Ian Lowe

Sabrina Ferras

Project Status Update

Changes to Initial Objectives

Originally, the objectives for the project were based around creating paid features and

having an active user-base by the time we were finished with capstone. We had listed objectives

such as tracking usage with Google Analytics, and doing SEO optimization. We made these our

objectives early on because we hadn’t yet decided on all of the feature work that we wanted to

work on.

Diving into development, we quickly amassed a list of wanted features, and shifted our

objectives to delivering on these. We wanted our final product to be as full featured as possible

before releasing a live version of MyPlanner.garden.

Current State of Project

We are finished with the feature work that we wanted to get done, and are now getting

things polished. We are also working on small improvements/additional features that we set as

stretch goals. Over the next week, we will shift our focus to the course’s final deliverables.

Implemented Features

1. Users of our app can register an account and log in.

2. Users can enter their zip code and get local weather information as well as plant

recommendations based on their location’s hardiness zone.

3. Users can ‘favorite’ plant recommendations, so that they can create a list of items to

plant.
 4. Users can add ‘plantings’ to their gardening log to keep track of items they’ve planted.

Each planting has fields such as date planted, a notes section, as well as the ability to

upload associated images.

5. Users can set watering reminders for items they’ve planted. Users will receive email

notifications on any day of the week they have a watering reminder set, that includes all

of the plants to water for that day.

6. Users can create a diagram of their garden and associate items on the diagram with items

in their planting log.

7. A plant API, complete with authentication via bearer token, that gives public access to

our database of plant information.

8. An AI plant identification feature. Users can upload or take a picture of a plant, and get

the name and images of the identified species.

Individual Contributions

Sabrina worked primarily on the plant API, watering reminders, and plant

recommendation features. Ian worked primarily on the plantings, weather, garden diagramming,

and plant identification features. Although this is where feature ownership was, both team

members assisted each other across all feature development.

Project Testing

Target Audience

The target audience for our web application is the gardening community as a whole as

well as people who are interested in joining that community. The pandemic played a major role

in increasing the number of younger gardeners. With the increase of millennials in gardening and
given their generally greater comfortability with technology, our web gardening application

could help this group in their relatively new gardening journey.

Testers

Linda Evans is our first tester, she is in her 60s and has been a very active gardener for 38

years. She has also led out gardening workshops at $75 per person, as well as given talks to

different groups on how to start organic gardens. Linda considers herself not very proficient in

technology, although she does use a smartphone and runs an Instagram account to share her

gardening and cooking experiences.

Our second tester is Mrs. Lowe! Alyssa is a first time homeowner who is excited to use

the gardening space that came with her home. She has recently been diving into gardening books

and just grew her first flowers from seed. Although not a very technical person herself, Alyssa

does spend her days supporting technical customers working in customer success for a software

testing company.

Charles is our third tester, he is a millennial who considers himself an intermediate when

it comes to technology. In terms of his gardening experience he says, “I helped out as a kid with

our small garden.” When this project was in its development phases he was very excited about it

and asked if he could be one of its testers.

The final tester for our web application is Kurt Hildebrand. He is an electronics engineer

specializing in embedded systems. Kurt programs primarily in C and C#, but is familiar with

HTML/CSS/JS and a little bit of backend (primarily ASP.NET). He will be testing the technical

aspects of our web application as well as reviewing our Plant API.

Tasks for Testers

1. Create an account
2. Add their zip code
 3. Add/remove a recommended plant to/from their wishlist
4. Add/remove a planting to/from their plant log
5. Add/remove/update a watering reminder
6. Create diagram of their garden
7. Upload a picture to use ‘AI plant Identification’ tool
8. (For tester who understands how to use API) Walk through Plant API and test it’s
implementation
User-group Testing

Linda Evans’ Initial thoughts on the home page were positive, she read through the

description and said she liked it. Before even being informed of her first task, which was to

create an account, she went to create an account. Although being uncomfortable with new

technology and the laptop she was using she was able to complete tasks 1 - 6 with relative ease.

