Gardenio Case Study

Designing community balancing online connection with offline action

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.

our solution

Design a scalable community feature that includes a Q&A forum 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.

• Gardenio is an organic gardening subscription service, they send you seasonal herbs and vegetables along with pots, proper soil, and fertilizer on a properly timed basis.

• Their goal is to get people back to gardening and make it so easy they have no fear in starting a sustainable hobby, that also ends with something they can eat.

• Their current app includes all the basic information the members would need to be successful in growing and harvesting their food.

• Gardenio’s CEO currently provides all the content and is the sole resource for guidance to his members when they have any issues with their plants.

Competitive/ Comparative Analysis

Gardenio fairs well by compared to other gardening apps. Adding a recipe feature brings it up to the top competitor. Adding community engagement would allow Gardenio to stand apart from other gardening apps.

By comparing other online communities we were able to understand what was useful, necessary, and favorable.

• Our users wanted something to provide them local gardening information and the ability to communicate with other gardeners.

• Though upvotes and likes are common, people we interviewed mentioned upvotes and likes do not necessarily make a response credible.

• Downvoting was also negated because people we interviewed said they wanted a kind community vibe and said they often felt intimidated to contribute to the conversation.

• Expert distinction was something our users wanted, we knew we needed to find a creative way to do this considering our clients didn’t want to create addicting social media nor did we want credibility to seem arbitrary.

Persona

About

Effort Tolerance: 9

Market Direction: Has some garden beds, always looking to expand her garden.

Gardenio

Goal: Maintain her garden for a holistic practice that also brings delight, wants to engage in a safe community that offers visual inspiration.

Challenge: Keeping up with a garden with a busy schedule, seeking informed information is also time-consuming, doesn’t always trust sources

What Gardenio can do: We can provide Jenny with an all-encompassing tool that gives direct plant guidance through app content and a community to discuss problems and share to encourage her to continue her journey.

Objections: Doesn’t want to spend too much time reading through tons of information, feels intimidated by others to seek or ask for advice.

Messaging/benefits:
“A community with common goals”
“Get out there and get your hands dirty!”
Offer a platform with valuable information and a respectful supportive community

• Gardenio can use the user input as free research and marketing.

• Members will continue to feel engaged between deliveries.

• Communication between members and with Gardenio will increase brand loyalty and business growth.

Building in existing app

Our stakeholders did not want the community feature to exist in silo, so we wanted to incorporate it have it feed into the existing portion of the app.

• The grow section is currently used to show members exactly how they should pot up their new plants, we decided new members seeking guidance in this would also be inspired by photos of other members. These would auto populate by incorporating popular tags the members use about the specific plant.

• The enjoy section was initially information provided by Gardenio on how to harvest and store the garden items. We added a feature that would feed recipes uploaded by members to encourage each other. This also brings forth Gardenio’s purpose in not only organic gardening but sustainability and food justice.

• The original app had an issues section here it gave users an opportunity to reach out to Gardenio via email if they were having a plant problem. We renamed it guide to promote a more positive connotation to keep users from feeling discouraged. We added pieces of our forum that would auto populate with tags and conversations surrounded the specified plants.

• Additionally, after a content audit I recognized some repetition from the essentials and grow section, we relocated the “standards” from the grow screen to the essentials page to condense the information.

Usability Testing

I did remote usability testing to see how to improve upon our app. The main takeaway was that the inspiration feed within our community feature was not as clear as the forum. Many users overlooked it and were unable to find where recipes and inspiring photos were within the app. We reworked the visual hierarchy to solve for this issue.

Deliverables

We achieved our goal in creating an attractive and fun way to be inspired by the Gardenio community

• We gave users an easy way to look at what other gardeners are doing to gain inspiration.

• We allowed users to save posts and recipes to refer back to at a later point.

• Giving recipes a separate feed allows users to easily search for recipes with their plants succeeding in Gardenio’s mission of empowering their community to grow their own food.

We were successful in making an engaging forum for users to ask and answer questions about their plants

• This gave Gardenio a way to keep their members engaged in-between orders and a space to give them tips so Gardenio could use it’s bandwidth elsewhere.

• Using color-coded cards provided a more visually pleasing and easily sorted forum to not overwhelm users.

• We allowed for tagging and searching so users could see if their question was answered before asking the community.

We implemented user profiles to commit to the importance of credibility within the Gardenio community

• Allowing users to have a profile that incorporates their garden and actual photos of their plants was how we creatively solved for credibility without being arbitrary.

• Adding a location and climate zone gives helps guide users in the types of plants that do well in differing areas as well as gives Gardenio more context to their community as they scale.

• Users can access their saved inspiration through their profile, making it easy to refer back to recipes and gardening inspiration.

Results

Our stakeholders were thrilled with our ability to find the balance between engagement and just another addicting social media app

We successfully incorporated Gardenio’s goals and vibe within the community addition

We should be seeing the community feature implemented later in Fall 2020

Future ideas

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