🌱 Inspiration 🌱

A lot of productivity tools focus on speed, pressure, and consistent work. During our brainstorming, we kept coming back to one idea: what if productivity could feel rewarding instead of overwhelming? What if building habits felt like nurturing something instead of chasing checkboxes?

Plants felt like the perfect metaphor. They grow slowly, quietly, and consistently. That inspired Grove, a plant-based productivity app that turns everyday tasks into moments of gentle progress. By representing each task as a plant that needs to be grown and nurtured on its own time, we eliminate the stress that traditional deadline-based task apps present. This encourages our users to develop their habits on their own time, just like how a plant will only grow when it has the right water and sunlight. :)

🌱 What it does 🌱

Grove helps users build habits through a growing digital garden. Each goal becomes a small plant. Completing tasks fertilizes the plant. As users stay consistent, their garden transforms into a thriving space that visually reflects progress. Harder tasks can be represented as larger plants, so as the garden grows taller with harder tasks, it can beautifully represent the user's personal progress.

Grove provides:

A calm, nature-inspired interface
Habit tracking represented as plant growth
Gentle reminders that feel encouraging rather than stressful

The goal is to make mundane tasks feel meaningful and enjoyable, and to help users stay grounded while working toward long-term habits.

🌱 How we built it 🌱

We began with research on habit formation and explored ways to turn consistent actions into visual growth. From there, we designed Grove through a combination of Figma prototypes and user flow iterations.

We built our core interactions around three ideas: planting goals, fertilizing tasks, and viewing growth. These became the foundation of our UI system, iconography, and user interaction. We also mapped each plant’s growth stages using simple state logic, which made the experience feel alive without adding unnecessary complexity.

🌱 Challenges we ran into 🌱

One of our early challenges was creating plant growth that felt rewarding without overwhelming the user. We experimented with different growth levels and styles, but we quickly realized that if tasks we represented with too many possible levels, the task itself would feel daunting and hard to complete. As such, we kept our largest plant level to 3, making it so that trying to complete this goal, no matter how hard it may be, can be represented in simple incremental steps.

We also struggled with information density. Productivity apps often become cluttered, so we spent time simplifying the layout and removing extra features that distracted from the main experience. For example, we wanted to tailor sprites for different seasons and holidays, but we quickly realized this actually adds a lot of confusion and overhead for our work.

🌱 Accomplishments we are proud of 🌱

We created a productivity experience that feels warm, soothing, and emotionally engaging. Our garden system provides instant feedback without feeling too stressful to the user, and we are proud of how intuitive the core interactions have been developed. Our final app has a very simple design that can be picked up immediately by anyone of all ages and demographics.

We are also proud of the polish in the visual design, especially the subtle personal touches that make each plant feel alive. We took a lot of time to experiment and finally came up with our block-based view, as the low-poly effects are really engaging while also being very visually stimulating. Grove ended up being both functional and aesthetically calming.

🌱 What we learned 🌱

We learned that small details matter in habit building and in design. A gentle reminder can feel more motivating than a strict one. A soft animation can make daily tasks feel more rewarding. For habits, it is important to ease a person into it, as bad habits are hard to break and good habits are hard to build.

We also learned the importance of iterative testing. Many of our best decisions came from removing features instead of adding more. Simplicity had the biggest impact on user experience.

Finally, we realized that emotional design can be just as powerful as functional design. People respond to things that feel alive and personal.

🌱 What is next for Grove 🌱

We plan to expand the plant library so each user can grow a unique garden that reflects their goals. We want to introduce seasonal events, new plant species, and a community greenhouse where users can share progress. We want to do this in a way that doesn't introduce more clutter, so research will have to go into this part.

In addition, we also want to allow progress to be shared with friends and family. Building good habits together is surely a way to incentivize people. Competition can also be a great driver for self-improvement!

The end goal for this product would be to create a fully fleshed-out design that applies to all of the habits of a user, allowing them to really grow their own life with Grove!