User Experience Questions

0. What did you measure and what did you learn while observing “users” interact with your prototype?

We only had a rough outline of what our UI might look like, so mainly what we measured was enthusiasm. Everybody seemed to think that ours was a good project, and now the key is to make it easy to use. We had some great suggestions, and one we will probably implement: having profiles for different plants.

1. What kinds of free, scrap, low-end, low-cost product or service can your team provide and who would it take business away from?

We are looking to make cheap, simple gardening solutions for herbs and other cooking ingredients you would normally buy in-store. We would be taking business away from sellers of organic, ready-to-cook herbs that are generally priced high and make cooking your own meals less cost-effective. We're aiming our product at people who want to cut down on eating out, so they would be spending less money at restaurants.

2. What specific sources of free software, programming, bandwidth, storage, branding, advertising and so forth can your project use? How will you get them for free (or for cheap)?

The web-based application interface of our product can be built on top of free tools like Bootstrap framework for the UI, mySQL for the database, and Highcharts for the graphs. As for advertising, the nature of our project should help us get free publicity. DIY/hacker/maker projects are all the rage these days. If we decided to take this farther than a class project, a Kickstarter could be planned to get the word out and raise funds for producing a finished product.

3. How will you make your first international sale?

Probably through Kickstarter.

4. After your team succeeds in taking over the low-end, low-cost market, what is the next level higher in that market?

After we have a mature, fully-developed product aimed at hobby growers, we can convert those users into serious growers by expanding our product line. Bigger boxes, boxes that talk to each other, maybe even full greenhouses.