GREEN THUMB PLANT APP: 2018 VERSION

THE BASICS

Green Thumb is an app that provides information to users on various plants, such as how to care for them, the type of environment they thrive in (and ones they dislike), as well as if they require little or quite a bit of maintenance.

The first iteration of this was created in May 2018 as part of a Quick Fire Briefbox brief, meant to be completed in a 2 to 4 hour time frame from start to completion. The specs were simple: the app’s purpose was to tell users how to care for their plants, images of plants had to be used whether they were photographs or drawings, the interface had to be easy to navigate and read, as well as not have too much information on the page.

The second iteration is currently being completed as a project for an Intro to UI/UX course in April 2019 and there is a page dedicated to that version.

The screens were designed for an iPhone 6. This was the second UI project I had created ever.

At the time, it took me about 3 hours to complete.

1) Launch Screen

This is the screen a user would first see when the app is launched if they were not signed in previously. There is a button to sign up for a Green Thumb account and another to log in with Facebook.

2) Low Maintenance Plants

Since I thought it was best to stick to three screens, I made the jump to the screen reserved for low maintenance plants. For discussion’s sake, to access it, you would click on the menu icon, where it would list this, the high maintenance plants, settings, etc.

In this scenario, though, let’s say that the user had already did that and ended up here. This page would list all of the low maintenance plants that the app currently has. The user could also search “low maintenance plants” by using the search bar to also be directed to this page.

Personally, I am that person who knows the name of some plants, but I can’t tell you the names of others. Now if someone showed me a picture of a plant I happened to see a few days ago, I would recognize it fairly quickly. I wanted for others to be able to scroll through the plants and still be able to identify them, even if it’s from a picture.

3) Plant Details

Let’s say the user found a low maintenance plant that they were interested in and clicked on its picture. They would be brought to a plant details screen like the one shown above, which lists the name of the plant, care information, as well as a picture of the plant.

I chose to add in the icons to not only break up the text, but to also categorize some of the information given. It’s easy to put too much information, so I did my best to include some of the most important information that I thought the user would be looking for.

NOTES

Looking back now (months after I completed this version), on the launch screen, I should have created an option to just simply log in without having to connect through an existing social media account. Some do not like having to connect social media accounts to apps. There is a very good chance that others won’t even have a Facebook account to begin with nor do they want to join Facebook. With that said, it’s something that should be revised.

I imagined the picture on the launch screen sort of almost being a video on a loop with the leaves blowing in the wind to make it look more interesting, but as we know, this is just a still and at the time, I didn’t think I was capable of doing that. Now? It’s possible. We’ll see where the second iteration takes me.

I received feedback on Briefbox that the black was too harsh against the background of the main screen, and I agree. It needs to be toned down or changed to at very least, a dark grey. Instead of lowering the opacity on the background picture, a solid background would be better. The green text and icons might stay unless I decide to also change them.

To take this further with the search option, a way to filter plants by characteristics would very useful. Ex. red plants, large plants, small plants, etc,. Maybe even some sort of a photo recognition tool where the user takes a picture of a plant, uploads to the app, and then is presented with the screen of plant details.