Overview
Our user study was conducted on March 11th, 2025 with classmates from CS247B. During this user study, we asked participants to create a new plant, log an interaction, and look through their garden to find plants that need attention. From our user study, we realized that our next steps should focus on increasing clarity for our users – adding status indicators, including tooltips with helpful information, and increasing font visibility.
Breakdown
We have included a breakdown of the core issues brought up by our users during the study in the table below. The most actionable items at this stage in our prototype are the plans at the top of our list with bolded elements.
| Issue(s) | Plan going forward |
| – Difficulty remembering different goals for each plant
-Difficulty connecting plant care with goals |
Refine the indicators for each plant need on the logging page, specifically including a label at the plant’s goal and where the plant is right now. |
| – Uncertainty whether actions were successfully logged | Add animations (e.g., a watering effect) and disable buttons after a log action to provide better feedback. Grey out the icons so it’s clear that they’ve already logged an interaction. |
| – Difficult-to-read fonts on labels for sliders
– Low contrast on buttons |
Increase the font size on the slider tooltips. Choose a darker color for the buttons so white text is easier to read. |
| – Difficulty identifying plants that need attention at a glance | Add attention indicators on the plants in the garden corresponding to the most urgent need, like a water symbol, to highlight struggling plants and serve as a call to action. |
| – Unclear how different plants correspond to different interaction needs. | Add an indicator (icon/label/color/etc) that categorizes the different types of plants, with a tooltip that explains the needs associated with that type of plant. Blend education about real plants with explanations about the app’s functionality. |
| – ”Enter name here” field unclear – users thought maybe they were supposed to add their own name | Reword to “Enter friend’s name” |
| – Users speculated that they might have a hard time understanding/seeing how a plant grew over time. | We may add small visual indicator under each plant to represent progress over time, but we feel like passive, more environmental indicators would be more aesthetic and less stressful. |
| – Settings page didn’t seem relevant. | In the fuller version, this page would be built out for customizing notifications. For the purposes of the prototype, we can make the settings version not interactable. |
| – Worry that users might forget to update a plant after interacting with friends | We believe that if someone doesn’t update their plant right after contacting their friend, leading the plant to start to die, when the user later sees the dying plant they can reflect and remember that they contacted the friend and log the contact then. Therefore, we don’t think that this is a problem. |
Our Takeaways
While we have many plans listed above, our overall feedback from our users was very encouraging for our proof of concept. Users expressed delight, surprise, and joy when customizing their plants, and had strong positive reactions to logging plant care and seeing health improve. We left our user study with an understanding that our concept resonates strongly with users and fine-tuning will be our focus from here.
