asher silverman

Root Network is a fictional social media site for gardeners. I was tasked with creating a broad overview of the network’s overall functionality and a seamless signup experience across mobile and desktop.

For this project, I conducted an anonymous online survey of 33 gardeners, interviewed 5 gardeners of differing backgrounds, constructed aggregate and individual empathy maps, and did a competitive audit of 3 direct and indirect competitors.

Competitive Audit

After a community survey and subsequent research, I chose to investigate 3 competitors: Facebook Groups, Dig the Dirt, and Build Soil.

Pain Points

User Personas

In addition to standard social media actions, I addressed user pain points by building in specific key features.

Key Features:

• A main feature of the site, users can “clip” posts, pictures, and comments to save in their virtual scrapbook. They can have as many scrapbook pages as they want, and organize clippings however they see fit.

• Users are able to earn various badges through community interaction with their posts and comments. These badges will aid others in judging the reliability of their advice.

• In addition to users being able to “follow” other accounts, they can join specialized groups to meet their specific needs. These groups are automatically suggested to the user based on choices made during the account creation flow, and can also be found via search or tags. They’re based on location, experience level, type of gardening, specialized interests, and more.

• A curated tag system gives users an easy way to search and explore information and groups relevant to their interests.

Branding

Root Network was a fictional product and so did not have any extant design guidelines.

I directly lifted the colors used in Root Network’s branding from a photo of my tradescantia (a common houseplant). The two shades of green are commonly seen in gardening, while the magenta adds contrast and color, evoking blooms and variegated leaves.

I picked a playful serif font to use for headings, and chose a versatile sans serif font family for all other text.

While most of the icons were from the Material Design system, the iconography for a central feature of the website required extra thought.

The scrapbook feature allows users to save posts in collections, akin to a physical scrapbook or a digital board (a la Pinterest.) Because much of the target user base would have more familiarity with the physical concept of clipping out an article to save for later, a pair of scissors was chosen to represent “clipping” a post for the scrapbook.

High Fidelity Prototype

This high-fidelity prototype synthesized insights from the previous usability study in order to improve upon the initial wireframes and give the users a better account creation experience. 

View the high-fidelity prototype here

For this project, I really focused on modularity, creating alternate versions of each component for desktop vs mobile. I learned a lot about how important predetermined design systems can be when designing for multiple experiences at once.

Because of this, I became intimately familiar with Figma’s component system, and ended up with a robust library of multi-property variants. Creating these designs for both desktop and mobile was a new challenge for me, but it was rewarding.

I’m pleased with how I incorporated the site’s design into the user’s first interaction with the Root Network, and overall feel like I learned a lot about how the key features of the site affected the account creation flow.

This project was done for the Google UX Design Professional Certificate, completed through Coursera in spring 2022.

This training covered:

• Information architecture development

• Sitemap construction

• Responsive web design

• Basic familiarity with Adobe XD