Who: “Rethinking Lawns”
Project Timeline: 9 Weeks
What: An eco-friendly educational company that works with local farmers to provide regional specific seeds
Emphasis based in education for those familiar and unfamiliar with the topic / idea of bringing a more natural look and feel to their lawns.
Why: To reduce pesticides into our environment and encourage natural wildlife to flourish the way it is intended to.
Denver Botanic Gardens, 2023
Competitive Analysis
While we are different from a typical lawn care business, the plan was to replicate the feel of the earthy natural lawn care website we are all familiar with. This competitive analysis led into the overall design and structure of the wire framing process.
A company that stood out in terms of great UX/UI design was American Meadows, they deal strictly in regional specific wildflowers for wildflower lawns, however they are more strictly sales focused whereas Rethinking Lawns focus on education first and then offers links to local farmers for seeds to purchase.
Why? Because when you begin something like wildflower lawns you need to understand your lawn will go through an awkward phase where it is not aesthetically pleasing. You need to understand what invasive plants you are at risk of and how to work with the area you live in. For example, in Arizona you should take advantage of the rocks and heat for a gorgeous rock landscaped yard that is low maintenance and looks good even during a drought
Another company that stood out was Blue Thumb, a non-profit Minnesota specific company. This company had more of a minimalistic design that did not feel as visually engaging as the UI we see in American Meadows.
Rethinking Lawns offers education, advice/support from a local and national level, and offers assistance to navigating city ordinances and HOA laws.
Refining Design
Rethinking Lawns has an Earth tone color palette to emulate a feeling of nature. While the website originally was going to be called Wildflower Power with an emphasis on wildflower meadow lawns, it evolved into lawn alternatives discussing other concepts such as moss lawns, and rock based landscaping.
The site pays attention to different regions and which option works best for the environment you(the viewer) live in. The viewer also has the ability to select other regions for research on lawn potential of other areas of the country.
While moving through basic navigation of the website, emphasis on education of the mission and vision which have undertones of philosophy was carefully placed and laid out throughout varying aspects of the website.
Usability Testing
Questions that were asked
➤ Does the design have an intuitive and logical flow?
➤ Does the language of our icons give enough information or does the verbiage need to be adjusted.
Are they direct enough? Do they make sense for the content they hold? Do they gain attention?
What was uncovered
➤ To place more emphasis on flow than on overall design at this point.
➤ To perform continued research of the specific verbiage used on our icon navigational links
➤ To test the layout on multiple devices and to adjust for different modalities (laptops vs. cellphones)
Questions to ask at the next usability test
➤ Is the mission and vision clear throughout the website?
➤ At what point do you feel connected and have buy in / stake to our concept?
➤ At what point does it make sense to ask for the region where the viewer resides?
(While cookies on a site can automatically detect the region,
we want to give the viewer the autonomy of choosing a region either for themself or others.
Exploring out of curiosity.)
Looking into the future
➤ More interactive elements (interactive state/region map)
➤ Hover over images for preview of next page (interactive element)
➤ Create logo
➤ Continued play with the blur / glass effect
➤ Researching modern design trends, re-examining website home pages
➤ Finding ways to fluff up screenshots and website / branding overall
Timeline: Engaging and interactive design elements to keep the viewer engaged in the content and to allow for buy-in / stake as to the “why” of our brand.
Resources Page: What began as minimalistic design choices will instead move into a drop down menu as opposed to its own separate page.
After continued work is done on overall branding and design of our website, an additional usability test will be done to gain more feedback on where to place further attention to.