My brother moved into a new home with a backyard and wanted to grow a vegetable garden.
He asked me for help. I didn't know the local plants either, and neither did most of the internet.
Context & Role
Project: Reap, a gardening companion app for mobile and responsive web
Timeline: 12 weeks
Team: Solo, a student project
My role: End-to-end, research through design handoff
So I built an app that helps with:
PLANT INFORMATION
Learn about your plants and discover the best bee-friendly ones to grow, with tips on the perfect planting time.
CARE REMINDERS
Never over- or under-water again, set care reminders and get rain updates so you can relax while your plants thrive.
CONTACT EXPERT
Stuck with a gardening problem? Book a call with an expert for local tips and tricks.
DESIGN WITH AR
Want to design your garden in real time? Use Augmented Reality (AR) to find the perfect spot for every plant.
The way ahead
This case study follows the Double Diamond process, Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver, since I ran the full cycle solo from initial research through handoff.
Discover
Observations
These were my early assumptions, based on my own experience and my brother's frustration. The research below existed to test them.
- Inexperienced gardeners are often unsure how to take care of their garden and maintain it.
- One always forgets to water the plants or overwaters them.
- Often, information on the internet is not compatible with the local region.
User Research
I ran surveys and interviews to understand gardeners' pain points, needs, and goals, new and experienced alike. Surveys helped me quantify which problems were most widespread, interviews let me dig into the reasoning behind them.
Key Insights
Insight 1: Gardening advice needs to be local, not generic. 75% of survey participants relied on non-local sources, and interviews confirmed the same gap, regional differences in what to plant and when weren't being addressed anywhere.
Insight 2: Watering is the single most universal pain point, but it's not just about remembering. 100% of survey participants wanted a reminder system, and interviews revealed the deeper issue, people don't just forget to water, they don't know how much a specific plant actually needs.
Insight 3: People want prevention, not just fixes. Interview participants noted that plenty of content exists for saving a dying plant, but almost nothing helps them avoid the problem in the first place.
Together, these three insights shaped everything that came next.
After 100's of sticky notes sorting, followed by affinity mapping and analyzing a pile of data, here's a list of insights: User Research Full Report
QUANTITATIVE: SURVEYS
8 Participants
12 Questions
Age: 20 to 60
Local plant information
is crucial
75%
75% of the participants use websites to gain information about gardening. All the participants rely on YouTube for information when trying something new but fail to find locally relevant content.
access to expert/guide
can be improved
12.5%
Only 12.5% of the participants have referred to a local gardening group for guidance. The others do not know if there is a platform to find one.
watering reminders
is badly needed
100%
All the participants shared that they want an app to remind them when to water which plant. Keeping track of which plant requires how much water is challenging.
QUALITATIVE: INTERVIEWS
3 Participants
13 Questions
Age: 20 to 60
Common Pain Points and opinions on Experts:
- The participants said they refer either their family elders or friends for gardening help because they have been doing it for a long time and know the local requirements.
- The participants shared that they want an app to remind them when to water which plant.
- The participants said they would like to know the indigenous and organic solutions to insects, slugs, and other gardening problems.
- “When to plant what, transfer from pot to soil, and harvesting time” was a common problem that the participants sought guidance for.
- A fascinating insight was that the participants feel there is content on how to solve a problem or fix a dying plant, but not much to prevent and correctly maintain the issues.
Define
Problem StatemenT
How might we help gardeners, whether just starting out or bringing real experience from somewhere else, get guidance that's actually local and easy to act on, so they can grow with confidence instead of guesswork?
user personas
Two personas capture the range of people Reap needed to serve. Juan is an enthusiastic beginner whose plants kept dying despite following generic YouTube tutorials, he needed guidance calibrated to his real conditions, not generic advice. Jess is the opposite problem: an experienced gardener who moved to a new city and found her hard-won expertise didn't transfer, the exact gap that started this project in the first place.
user journeys
Despite pursuing very different goals, both journeys dipped at the same moment: too many options with no way to narrow them down. That shared friction point became one of the clearest signals for what Reap needed to solve, not more information, but better filtering and guidance.
