Plantify calculates the impact on animals and the environment based on personal eating habits via a mobile app.
This is my personal startup project which started with a fascination with personal data trackers such as Fitbit, which I eventually needed to throw out due to my excessive steps obsession.
I wondered about personal data quantification when it came to food. How many fields of wheat would I eat in my life? I thought about animals - and how many were eaten every day in the world. I began to think of a calculator that knew how many cows you ate in your life projected from 2 hamburgers a week. From here, I expanded the concept to water, waste, and land. Plantify was born in my mind.
01 Concept discovery
I embarked on a discovery stage which included goal clarification and concept visualisation.
I was able to bounce ideas around at start-up events and vegan meetups.
01 User discovery
I immersed myself in vegan meetups, podcasts and video channels to find who were the likely users of the product and created personas based on this research.
I created 5 personas - Self Improver, Young Idealist, Reducetarian, Open-minded Vegetarian/Flexitarian, and Committed Vegan. I created journeys for each persona through the concept map including Joining and Habitual.
01 Product discovery
I spent time looking at apps that quantify individual food consumption with the aim of behavioural change, information awareness, or both. Features such as analysis, food input diaries and summary data charts were relevant to my concept.
02 Prototyping & Calculating
I created initial wireframes and the calculations I would need.
I quickly realised that calculating animals a user *saved, as I had imagined in my initial concept, was not a strictly logical calculation.
I instead concentrated on a 'compare' feature - where the user could compare their consumption against an average American, a category of person about which public data was available.
03 Brand vision
I formulated a brand product vision and user interface language to appeal to target users.
04 Development
I chose Bubble.io, a no-code development tool for the dev solution. My life became 6-12 hours of Bubble design and dev a day interspersed with illustration for the better part of a year.
An interesting outcome of this phase was becoming a SAAS power-user as well as a developer, which gave me new perspectives on these roles.
05 Refinement
As the product development progressed, the UI and navigation evolved - and the MVP took shape.
I shared and tested the evolving product with my friends and got feedback early on.
06 Native optimisation & launch
Between the dual-platform BDK testing app & Apple TestFlight feedback, I was able to iron out big and small glitches in order to successfully launch on the stores.
Impact
The most rewarding outcome has been feedback from users who have gained insight from the data and have used Plantify as a conversation aid for the highly emotive topic of animal food consumption.
Plantify can help focus on facts, and illustrate the power of even small changes.
