There are lots of similarities between creating a garden and a website. Both require taking users’ needs into consideration, continued management, and optimization. We don’t hear about as many poorly designed gardens as we do websites, however. With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at three prime examples of good UX in gardening and harvest some transferable tips to inform ourselves on how to better design websites.
The epitome of user-centred garden design is the Keyhole Garden. Named after the shape it takes, the Keyhole Garden is a small, two-meter raised garden initially developed to enable persons with AIDS to tend to their gardens as their AIDS progressed. The design allows people to work in the beds without having to crouch down and makes everything within arm’s reach. It was created by the Consortium for Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE). The raised beds and sturdy bricks used to hold the soil in also allows for people that need extra physical support to lean against the structure while they work.
Whatsmore, the system of composting with a Keyhole Garden is super optimised. The raised garden bed is made using a technique called "lasagna gardening". A lasagna garden is set up using the following layers (hence the name): wet cardboard at the base to kill weeds naturally (no-dig) followed by layers of green and brown organic material. The matter is left to decompose over some weeks and transform into rich soil, ready for planting (think waiting for a lasagna dish to bake in an oven).
While it was designed to help AIDs patients, the productiveness of Keyhole Gardens made them a sensation worldwide and popular among home gardeners wanting to manage their kitchen waste (kitchen waste is composted into a basket that sits in the centre of the Keyhole Garden bed). UX Designers can think of this as a successful implementation of Heuristic #7: Flexibility and Efficiency of Use, where two types of users, in this case not precisely novice vs advanced but similarly two user groups with different needs, are able to efficiently and effectively use the system.
The Mandala Garden can be combined with the Keyhole Garden to improve aesthetics and provide an even more memorable user experience while still retaining function. Although, according to Nielsen’s Usability Heuristic #8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design, states “clarity will always win over visual flourish”, implying less-is-more, the Mandala Garden is a strong example of aesthetically pleasing design giving high informational value.
Nielsen states designs should “leverage universal visual patterns that carry positive connotations”. If ever there was a symbol that carried positive connotations across time and cultures, the ancient Mandala is it. So, it is safe to say the Mandala form has one of the highest visual values. Furthermore, a Mandala Garden is designed to have a maximum productive area through employing polyculture gardening (growing different plant species together in the same area), thus giving it high informational value.
How a home gardener will implement it is simply by selecting the plants they want to grow, based on their needs, and plant them in each of the Keyhole Garden beds throughout the Mandala Garden. Simple!
Market Gardening was popularised by Canadian farmer Jean-Martin Fortier in response to the needs of small-scale commercial farmers. The problem: farmers have sore backs and legs from bending all day and walking back and forth from garden bed to garden bed. The large widths of garden beds make farmers hyperextend their backs to harvest from the center of the bed, causing many farmers to retire early or face health problems. Think of Market Gardening as the revolution for small-scale commercial farmers as ergonomics was to the office workplace.
If we zoom out, large-scale/monoculture farming is actually bad design. It isn’t human scale, exuberantly expensive, and not planned to meet human needs but exceed them. And we can understand this as a lot of things are built out of human proportions in our world today, not just farming. Market Gardening is human scale. It is human and user-centered in the truest sense of the word.
So what exactly is Jean-Martin Fortier’s design solution? Having 30” (width) raised garden beds as there are a lot of advantages with 30” for posture. You can harvest a lot from the crouching position as the beds are raised and it’s easy to harvest from the centre of the 30” bed. The crouching down is the correct position to be harvesting to be in to maintain your back. You also save time. You can easily step over a 30” bed from one path to the other whereas for a 45” bed you would have to walk out and around the bed to get to the next one. As harvesting is half the work on the farm, you need to be comfortable.
Whatsmore, row lengths are also standardised (the farmer can pick whether they want 100, 80 or 60 ft rows) so that all the row covers, insect nets, irrigation lines etc. are the same size which will save farmers time in looking for the right size, increasing efficiency.
All in all, a Market Garden design saves time by minimizing foot circulation (hop over bed rows) and is more ergonomic (farmers harvest in the crouching position). It is a design concept that has proven profitable (45% profit margin) by considering the user and looks to enable the longevity of one’s work. And this is what we want to do for a website when improving its UX - make it better at converting.
When designing for any system, natural or digital, it’s important to always take time to observe it first in order to discover if anything is out of balance just as we would during a Heuristic Evaluation.
Natural systems are resilient and are, in fact, the best UX designers - so we had better pay closer attention to nature!
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