UI/UX . RESEARCH . PERSONA STUDY
What if caring for your plants was easy?
Context of the project
For this project the personas & the brief was already given for reference. And the brief was to design a mobile plant-care companion for users in India that helps them track, manage & receive reminders for watering and caring for plants at home. And referring to the given personas for a better direction & creative problem solving. The important insight wasn't simply that they had different needs. It was that the same plant could represent completely different jobs.
My contribution
I approached this brief as an end-to-end product design problem, not just a UI exercise. I started by looking beyond the personas’ demographics to understand the behavioural problems underneath their visible pain points, then translated those insights into three distinct definitions of success. From there, I shaped the product proposition, prioritized features based on user value, product coherence and complexity, and used secondary research to understand plant-care behaviors, symptom ambiguity and the existing category. I also looked beyond the familiar reminders, diagnosis, journaling & community features already found in plant-care products. I defined the information architecture & adaptive Home experience, designed flows across plant selection, daily care, diagnosis, travel, journaling, growth tracking, expert contribution & performance monitoring, & explored these ideas through sketches before moving into high-fidelity design. Finally, I built an interactive AI prototype around the key persona journeys & considered the wider product implications ; business impact, retention, feature dependencies, operational complexity & future scalability ; including explicitly deciding what not to build.
Solution
Bloomo is a personal plant-care companion that adapts to how people actually care for plants. Instead of treating plant care as a series of watering reminders, it helps users understand what their plants need, decide what to do next, & learn from what happens over time. The experience adapts to three different care mindsets: Sakshi needs clarity and recovery, Aditya needs depth & observation, & Darshil needs evidence and better decisions. One shared product architecture supports all three without turning the app into three separate apps. It helps the user understand → act → learn → care better.
Process
Exploring problem areas & opportunity areas
Opportunity areas for Sakshi
Sakshi doesn't need another app telling her to water her plants. She needs something to work around her life, not the other way around. Between long working hours, frequent travel and limited plant-care experience, she struggles to choose plants that suit her environment, recognize when something is wrong and recover when care slips. The opportunity is to make plant care more forgiving & practical from helping her make better choices upfront to showing her exactly what needs attention when she returns to a struggling plant. Maybe something like a Care Reminders, Diagnosis, Plants to buy in which season or location or a Travel Mode that would scedule some house help to look after the plant.
Opportunity areas for Aditya
Aditya already knows how to care for plants. His problem is that generic advice doesn't match his level of expertise, while years of observations and accumulated knowledge have no structured place to live. The opportunity is to move beyond a typical plant-care tracker and create a tool that helps him document, compare and understand his plants over time. Instead of simply consuming more information, he should be able to build on what he already knows. Maybe he can expect features like Expert Plant Collection, Plant Journal & tracking, or Expert Q&A or community centered ecosystem
Opportunity areas for Darshil
Darshil treats his terrace garden less like a hobby & more like a system to manage. He wants to understand which plants are producing, where things are going wrong and whether an intervention is worth his time and effort. Yet his records are scattered across memory and a notepad, making it difficult to compare varieties or evaluate outcomes. The opportunity is to give him a clear view of garden performance and help him make informed decisions about what to fix, monitor, harvest or replace. Maybe he can expect features like Performance Dashboard, Plant-by-plant Tracking or maybe Forecasting
features & Prioritization
This table here has all the opportunity and features that i spotted and prioritized and the next step would be to further refine it in quadrants of low hanging fruit matrix
bloomo prototype concept
This maps out the user flow of bloom and how the three personas are kept into the lens of how to approach the problem and come up with the solution
User journeys with bloomo
This is the user journey mapping material
How does the solution look for Sakshi
Ananya doesn't need another app telling her to water her plants. She needs plant care to work around her life, not the other way around. Between long working hours, frequent travel and limited plant-care experience, she struggles to choose plants that suit her environment, recognize when something is wrong and recover when care slips. The opportunity is to make plant care more forgiving & practical from helping her make better choices upfront to showing her exactly what needs attention when she returns to a struggling plant. Maybe something like a Care Reminders, Diagnosis, Plants to buy in which season or location or a Travel Mode.
How does the solution look for Aditya
Ananya doesn't need another app telling her to water her plants. She needs plant care to work around her life, not the other way around. Between long working hours, frequent travel and limited plant-care experience, she struggles to choose plants that suit her environment, recognize when something is wrong and recover when care slips. The opportunity is to make plant care more forgiving & practical from helping her make better choices upfront to showing her exactly what needs attention when she returns to a struggling plant. Maybe something like a Care Reminders, Diagnosis, Plants to buy in which season or location or a Travel Mode.
How does the solution look for Darshil
Ananya doesn't need another app telling her to water her plants. She needs plant care to work around her life, not the other way around. Between long working hours, frequent travel and limited plant-care experience, she struggles to choose plants that suit her environment, recognize when something is wrong and recover when care slips. The opportunity is to make plant care more forgiving & practical from helping her make better choices upfront to showing her exactly what needs attention when she returns to a struggling plant. Maybe something like a Care Reminders, Diagnosis, Plants to buy in which season or location or a Travel Mode.
How the concept impact in a business
The system acts as an internal control panel for publishers, used by management to store, access, & manage journal data in one centralized, role-based system. Each journal record is structured across key categories. Each category contains its own set of sub-sections, fields, & relationships, forming a deeply interconnected system. The challenge was to design for this level of complexity while keeping the experience navigable & efficient not just for technical users, but for managers who need to move quickly through their workflows.
takeaway & learnings
Both platforms are commercially live and serving real clients in the academic publishing industry. These aren’t portfolio concepts or prototype demos they’re functioning products being used by publishers and their clients. The biggest lesson I took away from iCodex was how closely domain knowledge and design quality are connected. Taking the time to understand the industry’s vocabulary, hierarchy, workflows, and the way people actually work wasn’t optional. The better I understood the domain, the better my design decisions became. Being the sole designer also meant taking full ownership of the decisions I made. There was no one else to pass them on to, which pushed me to make decisions, defend them, & learn from them much faster. Working directly with the CEO gave me an early look into strategic conversations that usually come much later in a designer’s career. Understanding why something needed to be built not just what needed to be designed changed the way I approach stakeholders & client relationships. And perhaps one of the more unexpected things I learnt was how to document work that you can’t fully show. Working within an NDA taught me to separate what could be communicated publicly from what needed to stay confidential, while still telling a meaningful story about the problem, process, contribution, and learnings behind the work. Ultimately, iCodex taught me that good product design isn’t just about making the interface work. It’s about understanding the ecosystem the product lives in, taking ownership of your decisions, & knowing how to communicate the thinking behind them.