During my Product Design internship at Plantt, I was tasked with designing and building Plantt.com, a customer-centric shopping experience that connects local garden nurseries with consumers. The goal of this e-commerce marketplace is to give an online presence to local garden nurseries--in other words, an Amazon for local garden centers. With Plantt’s platform, we want to provide the best experience and resources for consumers in terms of gardening-related purchases, care, and projects. 

This project was in its starting phase, and I was to lead the design process for the shopping experience on the site from the ground up, from conducting foundational user research and developing personas of our target audience, to refining prototypes with PMs and engineers for development. Thus, a whirlwind of learning, research, designing, and iterating began, and I ultimately designed the shopping experience for the MVP of Plantt.com.

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Initial Question

How can Plantt.com improve the shopping experience at local garden centers, and improve the gardening lifecycle as a whole?

We first set out to talk to our target audience: gardeners and consumers who have experience shopping at local garden centers and nurseries. We wanted to get a sense of these consumers’ current behavior with the gardening cycle, especially the pain points that consumers experience when purchasing plants and other gardening-related products from garden centers. 

Understanding the consumer journey from pre-purchase to post-purchase would uncover product opportunities for the MVP, and help us understand where we could come in the experience with our platform. 

Specifically, there were three stages of this “journey,” or the gardening cycle and purchase process, that we wanted to understand:

Pre-Purchase (Research): How does one find and decide which plants they want to buy?

Purchase Process (Browse, Purchase, and Delivery): What kind of assistance does one ask for when they are purchasing gardening goods?

Post-Purchase (Gardening Care, Troubleshooting): How does one tackle the maintenance process and troubleshooting in the garden, and is it a complicated process?

Qualitative & Quantitative User Interviews 

After developing a user research plan coming up with our key questions, we were ready to really understand our target audience.

We interviewed 16 individuals with varying levels of expertise in gardening, and a variety of different gardens and collections of plants, ranging from a few houseplants to a thriving edible garden.

16 qualitative interviews left us with a lot to think about! We were able to further connect the dots between our research findings and our target personas through a survey of 450 individuals. 

From the quantitative survey results, we were able to determine the two major personas that made up the majority of our potential market:

I proceeded to create in-depth journey maps for both of these personas to really immerse myself in each persona. With the goals and needs that both of these personas demonstrated, I pinpointed the actions, emotions, and thoughts that each persona presented at each stage of the journey:

Brainstorming

Market Research

As a way to gain insights into the user flow and content requirements, the next step in my design process was doing research on competitors (11 industry-related platforms in the gardening space), as well as products with a similar user experience (8 marketplace platforms).

Creating a Solution

User Flows & Content Requirements

Based on the marketplaces and competitors we had analyzed, we brainstormed two models for the shopping and their flows:

Initial Sketches

To start bringing both of these flows to life and in front of users, we made rough sketches of each model. This helped set the foundation for the low to medium-fidelity screens that we wanted to user test.

Medium Fidelities

Deciding Which Model to Choose: User Testing

Medium-Fidelity Prototypes

I proceeded to create the rough, low-to-medium fidelity screens for the two flows, and tested the two prototypes for usability and preference with 8 users.

User Testing Session

The user testing scenario and tasks were kept the same for both flows for consistency. 

The session went as follows:

1. Context questions: To figure out if the user is a Weekend Warrior or an Avid Hobbyist.

2. Scenario 1: “Find a specific given plant, and go through the steps necessary to follow through with the purchase process.”

3. Scenario 2: “Browse the site to find any plant, and walk me through your decision of whether you want to purchase or not.”

4. Follow-Up: “What are your thoughts (positives and negatives) about the shopping experience in both flows, and what flow do you prefer?”

User Testing Findings

Our findings were surprising! We found that preferences were split half and half between both models (4 for nursery-centric model and 4 for product-centric model). However, the nursery-centric model had more positive feedback than negative feedback, while the feedback for the product-centric model was more negative than positive.

And, probably our most major finding:

The creative, imaginative, confident Passionate Hobbyist preferred the product-centric model, while the get-it-done, busy, efficient Weekend Warrior preferred the nursery-centric model.

