Building a Path Forward

Overview: Our client had started several gardening Facebook groups immediately before the pandemic. The groups grew organically during quarantine to over 230,000 members. The client had built a website and started a newsletter, but wasn't sure what to build next.

Objective: Gardenstead wanted to expand its services and offerings to the garden community.

Target Audience: We initially assumed our target audience was the Facebook community members themselves. Research later gave us a clearer picture of who that group actually was.

My Role: I worked on a four-person team in a five-week industry placement with Springboard. Learning each teammate's strengths and weaknesses early was essential to how we worked together.

Competitive and Heuristic Analysis

To understand the problem space, we looked at direct competitors approaching gardening from very different angles, as well as indirect competitors around one of the client's growth ideas, subscription video content. What we found was that no one was doing exactly what Gardenstead was doing.

Facebook Group Screener

We worked as a team to write the most efficient set of questions we could, and the client posted the survey across all six Gardenstead groups. After 24 hours, participation was too low. I looked into it and found little prior interaction between the branded posts and group members, so I proposed a few changes to the client: write in a more personal, less corporate tone; post as an individual rather than an anonymous organization; and pin the survey to the top of the feed. Those three changes took our response rate from 3 respondents to 37.

Interviews

We interviewed two brand ambassadors who acted as hosts in the Facebook groups, plus four other gardeners, to compare how ambassadors and the general gardening public answered the same questions. We wanted to know how and why users joined the Gardenstead Facebook groups and how they felt about it, whether users knew about or had visited the website, whether users had signed up for the newsletter, users' gardening needs and pain points, users' gardening spending habits, and users' attitudes and habits around subscription services.

Understanding Our Data

After interviews wrapped, we met remotely to build an affinity map in FigJam, grouping ideas from the interviews, surfacing shared themes, and drawing conclusions about who our users actually were.

The Edible Gardener is focused on production, sustainability, experimentation, and troubleshooting. They may incorporate some aesthetic choices or indoor plants, but edibles are the priority, and spending is highly seasonal.

The Aesthetic Gardener, Big Budget spends freely on plants, tools, supplies, and other purchases, with plenty of space to work with. Spending is mostly seasonal and can run over $500 a month at the high end.

The Aesthetic Gardener, Low Budget is looking for budget-friendly ways to grow their plant collection. They may be focused on indoor plants only, or have a small outdoor space, and spending is limited and non-seasonal for indoor gardeners.

Design Sprint, what can we accomplish

Our goal was to find more services Gardenstead could offer. After ideation, discussion, and evaluation, the team landed on one feasible concept. We each sketched independently, then combined ideas collage-style until we reached something we could move forward with.

The why, for the client

This MVP creates a new offering built from content Gardenstead already has, and it's flexible enough to leave room for future offerings.

The why, for users

Tied to our HMW goals from the interviews:

• It creates relevancy by letting users personalize content.
• It builds on the brand and strengthens brand trust.
• It lets users create categories and shortcuts to the information they need most, so they can get back out into the garden faster.

Style Guide & Wireframes, divide and conquer

With limited time, we split into two pairs, one building the style guide, one developing mid-fidelity wireframes. We came back together as a full team to evaluate choices, iterate, and decide how to put it all together.

User Testing

With a hi-fidelity prototype in hand, we ran five usability tests with individual participants. Each participant was asked to create a Gardenstead account and save something to their account that interested them.

Testing surfaced a few issues

A few icons and buttons were sized too small, the call-to-action for the quiz competed with the call-to-action for creating an account, and it wasn't clear to users why they should sign up for an account. We made changes to the design right away based on this feedback.

The Deliverables

The client specifically asked for competitive analysis, a new newsletter email template, and personas. We delivered those, plus a heuristic analysis of competitors and a design sprint focused on the website, and we ideated additional service offerings for Gardenstead's user base.

The Learnings

The newsletter format was implemented right away. While our contract was short-term, I'd point to the following as measures of success going forward: open and click rates, bounce and delivery rates, conversion rates from the Facebook groups and social channels, and future user interviews on the usefulness of current offerings. We also helped the client understand that masterclass-style instructional videos weren't what their user base wanted, and offered them another direction instead.