The Design Process (Part Two): Victoria Sustainability App

Tessa Stirling
6 min readMay 29, 2021

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Brief

To design a mobile app prototype for Sustainability Victoria which helps Australians grow and cook with fresh produce at home. The app prototype needs to adhere to the existing Sustainability Victoria branding and design language (i.e. logo, colours, imagery, iconography etc.) and must leverage modern UX design principles and trends to suit a modern audience.

Existing Victoria Sustainability Branding

Target Audience

The target audience for this app is any Victorian who is climate conscious, or simply considering growing their own food. The app must cater for Australians living in dense inner city urban areas with very little space to grow food. The concept must factor this context into all areas of the app design, ensuring all content, features and UI components are relevant for this specific audience, and the specific questions and needs they may have.

Goal

I wanted to design an application that encourages and educates Australians on growing and cooking with fresh homegrown produce. The challenge was that majority of Australian’s do not have the time to educate themselves on how to grow produce at home. Wouldn’t it be easy if all the information you need to grow and cook fresh produce at home was found ­in the one place at the click of your finger?

Proposal

I wanted to design an app where all the information Australians needs to successfully grow fresh produce and cook delicious, healthy meals with is all in the one place at the touch of their finger. The Victoria Sustainability app will feature a virtual garden where users add the produce they are or plan on growing. From the virtual garden the users can view how to care for that plant, how to cook with that plant as well as interesting facts about the plant. All the information is in a succinct format and leverages interface familiarity meaning the users can navigate the app with ease, educating themselves about growing and cooking with homegrown produce in a handy and simple way.

The Design process

Design thinking

I began my design process by understanding the purpose of the app as well as the target audience and their needs and wants. I then utilizing a design thinking framework exercise called seven step canvas, followed by some low-fidelity then high-fidelity wireframes which helped me establish a strong user flow. Read my Previous Blog Article “Design Thinking Process: Victoria Sustainability App” for an in-depth explanation about this process.

Seven Step Canvas

Target users and market

After establishing a rough user flow for my prototype using design thinking exercises, I decided to conduct more thorough research into the client, existing competition and UX trends in similar apps. I conducted a number of interviews and an online survey with over 40 peoples responses to allow me to gain a better insight into why people would use the app, what they would want the app the feature and how they would engage with the app.

User journey

I summarised my research by grouping my observations and putting them into a quick findings report. From here I was able to establish my user goals and create personas and scenarios to help aid me in understanding the user flow of my app. Having an in depth understanding of my user’s journey allows me to create an app which flows nicely and addresses all my users needs and wants.

Persona and Scenario

Story boarding

Storyboarding is a crucial design exercise as it allows the app to be shown in context with a certain user groups. Storyboarding allowed me to bring together my user research, personas, scenarios and high-fidelity wireframes into a succinct and easy to comprehend page, giving me a clear idea of the user flow I would need to implement in the final prototypes.

Storyboarding

A/B Split testing

After implementing all my research on the apps desired user flow, target audience and UX design I created two app prototypes to allow me to conduct a research method known as A/B split testing during my user tests. A/B split testing allowed me to design two different variation of my app and test both of the user to see what aspects and features they preferred as they went through the user flow. The main difference in my two prototypes was how the information was presented to the user. In prototype A I displayed all the information on single scrolling screens contrasting to Prototype B where I utilized a UX design principle known as progressive disclosure, when the information was revealed to the user in smaller chucks. My A/B split testing allowed me to determine the stronger and weaker areas of my prototype, guiding me to make small changes to my final app design.

Final Prototype and User Flow

Challenges

I faced multiple challenges throughout my design process, my main challenge was how to display large chucks of information in a succinct manner, where the user wont loose interest. I did some research into breaking down information via app interfaces and came across the term progressive disclosure, the UX principle of slowing disclosing information to the user rather than having it all on one screen where it can become overwhelming and the user can loose interest. With most of the challenges I faced I found that taking the time to research and understand how other UX designers had tackled the same problems usually worked a charm .

Conclusion

Based off my extensive research and user testing results, my proposed design solution for the Victoria Sustainability app not only encourages Australians living inner city to grow and cook with fresh produce, it educates users in a simple yet extensive way about growing and cooking with homegrown produce. The proposed Victoria Sustainability app makes the process of gardening and cooking easy for users and enables people with busy lifestyles to still reap the benefits of growing organic produce at home.

What can I do better?

  • Research and implement more UX design trends. New UX trends are immerging every day, it is important to stay in the loop.
  • Conduct more user tests to a wider audience to gain a better insight into how the target market engages with the app.
  • Prototype more sections of the app to make the users tests more realistic and accurate.

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Tessa Stirling
Tessa Stirling

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