Project: Pick Your Plants
Partner: Rachel Manno Developments
Principal Investigator: George Paravantes
Funder: Ontario Centres of Excellence - College Voucher for Technology Adoption
Students: Nicole Hanjing and Scott Minor
Gardening is considered to be a relaxing hobby, but can quickly turn stressful when standing in a garden centre faced with the challenge of selecting the perfect plants for one’s space.
To de-stress this portion of the gardening process, Humber faculty and students worked with Rachel Manno Developments to develop a mobile app which helps customers of garden centres with the custom selection of plants for their gardens. With its simple and brightly-coloured interface, customers can quickly filter through plant information and buy all the plants they need to successfully create their dream garden. The selection of plants on the app includes annuals, perennials, shrubs, evergreens, among others.
Gardening is considered to be a relaxing hobby, but can quickly turn stressful when standing in a garden centre faced with the challenge of selecting the perfect plants for one’s space.
To de-stress this portion of the gardening process, Humber faculty and students worked with Rachel Manno Developments to develop a mobile app which helps customers of garden centres with the custom selection of plants for their gardens. With its simple and brightly-coloured interface, customers can quickly filter through plant information and buy all the plants they need to successfully create their dream garden. The selection of plants on the app includes annuals, perennials, shrubs, evergreens, among others.
There were multiple phases in the development of the app.The interface design phase explored the colour and layout of touch interface components and took current brand style guidelines into account. The interaction design phase established best practices for the user interface animation and micro interactions. It also explored the goals, frustrations, and priorities users have for the app. Finally, the prototyping and testing phase was used to inform functionality of features along with any human factor evaluation of touch interface design. Eye tracking helped collect and quantify both quantitative and qualitative data.
“It’s been a great pleasure to have seen this app idea grow...I think it will positively impact a lot of people. For me, this is a labour of love, a way of accomplishing a task which makes people happy. ”
— Rachel Manno, Founder, Pick Your Plants
Students benefited tremendously from this applied research project by applying in-class learnings to a real-world situation.They considered the required specifications for the smartphone application, created a design for that application and illustrated that design using wireframes and interaction flows, prepared user interface specifications, and revised the design and corresponding work product to incorporate feedback from ongoing user testing.