PlantMe is a female led, completely volunteer-driven, non-profit online platform where people can learn how to grow plants, record their harvests, see their carbon emissions reductions and much more. Many different people have contributed to the site at different times and many of those people have been junior/entry-level developers. The colour choices are beautiful, but unfortunately this created a somewhat disjointed site structure and ad hoc design conventions.
This is the current landing page, which I used as a starting point for my investigation
I created this sitemap to show the existing site architecture, which revealed a lack of defined user paths and quite a bit of circular linking.
I asked PlantMe founder, Fliss, a range of questions to help me understand the purpose and target audience of her site. Her main goal was to get people using the site, as data from her analytics showed that most people who visited the site didn't engage with it.
From a business perspective, she wanted people to log their harvests so that she could measure the carbon offset that people were contributing to by growing their own food. From a sustainability perspective, she wanted more people to grow their own food for the good of the planet.
Taking into account the tools and information she had created on the site already, I was able to organise her site content into three main categories:
1. Information and tools related to growing plants
2. A platform where people can buy, sell and share their gardening related products, as well as share their land for growing
3. Information about how growing food has a positive impact on the climate
I then developed some basic user stories based on each of these categories and developed some pathways based on these user stories
User pathways and decision points beginning from the 'Plants' entry point
User pathways and decision points beginning from the 'Buy, sell and share' entry point
User pathways and decision points beginning from the 'Buy, sell and and share' entry point
This led to a new landing page design.
The platform is a progressive web app, not available on app stores, but able to be used on a mobile device just like an app.
The decision to include the QR code and mobile image was to encourage people to use the platform on their mobile devices.
The below images show the new site structure.
I generated a few different design ideas for the dropdown menus to allow Fliss to choose her favourite.
These colour choices were selected from a palette in a lovely banner feature that already existed in the site.
