This was a fun brief that was entirely self-devised within the General Assembly UX Immersive course. The seed was planted to create an app to buy plants!
We only had a week and so were encouraged to focus primarily on the User Interface and how we could employ interactions to delight the user.
• I position the plants as social companions for users to accompany them in their new WFH spaces.
• Using Gamification elements I offer a way to quantify the health & wellbeing benefits to users of their new Buddies.
• To develop a new concept in houseplant sales targeted to 18-35 year olds in urban areas and set against the change in many working environments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
• I want to empower users to make the place they spend more time in feel more lived-in too.
I wanted something really simple and stripped-down, to keep cognitive load to a minimum, and to let the character make the offering compelling.
Two sources of inspiration:
I developed a short flow around a Benefits and Feature-oriented onboarding process:
I personify the plants as a social companion
"Could you use a new buddy in the home?"
I emphasise their health benefits & potential to help the user's work environment
"Studies show one plant can improve air quality 25%"
I showcase the Augmented Reality (AR) feature projecting plants using the phone's camera app
"Use our Buddify AR feature to see your space filled with Buddies"
Going back to the brand I wanted something casual and funky and so looked to street art and cartoons for inspiration.
I looked to my Moodboard for brand colours and sure enough, look what popped out just like in my competitors - aqua/turquoise and oranges for the supporting tones with a nice contrast to the deep green for the main brand colour (circled).
For the Buddy brand I drew parts of vector images together to echo the playful and simple descriptors of the Brand Tone and to express the social companion angle.
For the Typeface I echoed the street art of the Moodboard and chose Sirin Stencil for headings (as if that could be sprayed across pots with the brand) and Roboto for the subheadings & body for ease of use.
I used pill elements to showcase text and contrast to buttons/body text, with transparency if needed. The radial style to quantify data was inspired by the Research stage and then used in the AR feature.
I made a simple reusable header containing the brand/home button in centre, with hamburger menu on the left and Ecommerce basket/login at the right.
As an addition to the week's sprint we were encouraged to think about how we could market our ideas, and what a splash page for the product would look like on a desktop browser view.
This introduced me to the no-code site builder Webflow and showed me the building blocks of designing for the web to complement designing for Figma.
Focusing on the UI here was a great opportunity to explore the technical side of a project. I was glad I added in a couple of stages of UX work to get a quick idea of what users wanted and to give it a grounding in a stronger concept.
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