Bonsaquarium: The Latest in Treehouse Technology

Created By: Alex Z (User Research), Giselle G (Designer), Vania W (Concept Artist), Eric B (Writer)

It’s notoriously tricky to take care of Bonsai trees. They must be watered and fertilized just the right amount and are prone to various health problems. Still, bonsai plants are immensely rewarding to take care of due to their longevity and beauty, making them an attractive yet intimidating challenge for gardeners.

Enter: the Bonsaquarium

We want to make growing a beautiful bonsai tree simple and accessible to gardeners of all skill levels. With the Bonsaquarium, gardeners don’t have to worry about mundane, everyday tasks. For casual gardeners, the automatic watering and fertilizing will be nice in case they forget to water their tree. Even serious gardeners will appreciate these features though, as they can now take vacations without worrying about how to water their plants. Other features of the Bonsaquarium, like health problem detection, can enable experienced gardeners to grow a greater variety of bonsai than they could normally.

Refining a design

We wanted the Bonsaquaium to be friendly and intuitive to use for beginning gardeners and pros alike, so we evaluated a number of prototypes to settle on our final design. First, we began with a paper prototype to assess the overall usability of our idea and get an idea of how one might interact with the real product. This paper prototype was just a cardboard box with a paper “touchscreen.”

Figure 1: Our paper prototype for the Bonsaquarium

For testing, we had our bonsaquarium and our paper UI prototypes. We sat down as a group in Alex’s house’s library. For participants, Alex selected random people living in his house who were available. We gave each test participant a rundown of the Bonsaquarium and then introduced the tasks that the bonsaquarium is used for (watering/fertilizing on a schedule and identifying problems). We also emphasized that we were testing our prototype for flaws, not the user. At the start of the test, we told the user the task they were going to try to do and that we couldn’t answer questions, then let them start. At the end of the test, we asked for additional feedback and comments.

Figure 2: Our paper display slides

We’re glad we started with a low-fidelity prototype because we gleaned some key insights into problems with our design. For example, many of our usability testing participants got confused when trying to determine if an on-screen (fig. 2) element was a button or not. We realized we needed to develop a more consistent UI language to help our users understand how to use the Bonsaquarium.

With some of the kinks ironed out, we moved on to make a digital mockup of our design in Figma. This digital prototype allows us to actually navigate through screens of the interface as if it were an app, bringing us ever closer to the final user experience. However, since the digital mockup is still just a mockup we only made a few example user flows.

Figure 3: Screens a user would see when the tree isn’t getting enough nutrients.

The final digital mockup is available on Figma too. With this mockup we can finally see how the technology of a Bonsaquarium can take a difficult task for gardeners and remove a lot of complexity and tedium.

Wrap-up

Unfortunately, the Bonsaquarium won’t actually be produced. However, the exercise of designing it was immensely valuable because it showed us how design can make an outsize difference on people’s everyday lives; the Bonsaquarium would definitely reduce headaches and give people the freedom to go on vacation or focus on other chores without neglecting the bonsai trees they’ve invested years of time into. By enclosing a Bonsai tree in a nurturing environment we hope to take a little stress off the gardener too.