Studies have indicated that planting at home can benefit one's living quality. It not only helps reduce stress levels but also brings more focusing and productivity for one's work. As a beginning business in this field, Gardenio seeks to create an on-line community that allows people to support each other and also advocate developing the habit of home planting to build a better environment for all. To achieve this goal, Gardenio reached out to us, counseling for identifying current gaps and seeking for better experience and interaction design solutions.
Gardenio is a new start-up that provides home planting sets and service for customers.
As Gardenio is just new to the market without solid business model, business model canvas can provide a systemic analysis to not only identify key stake holders but also define the value and business model that can best serve the customers. Since Gardenio is aiming to build a supportive planting community, identifying potential partners and define its customer segments could be really helpful to the formation of the community. Another potential value that Gardenio could bring to their customers is helping the customers creating more value for their plants through the supportive community.
To analyze the interaction between customers and Gardenio service, I decide to create Gardenio's user map and review the process with the following what, who, and how questions to find the potential improvement points.
What
Who
How
To help Gardenio run a successful business, it it essential to understand how Gardenio compare to other competitors. Therefore, I decided to conduct both comparative analysis and SWOT analysis to identify the position and the entry points for Gardenio in this market.
From the business analysis, there are four main issues that Gardenio is facing right now:
While motivating potential planting beginners took lots of time and effort, an immediate solution for attracting first-time users is to make the browse and purchase process simple with comprehensive and useful information for the potential customers to take action and purchase their first order without much efforts.
Other than directly competing in the current market, targeting on existing communities, helping them access to planting, and merge their activities into the Gardenio community could be another potential market. As Gardenio focuses on not only serving customers with planting products but also creating a supportive planting community, this new customer segment can bring more revenue and also make the planting community grow faster.
Provide selling and bartering system for customers to sell back or exchange their plants can extend the achievement of successfully grow their own plants and gain additional substantial value. With more achievement and value from growing plants, customers would be more willing to keep this planting habit and interact with various members in the Gardenio community.
To test whether these solutions can address the current challenges and create better experience for users interacting with Gardenio, I conducted prototype testing interviews with three participants that represents from three different user groups: experienced users, beginners, and potential customers.
Overall, the participants like the idea of helping customers create more value with their plants. Although it might be challenging to fulfill, it is still an interesting feature that could encourage people to start planting at home. However, the community feature is just similar to other social media apps and people might just want to use the apps that they have been using rather than sharing things using the Gardenio app. An improvement for this solution is to think about how to create the Gardenio community in current trending social media apps and connect those social activities back to the Gardenio app.
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