Learn to Grow with Crescere

Crescere is an interactive mobile gardening app allowing gardeners to buy plants, to start a garden or to enhance their gardening skills. The focus of the project is UI design, improving the user experience through the means of visual communication.

The Following Deliverables were Required:

The Design Process I Followed:

Target Audience and Brand Tone

The chosen target audience was gardeners or newbies aged 28–60 and this informed the tone of the brand:

Research

To understand the market and what is available in gardening apps I undertook market research:

Competitive Analysis

I looked at 6 gardening websites and 5 gardening apps each of which had a range of target audiences in order to identify opportunities

Comparative Analysis

Since the Crescere allows the user to purchase plants, I also looked at apps of major sales companies in different markets, such as Net-a-Porter, Nike and Look Fantastic to see if there was aspects, I could include to differentiate Crescere from other gardening interfaces.

Insights

The insights that developed from this analysis led to the inclusion of features such as:

• Quizzes
• Guides
• How to Videos
• Growth Tracker

Mood Board

Prioritising Features

There was much that I wanted to include in this project, so I used the following effort by/value graph to identify the essential features that I needed to incorporate.

What’s in the navigation

Sketches

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Onboarding

Once I had completed the mid-fidelity wireframes, I had an accurate description of what the user would expect in the app’s key features thus was able to start the onboarding visual design and enhance the brands tone through colour, typography, and illustrations. As such the onboarding visual design developed from a somewhat generic and possible millennial appearance to a more natural and calm tone. I felt this was more attractive to my target audience. This included incorporating animated illustrations to be more interactive with the user.

Development of The Homepage

The image below shows the design progression from greyscale wireframes to the final design, going through various visual design changes in order to simplify and reduce visual busyness. The changes in the article cards from photos to illustrations meant that continuity with the onboarding design was achieved.

Style Guide

FINAL DESIGN

High Fidelity Wireframes

Prototype

After a 1-week sprint, the final prototype of the Crescere app is presented as follows:

What’s next

I would like to conduct a usability test as I felt the app was too busy with too many features and in order to understand the user’s key priorities.

Key findings

• I love visual design and experimenting with colour and typography to enhance and shape a brand image and to attract the target audience
• Research into websites and apps in different markets showcased ways in which visual design has a significant impact on their brand, as well as highlighted opportunities to explore in the current brief.

Final Thought

I prefer to base my visual designs off a thorough UX research as I believe you are completely designing the app for the user rather what the designer thinks it should be.