
3. High budgets
4. Not interested in plants

How do people feel about urban gardening

A sense of achievement, pleasing, self-sufficient, nourished, refreshed.

Way to engage people with gardening

Social media, open day, open education, flower exhibitions, volunteer activities, friends' invitation, handbook...

Which plants to choose

1. Easy to grow and don’t not need much time.
2. Large food production.
3. Friends’ recommendation.

The Insights

With a population of 130,935, the highly-dense Pasadena community is a proper place to hold social activities, building communities for residents to enhance social bonds, and learn skills from each other.

How might we leverage social activities to encourage more people in Pasadena to get involved in urban gardening?

83% of the individuals we interviewed do urban gardening with the motivation of ornamental value, which brings them a sense of achievement and relaxation.

How might we properly guide people to learn gardening abilities and organize their schedule to join urban gardening?

For the reasons of not gardening, 67% of the individuals we interviewed mentioned the concerns about their ability to sustain plants and a lack of time.

How might we use ornamental value as a selling point to attract more people into urban gardening?

User Types

Then we explore 6 different behavioral continuum and pick two out of them to create a matrix. We identified the user types for each quadrant, and decided to select community garden volunteers as our user group.

Motivation + Opportunities

After we confirmed the user type, we raise two questions: What are the key reasons community garden volunteers' use the app? What are the opportunities we want to take advantage of?

Connecting

  • Want to find other people interested in planting.
  • Want to get to know other volunteers to garden together.
  • Want to exchange knowledge and skill sets with others to achieve better gardening outcomes.

Learning

  • By being a part of a community, they have a way to learn more about urban gardening.
  • Green Harbor will be a platform to learn more about ornamental value and enhancing the aesthetics of community.

Convenience

  • Want to get notifications of the recent events.
  • Want to join a community garden close to home.
  • Green Harbor will have a scheduled feature to help users better organize time for urban gardening.

Paper Prototype & Usability Testing

3

Testers

Testing Objectives

Challenges while treating customers with food restrictions

What kind of platforms they would like to collaborate with

Challenges while treating customers with food restrictions

What kind of platforms they would like to collaborate with

Task 1

Log in and join in Pasadena Community Garden.

Reflection

  • Use accurate gardens name.
  • Make the categories bigger.

Task 2

Join an event on Nov 15th.

Reflection

  • Add event titles on the popular events.
  • Change the button 'Join the Event' to 'Add to Calender'.

Task 3

Leave comments on an article about watering plants.

Reflection

  • The current 'Article' icon will be confused with the 'Chatting' icon.
  • Add the category of the article on the article page.
  • Change the 'Type Bar' to the button 'Add a comment'.

Task 4

Chat and send an emoji to Amy.

Reflection

  • Change the 'Chat' icon and put it on the top of the home page, instead of in the navigation bar.

Task 5

Change the garden you have joined.

Reflection

  • Create a new “My garden” page and put the button in the navigation bar.

Final Outcome - Low Fidelity

Logging Process

  • Help users find and join a community garden.
  • Enable users to easily find their ideal gardens through automatic locating, and also filters for both categories and distance.

Logging Process

  • Help users find and join a community garden.
  • Enable users to easily find their ideal gardens through automatic locating, and also filters for both categories and distance.

Home Page

  • A dashboard to notify users of the popular events, articles and their schedule.
  • Enable users to build social relationship with other gardening lovers in ‘Chats’.

Event Page

  • Notify users of the recent events and popular events based on the calendar.
  • Enable users to effectively schedule events and check the planned events.

Logging Process

  • Help users find and join a community garden.
  • Enable users to easily find their ideal gardens through automatic locating, and also filters for both categories and distance.

Article Page

  • Provide Articles related to urban gardening to help users be more knowledgeable about it.
  • A recommended section for currently popular articles and seasonal articles to help users follow the trend.

My Garden

  • List the detailed information and recent activities of the garden.
  • Make users more engaged in their communities and have a better sense of belonging.
  • Encourage users to participate more in the events of their community garden.

Future Developments

3 Questions

Possible Solutions

  • How can we enable users to better share their gardening results?
  • How to attract users who are mainly individual gardeners or who are not sure if they want to participate in community events?
  • How to deal with the users who registered online but have never participated in offline gardening.

Customer Profile

Sharing feautre & Explore page

Customer Profile