Project
Overview
Forest is an app that helps maintain your focus. While planting a tree on the app, you must refrain from using your phone during this period otherwise the tree will wither. On top of that, if you stay focused on the Forest app for long enough, real trees will be planted. For this job, I was asked to redesign the app within a five-day period, to boost the function of growing real trees.
Market
Research
To understand the user goals and motivations involved in planting real trees, I conducted a simple survey and used the key takeaways below to further ideation.
Market
Analysis
As a result of the user research, I found that there are people who don’t know this function, which means this function needs more marketing. Based on most of the users who are addicted to smartphone games, I use an NPC farmer to introduce the tree planting function. And I give the real trees some detailed information to make the users feel connected to their real trees.
Sketches
Wireframe
Visual Identification
Final
Project
Virtual Farm
I applied the virtual farm concept to the real tree interface because more and more people enjoy virtual games that provide them with a real-world experience.
Real Tree Identities
The more you know about trees, the more you feel connected with them. Therefore, we provided information about the different types, the growth cycle of trees, and the benefit to the earth.
Make the Avatar of Farmer a Storyteller
Apart from the real tree-planting feature, we also had to promote the app’s collaborative organization, Trees for the Future. However, people nowadays are so busy that they seldom concern themselves with information that doesn’t relate to them. But they do pay attention when they feel like they’re playing a game. As a result, I made the avatar act as the storyteller, to talk about how the organization plants real trees.
Reflection
Due to time constraints, I had to carefully plan the process and make decisions based on assumptions and guerrilla testing. However, the short timescale also provided me with a chance to run a solo sprint, which equipped me with the ability to flesh out ideas very quickly.
If I’d had more time, I’d have conducted interviews and observations to deep-dive into underlying motivations.
