The urban forestry program in Philadelphia has lead the way for the rest of US cities when it comes to urban greening. However, the path to a 30% tree canopy- the city’s goal- is still riddled with problems. ‍

The tree canopy is managed by several different entities. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) organizes two of the largest tree plantings all year through its Tree Tender program- a network of over 100 small volunteer groups throughout the city and the metro area.

While PHS is helpful in orchestrating the plantings, the groups are largely on their own in terms of:

• Finding and organizing volunteers
• Gathering resources
• Engaging neighborhood homeowners
• Checkng on planted trees
• Pruning trees

To get a broad sense of the problems the organization faces and then choose where to focus in:

• I created a qualitative survey and sent it to approximately 50 different group leaders from around the Philadelphia area. Seven people from different neighborhoods sent in responses.
• I did a long-form interview with an 8th group leader.
• I interviewed Ethan Leatherborrow, a Parks department employee with experience leading a group and expertise in urban forestry database management.

I started this project with the idea that I'd create something for volunteers like myself, but group leaders had few problems to report regarding volunteers. More consistently, they had complaints about getting neighbors on-board with the program. Ultimately, without homeowner participation and enthusiasm, the whole mission is in jeopardy. Incentivizing homeowners seemed like an interesting problem to tackle.

The PHS tree tenders groups are a variety of different kinds of organizations - some governmental, some non-profit, some just some neighbors with some shovels and everything in between. Ethan's group pre-dates the Tree Tender program as a non-profit and has the funding to incentivize blocks with events like block parties. However, many of the groups in the program don't have this as an option. I wondered if there was a way to create incentives for homeowners to help care for and expand the tree canopy through socialization without offering them monetary rewards.

I knew I wanted to create something that would remind homeowners to water their trees. I had a lot of ideas for how to do this while engaging them more fully in the process.   I organized my thoughts into a hierarchical features list in order to get a better sense of how to solve this problem.

I used the PHS website to guide my interface styling.

The MVP for this product consists of onboarding and a brief interface walkthrough.

Completion for these tasks among users was 100% but their feedback was very important in making final revisions.

• I was mistaken about how weather would impact that needs of the organization. I assumed that rain storms would mean that homeowners wouldn't have to water their trees. However, I learned that overwatering is not a problem. Extreme heat is the more threat to young trees. This lead me to change my rain warning to a heat warning, necessitating more watering.
• I had planned to allow users to water if 5 gallon increments, but PHS actually wants homeowners to water the trees all at once. This feedback in combination with feedback that the animated watering sequence was too long led me to design a way to skip having to watch the animation 3 times.
• At some moments it took users several seconds to realize where to click next, so I incorporated the pink more as an accent color to draw the user's attention.

In my final revision of this project, I decided to remove the weather widget from the homepage and instead place it in the "Tree Care" section. Since weather is largely irrelevant to tree watering requirements (unless in the case of a heatwave) it seemed unnecessary to keep it on the homepage where it was taking up space. As a result, I had to redesign the heat warning flow.

In version 2, neighborhood groups would have their own pages with contact information and group goals that neighbors can work towards together. The neighborhood leader board would be found on this new page.

Additionally, the process of calculating each tree's environmental impacts would be fully developed into a user-friendly process that would give the app enough information to give accurate estimates.

These estimated numbers would be compiled in the group impact section on the new group page so that the collective impacts of the program would be able to be compiled and used as a compelling set of figures to persuade and retain new volunteers and homeowners.

Updates may also include:

• Expansion of illustrations to incorporate more types of trees and tree care tasks
• Development of a system of negative feedback
• Audio design
• Restructuring of the tree care reference page

The feedback I received from higher up members of the organization was really positive and I've been encouraged to seek funding to continue this project with the support of UC Green. While my research conclusions were supported by the stakeholders I went over them with, the process was still lacking in primary data from homeowners. The time limitations and the scope of this project made it challenging to get all the info I would have liked to have had in designing solutions. It's also shown me once again, how these projects can expand and become endlessly nuanced. The challenge really is creating priorities within the given constraints and executing them to the best of my ability. If I'm given the support and capacity to continue this project, I'm interested to see how further research might change this design.