An application where users can virtually grow flowers while caring for their mental health.
Botanical bliss
Overview
This project is about sustainability and challenged us to explore how design can play a meaningful role in addressing global issues such as ethical consumption, biodiversity, and more. We were tasked with creating a product for a target audience of our choosing that promoted environmental awareness and responsible action.
Research
I conducted an extensive amount of research into this project as there was lot of topics we had to cover to make informed decisions on what we wanted to created as the final product. After reading through articles and group work within class about sustainability I decided on biodiversity and gardening as the topic that I would create by app about. I connected with this topic personally as I use plants as a form of therapeutic relief.
My research showed the mental health benefits of gardening, while also seeing the negative impact of social media on young people and from this my project idea was formed. It was an app aimed at teenagers and young adults that allowed them to virtually grow plants, which encourages mindfulness, setting goals, and rewards users with real plants, which promotes sustainability.
Sketches
My sketches were initially about the branding including variations of logomarks and different types of plants that could be included in the designs. Then I started to sketch out a simple flow of the application to get a better understanding of how many screens I was going to need for the rest of the information.
Wireframes
Wire framing my sketches allowed me to finalise the layout of my screens and show what pages I needed to include to complete the user flow.
Lo-fi mockups
At this stage I wanted to include my colour scheme and my illustrations of plants of the plants however, as I continued to design I found that the screens didn't align with my initial vision. The colours were strange and when I included the illustrations the screens seemed unbalanced and visually inconsistent.
Mid-fi mockups
My mid-fi mockups were variations of the same screen to help get any ideas I had digitalised and even with some simple changes I saw immediate improvement. I also changed out the plant illustrations and included more screens around progress and rewards.
Hi-fi mockups
My hi-fi prototypes took the best designs from the mid-fi mockups and perfecting each one, in terms of alinement, type size, and refining smaller elements of the designs.
Overall, I'm very happy with the outcome of this project and while I had issues at the start with colour and images, I was able to finish the project as I had envisioned.
Notion blog
You can find out more about this project by checking out my notion blog by simply clicking here!
Lucy Knox
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