InEarth - The Ultimate Gardening Assistant

The problem

Gardening is a complex activity which requires expert knowledge about soils, planting, spraying, and harvesting, and is not something most people know how to do at a high level today. Also, these tasks take a lot of time. Time which people in this busy world frankly just don’t feel like they have. However, many people would like to start gardening whether it be for health reasons or simply as a hobby.

The Solution

Create a mobile app to guide gardeners through their journey of planning to set up a garden up until maintenance. The idea is to provide the mobile application as a free tool that our users can download to their device. Moreover, we also offer the external smart water and nutrient dispenser that can be controlled through the application that can be purchased separately. Reduce routine work associated with gardening to maximize enjoyment.

User Research - Interviews

We performed seven semistructured interviews with gardeners of different levels, from novice users to experts. Our objective was to highlight the current gripes and inconveniences of gardening practices.

Persona

Lisa Westmore, 38 - Content Editor- Bellevue, WA

Lisa is a Northwest native. She grew up in Portland and moved to the Seattle area to attend college at the University of Washington. There she graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature and after college started working as an editor for the Seattle Times. Then she moved to San Francisco for a couple of years to work in a .com company. In San Francisco she meet her husband Alex and after three years of relationship the got married and decided to move back to Seattle.

To relax, Lisa enjoys gardening and it's the proud owner of a vegetable garden. She loves traveling, historical novels and a glass of pinot. She has been gardening for a few years now, but it wasn't till one of her girls became vegetarian that she decided to grow her own vegetables. Now Lisa wants to grow the vegetable garden in order to produce enough fresh veggies and herbs for the family during the Summer months. Lisa also want to become copy chief at her company before she turns 40.

Storyboard

System map 

Paper Prototype

High Fidelity prototype

Testing

We performed 5 usability testing sessions with the paper prototype and 5 usability testing sessions with the hi-fi mockup. All of our metrics improved after iterations.