Develop
Both personas hit the same wall in their journeys, too many options, no way to narrow them down. This phase was about building an information architecture that could filter and guide, not just present a list.
overview
Before wireframing, I ran an open card sort to understand how users would naturally group and label gardening tasks and information.
Card SortinG
Equipped with a better understanding of user personas, their needs, and the paths to accomplish desired tasks, the sitemap was created: a hierarchical view of the site’s information, including the structure of the pages and the content contained within. After several discussions and revisions, it started with a basic structure and soon developed into a much clearer one.
Card Sorting & Sitemap Full Reportdesign evolution
As the design evolved from a lo-fi to a hi-fi prototype, one could see the ideas forming better with each step. The evolution of the design from Lo-fi to Hi-fi for two key features is shown below:
HOME SCREEN
Low Fidelity
Mid Fidelity
High Fidelity
EXPERTS LIST SCREEN
Low Fidelity
Mid Fidelity
High Fidelity
usability testing
Methodology: Moderated Remote | Moderated in-person TestingThe usability test was done with six participants. This was very helpful in identifying the weak points to understand what worked well and what could be improved. A glimpse of the improvements is illustrated below.
Usability Testing Full ReportPreference test
Preference test
A preference test was conducted with 24 participants to validate the design decisions. Two images were tested for one of the onboarding screens. The purpose of testing the two images was to determine if users prefer a photograph of a plant or an illustration. The test helped define the rest of the onboarding screens as well as the overall theme of the application.
The most common words used to describe the preferred Option B were ‘warm,’ ‘friendly,’ and ‘inviting.’One of the participants stated that their reason for choosing the screen as, “I went for this one, based on the image showing the illustration of a person, and I think this goes nicely with your tagline, in that a goal is being worked on ‘together.’”
DeLIVER
Peer review
Design can never be done in isolation; feedback from colleagues helps only to improve the design further. After a successful peer review, the following revisions were incorporated:
Peer review based updates - Full report
Feedback about functional improvement and design consistency:
- The green button says ‘Yes,’ but the purpose is to cancel the reminder. Green has a positive connotation and might be better used to reinforce positive interactions with the app. Therefore, I changed the button text from ‘cancel’ to ‘remove.’
- Removing the back button from all the landing pages.
- Keeping only the first letter of the text as capital.
design handoff
After the extensive phase of designing & testing with constant iteration, it is time to prepare the project for a design handoff. A detailed Design language system was prepared to keep everyone in the same loop.
Design language system - Full reportFinal Design
Responsive Web Application
Design your gardenwith Augmented Reality
Design with the real-time view, get more information about your plants and plan your next plant with the Good and Bad Combination. Check and set a reminder for each plant.
Interactive Prototype
Learnings of the UX journey
Hi! I'm Bhrigu, the person behind this app design.
One of the primary learning of this journey began with the choosing of the app topic. The inspiration was my brother, who had just moved to a new city and home with a beautiful backyard. He wanted to grow a vegetable garden but had little guidance to begin. Since he knows I am interested in plants, he asked for my opinion, but coming from a different country too, I didn’t know the regional plants or what they needed to thrive in this environment. I wanted to create something that is accessible to everyone, especially to those living in new places who wish to express their love for plants and nature.After the user interviews, I included the feature of meeting local gardening experts. Local indigenous gardening techniques result from years of experience and are reliable. I understood that someone from Latvia has a very different gardening experience than one from Australia. Therefore, a gardening expert can be a great help to guide you with the local techniques.Another aspect that I included was designing the garden with Augmented Reality. This was a challenging bit. There are no guidelines, as of now, for designing UX for AR-based applications. I went down a rabbit hole in my aspiration to design an AR Garden designing app. A few days into researching, I found myself downloading Adobe Aero, a beta version of Augmented Reality design software. I was ready to go to all lengths to perfect the UX of Reap. Soon I realized the core of UX designing, it is a process of improvements and never really perfect.On a personal note, I learned a few life lessons while working on this project. One of them is to be open to being wrong. I learned to let go of my ideas and my assumptions. Getting too attached to my ideas stifles innovation because it limited me from looking at other options and beyond. It changed my perspective from looking at ideas to defending my pride. Another significant learning was not to make assumptions. I was amazed at my assumptions and how many of them altered by simply questioning these assumptions to the potential users.
