Major League Gardening
Connecting budding gardeners around the world.
Background
During summer 2020, I created my first ever design project with a team at Mississauga Hacks. During this event, our team was inspired by the social issues surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. The biggest challenge we identified was that people could no longer go outside and get fresh air. Rather, they were confined to their daily routines at home and were isolated from the rest of the world. This motivated us to to create an application that would allow people to go outside, connect with others, and still practice social distancing at the same time. Major League Gardening takes casual gardening to the next level, giving users the incentive to go outside to garden and compete with fellow gardeners all across the world through a competitive social media application.
As the product designer of the team, I focused on learning Adobe XD and designing the application.
Skills
Mobile Design, Branding, Pitching
Tools
Adobe Creative Cloud (XD, Photoshop)
Role
Product Designer
Problem
The impacts of COVID-19 have led to people feeling isolated and disconnected from the outer world. Lockdowns and social restrictions have both played a role in confining people to their home. This can be unhealthy and negatively impact people's mental health.
Our solution
To overcome these common feelings, my team and I developed Major League Gardening - a social media application that focuses on promoting a healthy lifestyle during COVID-19 through gardening. It takes a creative approach to connecting people around the world, in a healthy and productive way.
Green Feed
The home page, known as the Green Feed is where you can see posts, stories and challenges of those you are following. The home page follows a layout similar to instagram and allows the user to interact with their friends through sharing capabilities. It's called the 'Green Feed' because the main focus of the feed is to share and view posts related to gardening and nature.
Furthermore, users can chat and interact with each other through the messaging feature located on the Green Feed.
Challenges
Challenges are focused on engaging the user in gardening activities. Users can gain experience points for challenges they complete and compete with their friends. This incentivizes the entire experience and makes gardening a lot more fun and interactive.
Monitoring and Tracking
After completing challenges, users can upload their plants and share their harvest for others to see. Furthermore, by scanning their plants, users can gain further insights on their growth, health and overall condition.
Next steps
Conduct user testing
In order to potentially deploy this application in the future, it is crucial to perform user testing to determine if the application can gain traction and identify pain points.
Focus on the user journey
As this was my first time designing an application, I was new to design thinking process. I focused less on the user experience and more on aesthetics. While aesthetics and craft are important, usability should be prioritized to deliver a smooth experience for users.
Reflection
Overall, competing in this hackathon was a great learning opportunity as it allowed me to enter the creative world of product design. I am truly grateful for having the opportunity to design the prototype of our application because it gave me a chance to enhance my skills as a designer and apply them to other projects such as SpritTrackr and Mediatate. I hope to continue attending hackathons in the future to develop my skills as a designer.