Gardenstead launched in 2017 as an inclusive, online community for gardening enthusiasts of all kinds, all over the world.
After accumulating nearly 300,000 active social media users, they set their aim towards organically converting these users from free followers into members of their website and an eventual monetized product.
My team and I designed an innovative net-new platform that offers personalized, curated gardening content, like video tutorials and written articles, based on user preferences and their gardening type.
The new Gardenstead product enables users to grow their gardening skills, find and share inspiration, and expand their community of like-minded people.
Upon landing on the new platform, users are prompted to take a quick personality quiz designed specifically for amateur gardeners. The quiz then generates directs users to a library loaded with custom content based on their responses, and prompts them to subscribe to access the full collection of premium Gardenstead content.
For a deep dive into this project and a closer look at my process, scroll down to continue reading!
First thing's first: we had to learn about the company, their current user base, and what exactly they want to accomplish within the timeline of our project. We gained this initial information from a series of intake calls with the Gardenstead team, including their head of marketing and CEO.
Gardenstead's vision is to expand its offerings as a company to engage more of their users with the website, and ultimately encourage these users to subscribe to a paid product.
In particular, the CEO made it clear to us that they intend to move in the direction of monetized video content, though they hadn't yet verified if video content was something their users would actually see value from.
After gaining a clearer understanding of Gardenstead's goals and mission—not only during this project but down the line as well—our design team defined the scope of this fast-paced project by establishing a clear timeline of milestones and deliverables to adhere to.
We kicked off our work by conducting rapid landscape analyses of six total competitive products that exist in our problem space: our direct competitors were The Plant Club, Planta, and Gardenista, and our indirect competitors were Wondrium, Create Academy, and Skillshare.
We conducted our analyses based on three of Nielsen Norman Group's usability heuristics that we thought would be most valuable to investigate:
Ultimately, we found that each of these companies had the same central goal: provide resources and an inspirational platform to users in an accessible and affordable way.
Our next step was obtaining genuine user input to learn who the users actually are, past their statistical data like gender, age, and location.
We designed a survey that was published to Gardenstead's multiple Facebook groups in order to screen and recruit interview participants, giving us exposure to their hundreds of thousands of active users.
We assumed that because of Gardenstead's substantial social media presence and the 50+ survey responses we received in just under 2 days, that we would have no trouble scheduling interviews and gaining the qualitative data we'd need to move on. Turns out, we were wrong about that.
Close to 50% of users declined our contact request right off the bat, and many of the users who responded "yes" weren't actually responding to our follow-up messages. So, especially given the time constraints of this project, we had to get crafty.
We determined that the users we wanted to interview did not necessarily have to be current Gardenstead users, they just had to be everyday gardeners engaged in an online community.
So, we proceeded to share the survey to other similar Facebook groups and successfully recruited 7 total interviewees.
We were fortunate to be able to schedule and conduct all of our interviews within one week.
Our questions for users primarily surrounded why they joined Gardenstead, how often they use digital products to aid their gardening efforts, and their goals when using those digital products.
After the interviews wrapped up, our design team came together to create an affinity map within a digital whiteboard, to input the highlights from each of our individual interviews and group them to uncover shared themes. This way, we could effectively draw conclusions about who our users are.
From our affinity mapping and initial discovery, we gathered five primary insights that capture the average sentiments of users:
1) There is no willingness to pay for content if users feel they can find it for free;
2) Users prefer relevant, visually appealing, and easily scannable content;
3) Users want to find the most effective way to have a flourishing garden;
4) User spending varies based on their gardening type; and
5) Users are very frequently seeking inspiration.
From these insights, our team now had a better idea of who Gardenstead's users truly are and what they are (and aren't) looking for. To more concretely envision these users, we created 3 personas to represent the groups that Gardenstead aims to appeal to.
Click or tap on the images below to get to know the Gardenstead personas.
As a team, we chose 3 critical screens to begin designing: the quiz page, the quiz results page, and the content library page.
Each member of our design team independently created sketches for these 3 screens, and we later reconvened to analyze and discuss the rationale behind our design choices.
We divided our team into two groups in order to most effectively and efficiently create low fidelity versions of the initial designs and establish a base style guide to best manage our solution.
The wireframes we put together were simple but served as a great representation of how the end product would generally feel.
While Gardenstead had some existing styles and brand guidelines prior to the start of this project, there was no real source of truth for their product.
My team created a consolidated style guide to organize all of the styles and components that would be implemented our design, and that could serve as a scalable system as the brand grows.
One noteworthy change we proposed to the Gardenstead team was their color palette—not only did the existing color palette fail to capture the lively, vibrant, motivational feelings that the company aimed to portray, but their color palette did not meet web accessibility standards.
Our proposed new color palette emphasized a true, bold green as their primary color with other shades of green and gold as accent colors. This was a much better representation of Gardenstead's brand that we believed would much better accommodate their clientele, while also ensuring color contrast accessibility.
We collaborated to take our low fidelity designs and style guide to create a high fidelity, interactive model of our solution.
My team and I presented our design solution & research insights to Gardenstead stakeholders, walked through the interactive prototype with the client, and explained our rationale for the proposed UX and UI changes we determined would be most beneficial to the company in achieving their business goals. Gardenstead was receptive to our proposals, and enthusiastic about all that we accomplished for them within a relatively short project timeframe.
Since this project was completed on a contract basis, my design team for this project handed off the responsibility of developing and actually implementing the designs to the Gardenstead team and their in-house engineers.
Even though this project came to an end, I established strong relationships with both the designers on my direct team and the client team as well. I look forward to this new solution being launched in the coming months and to maintaining partnerships well into the future.
