Objective
Plant and floral sales have boomed during the pandemic as spending more time indoors has caused significant behavioral shifts.
I was tapped by a long-time B2B plant-broker to help create PlantNextDoor, a plant-care blog and map-based directory service to connect plant enthusiasts with educational information, local shops, and floral designers.
During initial planning, the business needed a clear value proposition, user insight, and user flow to begin building the MVP.
Project Scope
Define main use cases for MVP
Help shape content strategy
Define user flow
Deliverables
Competitive Analysis
Personas & Journey Mapping
UX Writing & Empathy Workshop
User Flowchart
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
My Role
User Research
User Experience Design
Content Strategy
Competitive Analysis
Opportunity lies here to position PlantNextDoor as the only plant & floral education platform that empowers the consumer to engage with & patron local retailers on their terms.
Ethnographic Research & Guerrilla Interviews
I focused research efforts on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.
Participant interviews were conducted at plant shops and additional interviewees were sourced from online plant enthusiast communities.
“I’m at home a lot more and want to feel better about that”
“Plants are for everyone, they’re universal. They don’t discriminate.”
Personas: 3 Types of Users
The Newbie
Those who are now dipping their toes into plant parenthood.
The Plant Parent
Those who collect & care for plants as a past-time.
The Retailer
Our industry professionals looking for new ways to attract customers.
User Journey Mapping
Users’ emotional landscapes were plotted to shed light on key opportunities.
The use case for a credible plant-care & store-finder platform is strong, especially in these times.
Cost-efficient customer acquisition is key, especially for newer plant & floral businesses. And they have to rely on digital means for this, especially during Covid 19. We have an opportunity to help them cut the distance.
Designing With Words
While I acted as the voice of our users, our writer wanted to know that the tone & voice of her plant-care articles fit a cohesive brand strategy. Tapping into my brand marketing background, I led the team through a series of content audits.
The result?
The creation of our 3 core brand principles that would permeate through our articles, emails, social media, and our site’s micro-copy:
Transparent
Empathetic
Fun
Here’s a snippet of one framework I used to collaboratively and strategically root our communications in the needs of our users in ways that convert.
How Might This Look?
While our UI Designer created the PlantNextDoor logo, mood-boards, and our style guide, I created mid-fidelity wireframes to bridge the gap between our research & strategy and our final product.
These would serve as recommendations and a starting point for her creation of pixel-perfect mock-ups.
Here’s a brief run-down of the task flow on mobile for finding & connecting with a plant shop on the site.
Task flows like this along with more detailed schematics illustrating feature prioritization, taxonomies & Google API integrations helped keep the system vision clear for everyone as we got closer to launch.
Next Steps
It was a pleasure to work with this team and on this product. In today’s day & age, wellness is more than a buzzword but a true priority and with this platform and the right strategic partnerships it can carve a nice role for itself in the community right away.
Again, the power of “Yes… and” proved to be powerful when it came to providing weekly visual design critiques. I also learned the importance of involving developers early and often to gain better technical context and avoid double-work.
Moving forward, I would advise the team to leverage the personas & user journey maps I created as inspiration for sales enablement content and sell the platform directly to businesses on a monthly subscription as tiered packages. Value provided to businesses could include, but not be limited to:
Sponsored listings as the top results on the “Discover” page
Sponsored editorial content on the site bi-annually
Inclusion into the brand’s social media content calendar, businesses would be entitled to a quarterly promotional post
Complimentary holiday gifting in December, courtesy of PlantNextDoor’s parent company, Focus NY
For future iterations of the site, the key feature I would endorse is a user-generated feed allowing for more seasoned “plant parents” to buy & sell plant clippings among the community. It would solve a key need for that demographic and promote better retention, giving them more reason to come back.
Well… looks like we’re at the end of the road. Think I should rehab my rubber tree now. Thanks for reading!