Kew Gardens

Kew Gardens is one of the world’s leading Botanic Gardens and an internationally important botanical research and education institution.

Kew Gardens wanted to explore the feasibility of creating mobile apps to help casual users with no botanical experience identify wildflowers. In part, the feasibility of these apps depends on communicating some very complex concepts, generally only understood by expert botanists. Kew approached Fjord to conduct proof of concept work to establish whether or not it would be possible to communicate these concepts through design, enabling novices to identify flowers reasonably accurately.

Guerrilla exploratory research in the gardens explored how non-scientists think about flowers, for example:

• what do they notice when they look at them?
• which words and concepts do they use to describe flower features?
• how do they understand the differences between different flowers?

We found that the general public understands flowers in a very different way from botanists. Sometimes this is because the concepts, such as distinguishing different types of symmetry, are hard to grasp; but sometimes the concepts seem simple (counting leaves or determining petal colour) but lay people and botanists will give very different answers.

Based on our knowledge of what novices would, and wouldn't, understand, we developed UI paper prototypes to explain the plant characteristics most likely to cause confusion. We then ran guerrilla UX testing in Kew Gardens to assess which concepts, interaction flows and UI designs worked, which didn’t, and why.

Our iterative prototyping and testing approach proved that it was feasible to create UI designs that communicated complex botanical concepts.

Given that areas of high botanical interest often have poor mobile network coverage, Fjord also provided consultancy on possible technical architectures for the service to ensure the best possible user experience whatever the network conditions. We are working with Kew to develop these apps further.