GardenBuddy
App Design, UX Research, Branding | Fall 2024
GardenBuddy is an app that connects people to community gardens in their area. Information about community gardens and the events that they hold usually comes from a variety of different sources, and can be intimidating for newcomers to navigate. GardenBuddy aims to fix this issue by putting all of it in one place, making local gardens and related events easy to learn about and join.
Research Summary
My goal was to make an app that was useful for both new gardeners and community garden managers. With this in mind, I conducted interviews with two people of each user type. For the gardeners, I was mostly concerned with finding out how easy it was for them to find and join a garden, and any difficulties they might’ve had once starting out. For the managers, I was interested in learning about how they handled communication with their gardeners and promotion of their garden. Ideally, the app would streamline these experiences for both user types.
User Personas
I created two personas based off of my findings from these interviews to summarize the needs of each user type.
For the site map, I focused on the perspective of the gardener. Key features include a map of gardens and events in the users area, personal and group calendars, profile creation, direct messaging, and group chats.
