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Bonsai can be literally translated as ‘tree planted in a tray’. It is an art form in which practitioners manipulate trees to make them resemble mature specimens but in a miniature form. For shaping the trees, artists perform various types of interventions, which require a considerable amount of knowledge in botany and plant physiology, making bonsai a practice significantly hard to learn.
In 2020, the COVID-19 lockdown coincided with the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, which is the busiest season for bonsai care. As a result, interest in Bonsai worldwide has almost doubled since March 2020 according to Google Trends:
Google Trends — ‘Bonsai’ interest over time
As I had to spend most of my time at home, I used the opportunity to resume this practice and added some plants to my collection. I quickly realised that in order to track the progress of my trees I had to document care events in form of notes and pictures, and searching for a tool I was surprised that none existed to serve this basic need.
With the support of another UX designer, a back-end developer and the r/Bonsai community as domain experts, I started working on Jooni in June 13, 2020 and the first version of the app was published 8 days after.
Today the app has 4000+ installs on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store, 1000+ trees registered and 429 avg. weekly visitors, being the 2nd most popular app of its type.
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Bonsai care journey
From seedling to mature tree, a bonsai specimen can often take over 20 years of intense care. For this reason, it is important that interventions are tracked to monitor progression and help decide what the next steps should be.
Interventions need to be performed at the right time of the year, and although these rules may vary based on species and location, artists usually follow the schedule shown on the image above.
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Opportunities
Through online forums and interviews with artists and hobbyists, I have collected opportunities for improving bonsai care through the use of a digital tool. The most valuable findings were:
1. Communities are key to knowledge sharing among artists
Plants grow at a very slow rate, and therefore it takes time for an artist to know whether an intervention was successful or not, and for this reason learning solely through own experience is not a very efficient method. As a result, artists often gather in communities such as bonsai clubs or online forums such as Reddit. Jooni should create a strong sense of community and encourage exchange of experiences between artists of all levels.
2. Beginners are insecure about sharing pictures of their trees
When beginning in Bonsai, hobbyists are often not confident about sharing pictures of their trees, mostly because they fear criticism from more advanced users. If beginners were more comfortable sharing, they would be able to get guidance at the time they need it the most. To solve this issue, Jooni should make beginners feel safe about sharing their mistakes.
3. Experts often share only the best picture of their trees
In bonsai exhibitions, books or magazines, experts tend to share only the best pictures of their specimens, and while this can certainly inspire beginners, it will not help them to learn how to achieve that same result with their own trees. To solve this issue, Jooni should encourage experts to share the backstage pictures of their trees.
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User flow
Based on the opportunities identified, the user flow has been defined and served as a basis for designing the user interfaces. It consists of 5 main screens through which the user can navigate:
Gallery: The entry point of the application, contains suggestions of trending trees and allows the user to sort by new or trending entries. On desktop it is shown as a 4 column grid while on mobile it has 1 column only.
Journal: Contains an overview of a single specimen, including its thumbnail, name, species, owner, number of likes, comments and list of events.
Event: Shows details of a chosen event, mainly its images and notes.
Profile: Displays all trees posted by a user, the badges earned by her/him, profile picture and other details.
Genus: Contains a list of trees belonging to a genus, care guidelines and list of species contained in it.
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Releases and feedback loops
Using Reddit and Instagram as the main means of communicating with users, we have engaged with the community to provide feedback on newly released and upcoming features, helping us prioritise our work and give us input on their needs or pain points. For more direct input, we set up video calls to talk directly to individual users.
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Solution
In an incremental manner, Jooni is continuously evolving based on feedback gathered from the community through social media, forums, app store reviews and data gathered through analytics. Functionalities have been defined to serve the goals and opportunities of the users mentioned before. To highlight some key features:
Trees tracked through Jooni are public by default, allowing other users to see and learn from their care history. Trees can be set to private by their owners.
Popular trees uploaded by expert artists are recommended to users so they can learn best practices from experienced peers.
Users are awarded badges as they complete certain achievements, including positive cases like uploading a popular tree or negative ones such as killing a specimen.
Users can export their progressions as images directly to social media such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit or similar.
Users can schedule future events and get reminded when the date arrives.
Users can set preferences such as language (6 in total) and theme (light or dark).
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