Turnip
Who
Vik Bathala
Alice Liao
Joanna Zheng
WHERE
HackDuke Ideate
Durham, NC, USA
WHEN
May 2021
HOW
Adobe XD, Figma, Procreate
Turnip connects urban community gardeners and provides a space for information, connections, and communication. We provide a space for chatting with community gardeners to ask for help or find ideas, crowdfunding community gardening projects, and providing a marketspace for backyard growers and community-restaurant sales.
In addition, we allow community members to monitor local community gardens to maintain security and see progress. Finally, we provide a database of information on what grows in each region, when to plant, companion plants, and other important information.
Turnip was conceptualized during HackDuke Ideate 2021 - A 36-hour design hackathon hosted virtually by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For our prompt, we were tasked to create a prototype app for one of three nonprofit organizations. We decided to work with SEEDS (NC), a local urban garden and kitchen classroom that teaches young people valuable life lessons and skills through gardening, cooking, and sharing food.
We built this prototype using 3 main softwares: Adobe XD, Procreate, and Figma. We used Adobe XD to create all of the mockup pages, wireframes, and general designs. We used Procreate to create more complex illustrations, such as those found in the first, second, and last onboarding pages. And finally, we used Figma as a sort of collaborative ideation whiteboard - something that served to be very useful as virtual competitors.
The biggest challenge we faced was, of course, the time crunch. With only 36 hours to create a fully fleshed out prototype with people we've never met before, we quickly highlighted our own strengths and weaknesses and formulated an efficient plan for prioritizing and delegating tasks.
Another major challenge we faced is that most of us had very little experience using Adobe XD before the competition, and one of our members had never used it at all. So, along with creating a fleshed out prototype given the time, we also had to learn the software needed to create the prototype. Luckily we all learned fairly quickly, and we took the time to share knowledge when we could.
Overall, we were very proud of what we managed to accomplish. We took the judges critique in stride, and eventually added much of what the suggested after-the-fact. We ended up winning 1st Place for "Best Project for SEEDS (NC)" and 3rd place for "Huawei Innovation Award", and we were proud to present our product to SEEDS (NC) and improve our community!
We wanted to create user personas to demonstrate the types of people that we expect to use an app like this. On the left we have Kiana who is a young adult who is green with the greens but wants to get involved in community gardening and sustainability around her campus. She's interested in building community in her college town and helping out the environment. She doesn't know much about gardening or how to get involved, but she's tech savvy and has an IPhone, IPad, and MacBook.
On the right we have Mickey who is an expert on community gardening and is a local educator on nutritional health and gardening. He wants to foster a healthy community and mitigate food insecurity in his area. He has trouble obtaining funding when he needs it and often finds himself with less people interested in community gardening.
We set out to design an app that caters to both audiences. Our design includes a variety of solutions, such as community chat spaces, information databases, crowdfunding, platforms, a marketplace for produce, security monitoring, and local meetup information.
The biggest challenge we faced was, of course, the time crunch. With only 36 hours to create a fully fleshed out prototype with people we've never met before, we quickly highlighted our own strengths and weaknesses and formulated an efficient plan for prioritizing and delegating tasks.
Another major challenge we faced is that most of us had very little experience using Adobe XD before the competition, and one of our members had never used it at all. So, along with creating a fleshed out prototype given the time, we also had to learn the software needed to create the prototype. Luckily we all learned fairly quickly, and we took the time to share knowledge when we could.
Overall, we were very proud of what we managed to accomplish. We took the judges critique in stride, and eventually added much of what the suggested after-the-fact. We ended up winning 1st Place for "Best Project for SEEDS (NC)" and 3rd place for "Huawei Innovation Award", and we were proud to present our product to SEEDS (NC) and improve our community!
Here is a look at a bit of our planning phase. We created an onboarding flow diagram to clarify how we wanted our users to traverse through our app. Additionally, we created an ideation board that included things we thought would be important to include as well as some of our findings from the user studies we conducted. One such finding from user interviews was that a marketplace for excess produce or advice on dealing with surplus would be very enticing as the user is often left with too much yield and did not know what to do with it. We included this into our final design by allowing users to post sales for crops they grow. Additionally, here are 3 of the 6 onboarding screens we created. We found it important to design an introduction and explanation for the app so new users would understand the capabilities and use cases for the app.
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