A few issues encountered was being not sure that the heart icon in the list or plant

recommendations was to add them to the wishlist. She recovered and figured it out fairly quickly

though. Another thing that puzzled her was that the plant recommendations/wishlist was not

connected with actual plantings. Once I explained to her that the ‘my plantings’ were for actual

plantings she had planted, she understood. I think it would be good to have more informational

boxes to explain these unclarities. Task 6 was a little more complicated for Linda, it took her a

little assistance to understand what she was supposed to do. It would be good to add more

description on this page as well. Finally she did test out the ‘AI Plant Identification’ and she is

very excited about it, but there was some issue with the pictures from my phone camera being

too large to be processed. Overall she was very satisfied with the Web Application and is happy

with what it can do and looks forward to seeing improvement on the ‘AI Plant Identification.’

Alyssa Lowe was able to navigate through account creation and log in with no issues. She

commented that when asking for the user’s zip code, a mention about not using her location for

commercial purposes might be welcome. She was a little confused about what the heart icon was

supposed to do on the plant recommendation section of the dashboard. When clicked, nothing
appeared to change. I watched her struggle with it for a minute or so and then suggested scrolling

down, where she found the plants that she ‘hearted’ in her wishlist. What she thought was

confusing about this, was that the hearts are already filled with a color. She suggested that it

would be nice if the hearts had no fill until they were clicked on, which I think is a great idea.

Alyssa had a lot of feature requests on the plantings page. She would have liked to be able to add

individual notes to her plantings, rather than having to edit a single ‘notes’ section. She also

suggested being able to add tags for organizational purposes, as well as options to search. She

noted that when adding multiple plantings, these features would become necessary as it was

tedious to have to search through a single list. On the plant diagramming page, she requested the

ability to be able to copy and paste objects. This is for the case when you planted one type of

plant, maybe in different pots or in different places, but at the same time. Alyssa’s use of the

plant identification feature went smoothly. She mentioned that she would love the ability to add

plants to her wishlist from this part of the app as well.

Charles’ testing went smoothly overall. He was able to get through all the tasks with

minor assistance. First of all he liked the home page because it was ‘simple and not too many

buttons.’ In task 3, he struggled to realize that he added a plant to the wishlist, he suggested to

make it more clear when a plant was added to the wishlist that the color of the heart icon could

be changed to indicate it had been added to the wishlist. Also making it clear that to add an item

to the wishlist, have instructions to heart a plant in the plant recommendations list. One more

suggestion for the dashboard was to put the zip code of the user along near the hardiness zone to

indicate that this was used to determine the hardiness zone and have a link to change the zip code

if needed. In task 6, after adding a rectangle to the Garden Map he repeatedly tried to add a new

circle but he did not see it because it was the same color as the rectangle and not visible when
placed directly on top of it. He suggested having new shapes appear in different places to prevent

this from happening or even having a drag and drop menu. Overall, Charles found our web

application to be very neat and sees potential for the future.

Kurt Hildebrand thoroughly tested creating an account. He found success in: creating an

account using his credentials, not being able to create an account with usernames/email addresses

already registered, using email addresses with plus addressing, using usernames with emoji,

using usernames with Chinese characters, and allowing RTL text (e.g. Hebrew). Kurt found that

creating an account successfully escapes name and username by attempting script injection, SQL

Injection, and unwanted variable interpolation. One technical issue found was that even though

the name field does appear to have a limit length of 255 characters, long names cause the

identifying account name in the top right of the web pages to extend past the right side of the

screen. The user has to scroll to the right to interact with its Profile/API/Logout menu. Another

critique was that the created username is not used in the login or profile edit. Lastly Kurt tested

the Plant API and found /api/plants endpoint seems to not require authentication, but the other

two endpoints, /api/plants/{field}={value}, and /api/plants/zone={value}, do require

authentication. He figured this could be a design decision. He suggested, if possible, to redirect

to https. Finally Kurt said “Technically, the app is pretty awesome. Good job!”

Plans for Improvement

After receiving very great and constructive feedback from our testers, we plan on adding

more description where we found our testers struggling with most, for example making it more

clear that the heart icon in the recommended plants adds the plant to the users wishlist. Our

testers offered great suggestions for improvement and ideas for additional features that we will

look into which are best suited to incorporate into our application in the future.