Plot

The challenge

Community gardens run on volunteer energy — and lose it to logistics. Plot waitlists live in one person’s inbox, watering rotas die in group chats, and every handover of a coordinator role loses a season of knowledge.

The brief I gave myself: design a tool that a sixty-person garden would actually adopt, knowing that half its members are not “app people.”

Research

I spent two weekends at three gardens, ran a diary study with five coordinators, and audited the tools they’d already tried and abandoned. The failures had a shape:

• Generic tools demand translation. Trello and spreadsheets forced garden concepts into cards and rows; coordinators became full-time translators.
• The calendar is the garden. Everything meaningful — sowing, watering, harvest days — is seasonal and shared, yet no tool led with time.
• Adoption is social, not individual. A tool only stuck if it worked on the noticeboard as well as on a phone.

Process

I structured the product around a single object — the season — with plots, tasks, and events hanging off it, then prototyped the three riskiest flows in ProtoPie: joining a garden, claiming a task, and printing the week to paper.

Designing the print view felt like designing a small public space: it had to serve people who would never open the app, and it changed the information hierarchy of every screen that fed it.

Every screen had to survive being photocopied and pinned to a shed door.

Outcome

Usability tests with six gardeners (ages 24–71) hit a 100% completion rate on the joining flow, and the paper-first weekly view tested as the feature coordinators wanted most — the opposite of where a digital-first process would have started.

What I’d push next: a lightweight handover kit, so an outgoing coordinator can pass the whole garden — not just the login — to the next volunteer.