Community Gardens Management Tool
Shortlisted in the final round of the 2023 WillowTree for Good product pitch competition.
Role: Product Designer
Management (sprint planning and stakeholder interviews)
UX analysis (empathy maps and personas)
Design (app UI and branding kit)
Prototyping (basic flow and interactions)
Team: Ananya Garg, Robin Gao, Sana Goyal, Sarayu Yenumula
Timeline: March - April 2023 (5 weeks)
Overview
The WillowTree for Good competition asked participants to design a digital product to address a social need. After being selected to compete, I teamed up with 3 computer science students and in our agile, cross-functional team, we built and pitched an app concept to facilitate the management of local community gardens.
Discovery
During my time as a student at UNC, I learned a startling statistic about my own campus: approximately 25% of UNC undergrads were reported to be food insecure. (One in every four undergraduate students!) I brought this back to the team and dug into how other communities tackle food insecurity.
Thus, our app concept was born: as the Green Team, we asked ourselves, “how might we support sustainable and grassroots initiatives such as community gardens?”
Within three weeks, our team conducted a critical user interview with the coordinator of the campus community gardens. Thanks to his insight, we formulated several user empathy maps, including the two below, and identified four key needs of community garden administrators:
Community participation: admins have to promote morale and team bonding.
Clear roles and information: volunteers aren't sure how to pitch in.
Funding and equipment: gardening supplies are expensive!
Regular contribution: gardens need continual care from volunteers.
In our research, we also found similar garden-focused and volunteer management apps. So, how would we separate ourselves from the competition?
Iterating, re-iterating…
At this stage of the fast-paced, month-long competition and with our brainstorming artifacts complete, it was time to open up Figma for the first iteration. Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at a screen in its infancy. (It'll get better… Trust.)
I was pleasantly surprised to see our pitch make it past the first round and felt validated on my first real attempt to prototype something in Figma!
Nonetheless, our biggest feedback from judges and mentors had been to adhere more strongly to iOS — because the engineers on my team were most familiar with building in Xcode, Swift, etc. — so for the next iteration I was ten toes down on incorporating Apple’s SF Symbols, Human Interface Guidelines, and the iOS 16 UI kit.
And behold… the next iteration. This is the version we pitched to our judges, including a number of Fortune 500 tech executives based in the NC Research Triangle.
Take a look at my full Figma prototype and play around! Much better, right?
Reflecting
This competition was one of those moments that not only asked me to deliver something well thought-out and quickly, but also challenged me to believe in myself and apply the concepts I’ve embraced during my coursework this semester. I had never gone this ham for a high-fid before, so I was asking a lot of questions to my mentors and felt lucky to have them as a resource!
Even though we didn’t win the final round, I still had a lot to take away from this learning experience. As for the problem of food insecurity on campus and in communities beyond, I trust the winning team will be able to make a wave with their app that would simplify communication between users and local food banks.