Because the Weekend Warrior persona makes up a larger segment of our market, we decided to move forward with the nursery-centric model.

It was now time to get granular, and break the experience down into its different parts:

1. Explore Nurseries

2. Discover a Nursery

3. Browse Plants at A Nursery

4. Learn about Plant

We started by applying the ideated features from our brainstorm session as content requirements for each part of the experience in the MVP stage:

Part 1: Explore Nurseries

The first flow we had to explore was the experience that users see when they enter their zipcode. We explored two different UI layouts and flows that resembled two different existing market places:

1. Option 1 (resembles Instacart): Select one store and enter that store’s in-store shopping experience to search for specific items. Can toggle between different stores.

2. Option 2 (resembles Mercato): Products at each store are laid out for browsing within the same page through a horizontal scroll, and dynamically changes items listed out based on searches.

Our initial reasoning for the Instacart model was that it serves to immerse users in the experience of shopping at their trusted garden center, while our reasoning for the Mercato model was that it helped compare plant options across nurseries.

Through user testing as well as evaluating our goals to serve and power our clients, the garden centers themselves, we decided to proceed with the Instacart model. Users expressed that the Mercato layout was too overwhelming, and an “information overload.” Although they appreciated that they could compare their options, they felt that the horizontal scrolling was an unfamiliar user experience. Additionally, the Instacart model serves the needs of the garden centers and nurseries better, as they preferred not to be compared and “shopped” against each other.

Therefore, we finally went with the Instacart model, as seen in the high fidelity screens below:

Part 2: Discover a Nursery (aka Select a Nursery)

Now that we had nailed down the “Explore Nurseries” flow, the next step to focus on was entering the in-store experience of a nursery, and the information that goes into choosing a nursery. 

In V1, we had come up with several explorations of the nursery information cards: some that emphasized their contact information more, some that emphasized ratings more, and some that emphasized the nursery’s “specialties” more. 

However, through user testing, we found something quite surprising: users express that the information on the cards to be hard to follow due to the small fonts, as well as overwhelming when organized in a grid layout. We also found that users didn’t know what would happen when they selected one of the nurseries; would they see more information about the nursery? Would they be taken to a different website, or an in-store experience?

Due to the results from user testing, in V2 iterations we decided to break the list of nurseries and the information about the nursery into two steps: the grid layout (as it focuses on discovery), and then a modal when a nursery is selected, which gives the user all the information about a nursery.

Browse Plants at a Nursery

The next set of explorations we focused on were the product cards in the browsing experience. We wanted to get a better sense of what information users value and are interested in knowing about to “advance” their purchase process.

We explored different interaction design options, as well as information hierarchy options:

We found that users didn’t need to know stock and availability information right off-the-bat, if that information is included on the plant information page. Users were interested in learning about quick key characteristics about a plant because it helps them initially assess a plant for their needs.

We also created organized filters based on users’ needs that we had discovered in user research, and decided that users can filter their browsing experience by type of plant, benefits that the plants provide, and their characteristics (i.e. height, color, etc.).

Final Screen View

We put all the screens together in the entire discovery and learning process of the pre-purchase experience:

Conclusion

Reflection & Takeaways

This platform is the next big chapter at Plantt, and having the opportunity to kick start the product design process for Plantt.com was extremely challenging yet rewarding!

From this project, I learned how to maneuver around constraints and tradeoffs, and find a balance between satisfying the company's needs and the user's needs. I learned that every feature that I may design might not be completely feasible due to engineering and business constraints, and the challenge of having to design alternative options that provide value to users. 

I got to create actionable designs through every iteration, and refine them through in-depth user testing. I also had the opportunity to speak with stakeholders and potential users, and find a middle ground that will work for both parties; the process of interviewing many participants and conducting a multitude of user testing sessions not only helped push me out of my comfort zone, but also helped me empathize with users, which was crucial to my design process.

Next Steps

The next steps for Plantt.com are to:

• Conduct more user testing on granular features of site (filters, etc.)

• Adding more dynamic features to the plant information page, such as interactive diagrams (not possible at the moment due to engineering constraints)

• Introducing personalized and engaging content to aid users in plant discovery, such as design tools, wish lists, etc.