To explore the importance of sketching, I took part in a group mini-project. We were tasked with creating user flows and sketching interfaces for an app to control a smart plant pot.
<aside> đź”˝ Plant Co Brief
Move over, terracotta: The flowerpot of the future has arrived. The PlantCo Smart Pot, unveiled earlier this month at CES, combines environmental sensors and automatic watering to create a sleek and happy home for indoor and outdoor plants.
PlantCo includes the same sensor suite as Flower Power, and a 2.2 litre reservoir and water pump are built into the walls of the pot itself. It promises a year of battery life.
The pot connects over Bluetooth, and sensor data is available through a mobile app. A cloud-based decision engine helps the pot analyse your plant’s wellbeing and learn its exact watering needs over time; it will also suggest gardening tips and remind users when the water tank needs refilling.
Other than that, your plant will basically grow itself!
As a companion for the smart plant pot you are required to design an smartphone app which will allow the user to keep track of:
Your app should include:
To start this mini-project we split into groups and began thinking about the user flows. There were 3 main flows to consider for the project; add a plant; plant care; and check moisture level. The first one we focussed on was “add a plant”. This was the most complex flow as there were a couple of steps in the process. We also had to consider the ways in which you could select the specific type of plant, which added more to the flow.
The second and third flows were simpler as they were less user-involved processes. The Plant Care flow would direct to a variety of ways to find out plant care info, and the check moisture would just be pressing a button and seeing previous levels.
I’ve sometimes struggled to understand why I would want to do user flows before sketching but I think I understand better now and why I have felt this way before. I think in projects for uni, we’re given the freedom to do whatever we want in the project, so sometimes I don’t really know all the flows that are going to be in my products until I start sketching. When I’m given a brief like this, however, I think I can see how much more useful creating user flows early can be. It helps you to focus the sketching on what is actually needed rather than creating multiple sketches for entire flows. I’m glad I understand this further and will continue to focus on my user flows in the future.
After completing the user flows, we quickly sketched our initial ideas for what the screens would look like. We had a lot of different ideas for layouts, with the first idea being to have a traditional bottom nav bar to move between the screens. After some discussion, we actually felt it would work best to have a carousel of all your plants as the home screen, which would then lead you to a specific plant profile, or to add another plant. I felt this was a really good idea and kept the app feeling like a focused product, rather than an off-the-rack templated app.
With our initial ideas sketched out, we split up to sketch 6 screens on our own. We split so that 2 of us would focus on adding a plant flow, and the other 2 would focus on the plant care and moisture flow, with us all also sketching the home and plant profile screen. This worked well as it would allow us to have a lot of ideas around the main screens, and still have some ideas to discuss around the flows which were more typical in design.
When we returned to discuss whose ideas worked best, we had a lot of conflicting ideas. We all largely agreed on the format of the home carousel, with only some visual elements up for discussion. The plant profile had quite a lot to be discussed around layout, we liked the Instagram-style profile at the top, and the buttons to complete certain functions, but the plant care history was up for discussion. I had initially had a log of the previous checks that would present a history, but someone else suggested using a metre bar for each of the four functions. I thought worked much better than my idea, so was happy to include it.
The rest of the screens had some minor changes and compromises, but I felt overall we all collaborated really well and created a set of screens that worked well together. In our uni projects, we don’t get to do much collaborating as our work is usually done on our own, but this part of this project was something I enjoyed a lot. Getting to collaborate and share (and argue) our ideas made for a much better design process and something I want to do more of in the future.