As a side project, two developers and I are reworking the app Plenti. It's currently available for download on Apple and Android, and we're hoping to release 2.0 in late summer 2021. I'm designing in Figma,  we've been working on the new version since February 2021. It was originally created by developer Anthony Dreessen, and he's leading the redesign process. The app is free, however there is a premium version which adds a few features. One of the goals of this redesign has been to make the premium version, PlentiFull, worth it for the users. The revenue from the premium version goes towards the app hosting, so there is no budget. This means that we have very limited access to the user demographics, as we would have to pay for this information.

The main goals of Plenti are to build community and relationships among neighbors by sharing food, as well as encourage healthy, local eating. A gardener or farmer can list their extra crops on Plenti, and their neighbors will come pick it up.

Since there're only three of us working on this project, I find myself wearing a few different hats. The app is built off material design, so I don't have too much freedom in terms of elements, but I'm spending as much time on fleshing out features and streamlining user flows.

This is what the original main screen on Plenti looked like. You would click one of these three options, and it would expand to show you tiles with stock images of each type of food in that category. You would then click on the tile, choose how much you were looking for, then the system would tell you if there was any available in your determined range.

I knew immediately that this process needed to be reversed.

Instead of making the user click through a process only to often find there aren't any available, we decided we need to show the user right off the bat what is nearby.

On the left is the first iteration of the new way for users to find food.
On the right is a new feature we introduced for the premium users, a search bar that would show you directly whether there were any matching listings nearby.
It was shortly after this that I stopped using non-waterproof ink for wireframe sketches.

Eventually we realized that there was something missing - users needed to be able to add their own photos of the food they had grown. Not only would this increase the farmer's pride and engagement, it would ensure that food seekers were getting exactly what they were looking for, and it would make the whole experience feel more local and genuine.

Here is a mockup of the new and improved main screen. Users are presented with all the listings in their set range, sorted chronologically. When a user clicks on a card, it opens to show more detail, and give the option of connecting with the gardener who listed the crop.

Once you've connected with a user to chat about a specific crop, you can view their profile, and they can choose to share their pickup location with you. Premium users can feature the crops they have, and the ones they're looking for on their profile. With this and location information, there are a variety of things that can show on a profile given different situations. This matrix is how I sorted out where and how these features are visible.

In order to make our app functional, it must be populated by real user's crops. This makes the crop listing process quite important. If it is frustrating or confusing, users will give up, and the point of the app is lost. After a few different flows, here is the listing process that I landed on.