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Grow your Salad
at home.
HydroG | Indoor hydroponic gardening app
HydroG helps you grow fresh organic vegetables, herbs and fruits all year round in your living room, kitchen, even tiny studio apartment. I led the HydroG brand and user experience design.
My role
Customer Insights & Ideation
I targeted relevant social media groups to uncover insights and translate concepts into features to address customer behaviours and motivations.
Experience Strategy & Vision
I created frameworks and prototypes to share the vision, design principles and content strategy. This helped to evangelise ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making.
Planning & Scope Definition
I defined the product requirements with the core startup team, founder and CTO. I set customer goals and balanced business goals. I prioritised and negotiated features for launch and beyond.
Design Execution & Validation
I designed the iOS mobile app, executed journeys, wireframes, prototypes and design specs.
Results
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Validate HydroG B2C offer
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Decreased design to dev handoff time
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Exceeded expectations in seed round
Overview
Coronavirus chaos has spurred a grow-your-own food movement — and space-age hydroponic technology is rising to meet it.
In lockdown, many of us are seeing what our cities look like without smog. Office workers are experiencing office life without the office; Twitter announced that most of its employees could work from home forever. And what do more people do when they’re spending more time at home? If viral Facebook posts and Instagram hashtags are any guide, pandemic hipsters have moved on from once-fashionable sourdough starters to growing fresh fruit and veg.
Thanks to giant leaps forward in the science of hydroponics and LED lighting, even people in windowless, gardenless apartments can participate in the revolution. With a number of high-tech consumer products on the way, the process can be automated for those of us without green thumbs.
Framing the challenge
Help you grow fresh and organic food in your home, regardless of your living space or know-how.
Help individuals and families shift to home hydroponics micro-farm living.
The approach
Design, test and learn.
I designed a lean and focused 3 weeks workflow.
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A 1-week Research Sprint consisted of competition analysis and quantitive a qualitative user research.
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2 4-days Design Sprint workshops in tow weeks to ideate, prototype and validate with real customers.
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1-day Brand Sprint workshop to pinpoint the design language and marketing messages
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4-days UI Sprint (iOS app)
Future customers Insights & Ideation
200 Responders
48 Hours
I targeted urban gardening, hydroponic fans and aerogarden social media groups, and launched a user research to identify potential customers profiles and connect to their motivation and challenges.
Overwhelmed with over 200 responders in only 48 hours we continued to the next stage in an uplifted spirit.
Reflecting our potential customers' motivations and challenges in a smart on-boarding.
Motivations
Reduce stress levels of lack of space, past experience and time.
Challenges
Design Execution & Validation
Turn shipping time despair into an opportunity.
One of the challenges I identified was the time gap from order to delivery, how can we maintain engagement and enthusiasm, when a few days delivery can turn into weeks due to the pandemic. I brought to testing some ideas and unfortunately they were all rejected.
I decided to invite a few potential customers for a focused brainstorm session. During the session almost all of the participants raised concerns about their lack of experience in hydroponic cultivation, and thus was born the idea of producing a study course for the waiting time.
In the following testing session we were happy to discover that over 75% of our potential customers would greatly appreciate receiving a study course for the waiting time for delivery.
We developed a course of 5 sessions of hybrid learning and modelled 2 sessions for testing - the feedback was amazing and a new and super cool feature was born!
The sync moment.
One of the moments that was especially important to us is the moment of synchronization between the virtual product and the physical product.
We created a multi-sensory experience of visual and sound to celebrate the connection.
In addition we were able to share the experience with friends and family, which also serves as an organic marketing catalyst.
Turn the challenge of changing harvest times into an enriching experience of cooking healthy food.
In preliminary talks with HydroG entrepreneurs they strongly expressed their desire to accompany their customers beyond harvest day on a journey to a healthier lifestyle.
In the user study I conducted I examined the needs of potential customers around a healthy diet and found that many of them had difficulty organizing the week's meals, shopping and cooking. They also expressed concern that they would not be able to eat what they had grown in time.
Connecting to these needs and challenges, I designed a feature that allows users to receive a weekly update to their weekly harvest alongside recommendations for dedicated recipes that consist of the weekly harvest commodities. In addition, we offered them in one click to get a shopping list of everything they had left to buy order it online! Cool, Ha?
Summery and reflection
In three intense and focused weeks we achieved a fully validated B2C offer, well thought out and ready for development. The founder was very satisfied with her team alignment and clarity on the next steps.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of my clients.
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