From Social to Subscription

Project overview

What's the problem?

Gardenstead launched in 2017 as an inclusive, online community for gardening enthusiasts of all kinds, all over the world.

After accumulating nearly 300,000 active social media users, they set their aim towards organically converting these users from free followers into members of their website and an eventual monetized product.

The solution

My team and I designed an innovative net-new platform that offers personalized, curated gardening content, like video tutorials and written articles, based on user preferences and their gardening type.

The new Gardenstead product enables users to grow their gardening skills, find and share inspiration, and expand their community of like-minded people.

Upon landing on the new platform, users are prompted to take a quick personality quiz designed specifically for amateur gardeners. The quiz then generates a custom library based on their responses, and prompts them to subscribe to access the full, expansive collection of premium Gardenstead content.

Plan

Understanding business goals

First thing's first: we had to learn about the company, their current user base, and what exactly they want to accomplish within the timeline of our project. We gained this initial information from a series of intake calls with the Gardenstead team, including their head of marketing and CEO.

"Our goal has always been to connect gardeners, foster and share knowledge, and make gardening resources available to everyone."

gardenstead.com

Gardenstead's vision is to expand its offerings as a company to engage more of their users with the website, and ultimately encourage these users to subscribe to a paid product.

In particular, the CEO made it clear to us that they intend to move in the direction of monetized video content, though they hadn't yet verified if video content was something users would actually want.

Project plan

After gaining a clearer understanding of what it is Gardenstead intends to accomplish - not only during this project but down the line as well - our design team defined the scope of this fast-paced project by establishing a clear timeline of milestones and deliverables to adhere to.

Discovery

Heuristic competitive analyses

Using the results from the A/B tests as well as my heuristic analysis, I closely partnered with my fellow team leads to write a detailed and persuasive business case proposal to advocate for a solution that better aligns what we know to be genuine user needs with higher-level company objectives.

The three primary direct competitors we evaluated were The Plant Club, Planta, and Gardenista, while the three indirect competitors we evaluated were Wondrium, Create Academy, and Skillshare.

Each of these companies has the same central goal: provide resources and an inspirational platform to users.

User interviews

Our next step was obtaining genuine user input to learn who the users actually are, past their statistical data like gender, age, and location.

To recruit participants, we created and posted a screener survey to be pinned to Gardenstead's multiple Facebook groups, giving us exposure to their hundreds of thousands of regular users.

We assumed that because of Gardenstead's substantial social media presence and the 50+ survey responses we received in just under 2 days, that we would have no trouble scheduling interviews and gaining the qualitative data we'd need to move on.

Turns out, we were wrong about that.

Users were engaging with the survey, but not responding to our follow-up emails or messages.

So, especially given the time constraints of this project, we had to get crafty.

We determined that the users we wanted to interview did not necessarily have to be current Gardenstead users, they just had to be everyday gardeners engaged in an online community.

Synthesizing the data

We proceeded to share the survey to other similar Facebook groups, and successfully recruited 7 total interviewees.

After the interviews wrapped up, our design team came together to create an affinity map within a digital whiteboard, to input the highlights from each of our individual interviews and group them to uncover shared themes. This way, we could effectively draw conclusions about who our users are.

Primary insights

From our affinity mapping and initial discovery, we gathered five primary insights that capture the average sentiments of users:

1) There is no willingness to pay for content if users feel they can find it for free;
2) Users prefer relevant, visually appealing, and easily scannable content;
3) Users want to find the most effective way to have a flourishing garden;
4) User spending varies based on their gardening type; and
5) Users are very frequently seeking inspiration.

Personas

From these insights, our team now had a better idea of who Gardenstead's users truly are and what they are (and aren't) looking for. To more concretely envision these users, we created 3 personas to represent the groups that Gardenstead aims to appeal to.

Click or tap on the images below to get to know the Gardenstead personas.

Design

Sketches

Now that we'd determined what screens the user would encounter as they move through this experience, we took to pen and paper to sketch out our initial ideas.

As a team, we chose 3 critical screens to begin designing: the quiz page, the quiz results page, and the content library page. Each member of our design team independently created sketches for these 3 screens, and we later reconvened to analyze and discuss the rationale behind our design choices.

Wireframes

With our user flow finalized and a foundational structure for the solution established, we moved on to transfer these designs to a digital setting.

We divided our team into two groups in order to most effectively and efficiently create low fidelity versions of these designs and establish a base style guide to best manage our designs. The wireframes our team put together were simple but served as a great representation of how the end product would generally feel.

Brand new style guide

Simultaneously alongside the wireframes, we created a style guide to organize all of the various styles and components that would be implemented in the design. Gardenstead had some existing styles prior to the start of the project, and we kept all of those in consideration.

However, one major change we proposed to the Gardenstead team was their color palette; not only did the existing color palette fail to capture the lively, vibrant, successful feelings that the company brand aimed to portray, but several of the colors in the existing palette did not meet web accessibility standards.

We created a new color palette with an emphasis on the color green, with various shades and an accent color of gold. We felt this was a much better representation of Gardenstead's brand, and would also much better accommodate their clientele. We continued on to flesh out the style guide, which evolved as the design process moved along.

High fidelity prototype

As a well-equipped team, we came back together to take our low fidelity designs and style guide to create an interactive model of the solution we would bring to Gardenstead.

To rapidly create this prototype while ensuring that we deliver high quality results, each designer on our team took the lead on designing and prototyping 2 screens within the same shared Figma file. We collaborated to adhere to the style guide, add interactive elements, and create a second-to-none user experience.

In conclusion

Client handoff

As we wrapped up the final phase of our project, we prepared to hand off our designs and our research to the Gardenstead team. We presented the project in its entirety, walked through the interactive prototype with the client, and explained our rationale for the proposed UX and UI changes we determined would be most beneficial to the company in achieving their business goals. Gardenstead was receptive to the feedback and enthusiastic about the work we completed within a relatively short project timeframe.

Next steps

Since this project was completed on a contract basis, my design team for this project has handed off the responsibility of developing and actually implementing the designs to the Gardenstead team and their in-house engineers. We established a strong relationship between our designers and the project manager we worked with, and we look forward to this new offering being launched in the coming months.