GIVING GARDEN

Overview

Giving Garden is an app that emphasizes growing a community around food and sustainability. It aims to help urban and suburban people who are thinking about growing their own produce by providing them with crowdsourced and local data about what to grows best in their area. The app also has an Offer feature where people can give away extra produce they don't need which helps with the goal of combatting food waste.

I worked with the founder, another designer and two engineers to create a platform where people are able to share tips and information about gardening as well as exchange produce.

My Role

UX Design

Platform

iOS app

Tools

Sketch, InVision

The Challenge

Improve The Produce-Exchange Experience

Based on user feedback and research, we found that people were forgetting to close their offers after they've already given away their produce due to the fact that people would have to go back and look for their original post in order to close their offer. This added extra tedious steps for the user who would have to go through all their previous posts before finding their specific Offer post that needed to be closed out. This resulted in numerous offers being left open on the home feed which caused confusion among other users.

Current Friction In The Experience

Below are examples of two screens regarding the Offer experience. People would first have to navigate to their profile, scroll through their recent posts to find their offer, deal with a very small touch target size until finally they are able to see the "Close" button to close out their offer. It's no wonder people would rather just leave their offers open!

How might we improve the produce exchange experience?

BRAINSTORMING

Designing For Security and Efficiency

After discussing the problem with me, the stakeholder asked me to design the user experience for the app's chat feature so that people are not forgetting to close out their offer posts. Additionally, I had to design it so that once an offer is closed, all correspondence between two users is stopped. This prohibits any random people from messaging the user. If someone wanted to contact the person they made an exchange with after an offer has been closed, they must send a message request.

How might we make it easier for users to exchange produce?

When designing the produce-exchange experience, I aimed to make it as secure and as easy as possible. If someone is replying to an Offer, they are able to message the person that is Offering their produce. For security purposes, I made sure that a user must send a message request after an Offer has closed. I also made it so that after a produce exchange has transpired, the user can easily close out their offer from the chat screen.

Wireframes

Final Designs