Project Type

  • Silly Side Project

  • B2C

Duration

3 Weeks

Contribution

  • Ideation

  • Research

  • Product Design

  • Visual Design

  • Brand Design

  • Design Systems

  • Prototyping

  • User Testing

Tools

  • Figjam

  • Figma

Team

1 Product Designer

Project Overview

The Problem: Loneliness and the Lost Art of Hobbies.

Hobbies are often reframed as productivity or monetization, leading to guilt around pure enjoyment. Loneliness is rising among millennials in the workplace, as they lack opportunities for connection.

Short on Time?

Jump to Final Product
Graft Icon
Blocker

The Challenge

How might we design a platform for millennials to build new hobbies while fostering a community and connections?

The Goal:

To combat this anxiety, the visual interface needed to be an "accessible and friendly guide" that prioritizes mental health over efficiency.

(00 Final Design)

Blocker

Solution

Graft: The Gamified Gardening App

Creating connection through play. Graft is a friendly, community-driven guide designed to make plant care accessible for the modern gardener.

Talk to people in your community to ask for help.

The groups feature allows gardeners beginner or advanced to talk and interact with those in communities near by, or even communities with similar interests.

Asking a group a question

Complete tasks and collected badges!

Overtime complete tasks and badges are awarded to those who claim it with thousands of badges to collect and show off.

Try and collect them all!

authorizing apps

Keep track of your plants in your own profile.

Keep a log of information about your plant on a specific day.

Track its progress and its statistics and compare it overtime.

Checking old statistics on a plant

(01 Research)

User Research

I spoke with four millennial gardeners with varying levels of experience, ranging from those just starting to seasoned veterans.

What did I find?

  • • 2/4 possess an existing network of gardening peers.

  • • 4/4 are motivated to share visual progress updates.

  • • 3/4 exhibited interest in gamification and reward systems.

User Personas

Who is the Modern Gardener?

Leveraging primary and secondary research, I defined two personas focused on working millennials seeking to rebuild the community connection found in academic settings.

(02 Design Exploration)

Information Architecture

What Go Gardeners (or non gardeners) Need?

Once the pain points were found next was to create a clear vision of what I wanted the app to include. Including features, pages and flows.

Information Architecture

Wireframes

From Sketch to Screen.

The design evolved from rough sketches to mid-fidelity wireframes to visualize the user journey. Feedback from the original interviewees was crucial in refining the layout before the final UI phase.

Wireframes

Design System

Therapeutic, relaxing and welcoming.

To counter the stress of modern productivity apps, Graft’s branding is intentionally therapeutic and welcoming. The colour story utilizes the "calming tones that plants hold," offering a visual break from the harsh, bright interfaces often found in the market.

(03 Conclusion)

Reflection

Before visual execution, creating a detailed Information Architecture gave me a "clear cut understanding" of the user's needs vs. the design scope. This project also reinforced the power of empathy; validating concepts with actual users cleared up my previous assumptions and ensured the design truly resonated with the target demographic.

Next Steps

Design a 3D soil-insertable plant tracker.

Expanding the product with a physical sensor to automatically track soil health and water retention in real-time.

Desktop Ecosystem:

Expand to a web app to support deeper "admin work" sessions.