Tropi
The beginner's guide for plant growing
Tropi is a project I worked on as part of a workshop in software and user experience in the school of computer science at the Hebrew University. I worked as a single designer in a team of software developers.
UX, UI, User Research, Prototyping, illustration
Indoor plants can make anyone bring nature into the concrete jungle we live in. They improve the air quality at home and calm us down.
People that want indoor plants buy them at the store or get them as a present, and sooner or later they forget the gardening instructions for the plants. After a while, we water the plants too much, or too little, and they die.
The Problem:
The problem is most people do not know what plants want or need!
People have many gardening instructions to remember, and they are made of various parameters, such as watering quantity, watering frequency, when to use fertilizers, and when was the plant lastly watered.
Expectations
Reality
The solution:
The solution is Tropi, a virtual gardener for your help. Tropi is an app that manages all of your indoor plants, reminds you of the gardening instructions, and keeps track of the gardening routine.
Persona
Yuval, 27 years old
Has just moved to her place and she always dreamt of an apartment full of plants, like those you see on Instagram. She has one succulent that she got on her birthday, and she got two more plants as a gift for her new home. Yuval went to the local store and bought some herbs. Now, she can't remember what the gardening instructions for each plant are. She keeps forgetting to water her plants and puts reminders on her phone to remember, and the succulent has died because she watered it too much.
Tropi is an app that manages your plants at home. Tropi helps the user to keep track of his plants, classify them, show him the gardening instructions, and remind him to water the plants. If you have Tropi, you always know how to treat your plants, so no plant dies out of thirst or drowns from excessive watering.
We assume that most users will be beginners and not experienced gardeners, so the instructions and categories are kept simple
Homescreen
User flow
Virtual Plants
Once you get a new plant, create a new virtual plant on the Tropi app. Eventually, all your home plants will exist as virtual plants on Tropi so you'll know how to garden them. There are 3 categories of plants:
Tropical plants - Herbs - Succulents
Every category has different gardening instructions and watering frequency.
The process of creating a new virtual plant:
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Classify the plant: Select a category or answer questions.
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Select an icon resembling the plant from the available plant icons gallery.
If the user doesn't know how to classify the plant, he can answer questions that will aid him in classification.
Category classification flow chart:
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Tropi Tasks:
The home screen shows your future tasks. Once a task is marked as done, the app adds the future task for that plant, according to the instructions of the category.
There are three types of tasks:
Watering
Water spraying
Fertilizing
Instructions per category:
Caring task page:
Herbs
June-September: Water every day 3 glasses of water, fertilize every two weeks.
September-November, March-May: Day on day off 2 glasses of water, fertilize once a month
December-February: Water every 3 days 2 glasses of water, no fertilization.
Tropical plants
June-September: Water every day 3 glasses of water, fertilize every two weeks.
September-November, March-May: Day on day off 2 glasses of water, fertilize once a month
December-February: Water every 3 days 2 glasses of water, no fertilization.
Spray water once a week.
Succulents
June-September: Water every two weeks, 1 glass of water.
September-November, March-May: Water every three weeks, 1 glass of water.
December-February: Water once a month, 1 glass of water.
Caring task history:
Caring task history:
Tasks can be added manually to the app, so they will be registered in the plant history.
Plant Icons:
I created and designed the plant icons as vector images. They are colorful and make you want to get them all.
My Plants:
All the virtual plants appear on my plants' screen and are divided into categories. The user can read about the gardening instructions for each category.